Some time ago I came across this; it is an excerpt from an Amazon reader (George F. Simons) review of a book on "Non-Violent Communication":

"Being positive is the sine-qua-non of today's US culture. Put another way, the quickest route to becoming a pariah in both work and social contexts is to fail to show the obligatory positive attitude. Negative judgments, failure to look on the bright side, criticism, mourning failures and losses head a list of US capital sins. The result sounds good on the surface-positive feedback, lots of encouragement, and a steady diet of "atta' boy/atta' girl" language. Negativity is bad, violent, and destructive, while "Blessed are the positive!" is beatitude in US civil religion.

"Plenty of non-USians had been telling me that they felt attacked and aggressed upon by US "positivity." My initial temptation was to dismiss their complaint as negativity or pessimism. However, listening to what they felt, I learned that having a positive attitude was not itself the problem. They felt that they were being judged, that their US interlocutor was taking a one-up or arrogant stance toward them. I had overlooked the fact that both positive and negative evaluations can be violent communication forms. Both play into the our addiction to judgment and dichotomous thinking. We fail to observe that the messages, "Great job," and "You screwed up," are [I would say "can be"] identical acts of violence, the subtext being, "I judge you," whether the judgment be positive or negative.

"Also often missed is that the injunction to be positive can be a power play used to neutralize opposition to one's ideas and plans. Criticize me, or look on the negative side of what I am doing or saying, and you are no longer my friend. We experience this on a daily basis, and recently saw it writ large, in US policy toward those countries that refused to support the US invasion of Iraq. While Rosenberg's book does not address the cultural phenomenon of US "positivity" directly, reading it that gave me the impetus to look for the feelings and the needs in people's reaction to the aggressive use of the "be positive" principle."

It seems to be characteristic of dictatorial political regimes (and sometimes other, closer ones) that they want to deny the existence of problems in their societies. Think of the Soviets or China, at least at some periods of their dominance.

I sometimes think that my mother would have killed us if we presented to her or to "outsiders" emotions that she did not want to contemplate. She could be at times saccharin sweet and lauded the value of us being so also, and at other times she enjoyed inflicting pain and humiliation on us children. So maybe it is no wonder that I sometimes have a hard time with "being pleasant."