'Who Moved My Cheese?' vs. 'There Is No Spoon'

What Ehrenreich is talking about here is very akin to something that I noticed as a child in the 1970s -- to a mindset that was common among certain scattered Southern evangelical flocks. It would become much more prevalent among such groups a couple of decades later, and commonly be referred to as "the gospel of prosperity." About the same time, other variations began to seep into the cultural landscape -- both via a general sort of popular self-help mentality, as well as into the corporate setting by way of M.B.A. lit and various office motivational hoo-hah. And within the past decade, we finally saw it filter into American politics, via the "transformationalist" thinking of the previous administration. ("We're an empire now, and when we act we make our own reality.") And as Ehrenreich demonstrates, it played a significant role in landing us where we currently are; and she's far from being the only one to argue this point in the past two years.

But, hey -- pragmatists never tell people what they're wanting to hear; so to hell with 'em, right?

At any rate, the same artist has a number of similar videos up, each illustrating a different recent socio-economic text. Alos worth viewing is this one of Slovaj Žižek discussing a portion of his book First as History, Then as Farce, which is a lot more visually dense than the one above and moves at about four times the speed.