Self help
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“”If you’re reading it in a book, folks, it ain’t self-help. It’s help.
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| —George Carlin |
Self help is the umbrella term given to a fairly large genre of self-guided instructional materials, particularly those centering around improving one's personal life. Such books cover a vast amount of territory, including psychology, motivation, sex education, fad diets, law, and family issues. Ideas often flow between the self-help movement and other enthusiastic groups of people who like to confidently tell strangers how to live, such as the pick-up artist community, LessWrong, or some practitioners of Martial Arts.[1] Most of it is only peer reviewed in the sense that sometimes authors talk to each other while using the urinals or stalls in the publisher's water closet.[2] Many self-help titles are in fact based on very dubious principles drawn more from pop spiritualism than science. It has been suggested that the name is misleading because, as George Carlin put it, "If you're looking for self-help, why would you read a book written by somebody else?"
Although the self-help movement has parallels in ancient philosophy and religion, the modern form was born in the 19th and early 20th centuries with books like Samuel Smiles' Self-Help[3] and Dale Carnegie's How To Win Friends and Influence People. Today it is especially popular in the United States, due to its individualism and emphasis that virtue is rewarded. If one's society is very unequal, and one's place in it largely depends on accidents, then that would be too horrible to contemplate, so it must be wrong!
Instructional materials for other subjects — particularly the sort that might also be taught in school — might reasonably be considered self-help as well, though the term is not always used in those cases.
All self-help books peddle two different notions:
- People have the potential to be, have, or do anything they want.
- People should always be living at their full potential.
In other words, you are always supposed to be a god, and if you're not, you suck.
Contents |
[edit] Some famous self-help books
| Title | Author(s) | Published | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|
| Freedom: Credos from the Road | Barger, Ralph "Sonny" | 2005 | How you can achieve and excel by applying the immense wisdom of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club to your life. |
| The Courage to Heal | Bass, Ellen, and Laura Davis | 1988 | About child abuse and recovered memory; highly controversial and mostly rejected by the scientific community. |
| Games People Play | Berne, Eric | 1964 | Book which popularized Transactional Analysis, an influential concept in 1950s and 1960s psychology which has since fallen out of vogue but remains influential within the self-help market. |
| Honoring the Self | Branden, Nathaniel | 1983 | Branden turned to writing self-esteem books after his acrimonious split with Ayn Rand and the Objectivism movement |
| How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World | Browne, Harry | 1973 | Self-help through anarcho-capitalism for societal dropouts. Browne later twice ran for president on the Libertarian Party ticket. |
| Chicken Soup for the Soul | Canfield, Jack, et al | 1993 | and a large series of books which followed. Generally filled with glurge[4] rather than pseudoscience. |
| Don't Sweat the Small Stuff (And It's All Small Stuff) | Carlson, Richard | 1997 | and a large series of books which followed. |
| How to Win Friends and Influence People | Carnegie, Dale | 1936 | targeted at people with social difficulties and anxieties.[5] |
| How to Stop Worrying and Start Living | Carnegie, Dale | 1948 | |
| Shut up and stop whining: How to end your addiction to self help books | Ctibor, Javiar | 2015 | Okay, not really, but he is thinking of writing it. |
| EST: Playing the Game the New Way (The Game of Life) | Frederick, Carl | 1974 | presents the concepts taught in Erhard Seminars Training in book form; the author was sued by Werner Erhard claiming it was an infringement on his intellectual property rights but the suit failed and the book became a best seller in 1975. |
| I'm OK, You're OK | Harris, Thomas | 1969 | a classic presentation of Transactional Analysis, on the best seller lists for two years in the early 1970s. |
| We Are Not Afraid | Hickam, Homer | 2002 | Some truly banal positive thinking 'n' go-get-em motivational talk wrapped in teh American flag and "we stand up to bullies after 9/11" BS here, written at about a 6th-grade reading level.[6] |
| Think and Grow Rich | Hill, Napoleon | 1937 | considered a classic on entrepreneurship written during the Great Depression; much of it is about good planning for the future and positive thinking, but it includes the pseudoscientific concept of tapping into "infinite intelligence" and a weird chapter on sexual sublimation. |
| Born to Win | James, Muriel and Dorothy Jongeward | 1971 | more Transactional Analysis |
| Psycho-Cybernetics | Maltz, Maxwell | 1960 | despite the esoteric name this is mostly basic goal-setting and developing one's social skills with some Christianity and self-hypnosis mixed in. |
| Let's Develop | Newman, Fred | 1994 | an attempt to promote Newman's controversial Social Therapy to the self-help market. |
| The Power of Positive Thinking | Peale, Norman Vincent | 1952 | Probably the first widely distributed book of this type (untrue). |
| Harmonic Wealth: The Secret of Attracting the Life You Want | Ray, James Arthur | 2008 | On the New York Times bestseller list in 2008. The author later made the news in October 2009 when 3 died and 19 were hospitalized after a 2 hour "sweat lodge" ceremony at a large group awareness training he was conducting in Sedona, Arizona. |
| Reader's Digest Do-It-Yourself Manual | (The editors of Reader's Indigestion) | 1965 | A classic volume of professional tips and projects. |
| The Miracle of Psycho-Command Power | Reed, Scott | 1972 | poorly-conceived and frankly ridiculous ripoff of Psycho-Cybernetics and Think and Grow Rich mixed with pseudoscientific information on handwriting analysis and claims to teach you how to control others' actions by staring at them.[7] |
| Awaken the Giant Within : How to Take Immediate Control of Your Mental, Emotional, Physical and Financial Destiny! | Robbins, Anthony ("Tony") | 1992 | Summed up to one sentence: "Get off your butt and do something." Recent motivational stuff includes such things as fire walking (seriously).[8] |
| Possibility Thinking | Schuller, Robert | 1967 | a Christian televangelist's contributions to the self-help market. |
| Be Happy, You Are Loved | Schuller, Robert | 1986 | again, a Christian televangelist's contributions to the self-help market. |
| Passages | Sheehy, Gail | 1974 | very popular, reasonably "wise", but if the reader is not on the same "life track" as her chapters, it rapidly loses value. |
| Self-Help; with Illustrations of Character, Conduct and Perserverence | Smiles, Samuel | 1859 | Collection of stories praising those who improved their lives through hard work, thrift and education. Available online for free.[3] |
[edit] Other books that purport to make your life better if you read them
- Bach, Richard, Jonathan Livingston Seagull — omnipotence through adrenaline junkiehood. Lots of bird photos to inspire the reader.
- Covey, Stephen, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People — Covey managed to parlay that book into an empire of personal organizers and inspirational material.[9]
- Johnson, Spencer, Who Moved My Cheese? — a rodent parable.
- Hubbard, L. Ron, Dianetics — later became the basis for a noxious cult.
- Orr, Leonard and Ray, Sondra, Rebirthing in the New Age — Barely edges out The Miracle of Psycho-Command Power as the most ludicrous piece of shite ever to come out of the whole self-help/new age mess. Claims you can achieve physical immortality.
- Schwartz, David, The Magic of Thinking Big — popular among salespeople and business; Amway is fond of promoting this one too.
- Pirsig, Robert, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values — how to use spanners without getting your hands dirty.
- Byrne, Rhonda, The Secret — a 2006 book/movie about the supposed power of wishful thinking.
[edit] Some generic stuff that needs crystallising
- Trudeau, Kevin — an ever-growing list of books "they" don't want you to read.
[edit] Skepticism for the whole damned movement
- Salerno, Steve - SHAM: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless
[edit] See also
[edit] Footnotes
- ↑ See Steve Barnes' blog Dar Kush
- ↑ This would better be called "pee-review" - get it?
- ↑ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Help_%28book%29
- ↑ See TV Tropes or Snopes. [1] [2]
- ↑ Wikipedia: How to Win Friends and Influence People is one of the first bestselling self-help books ever published. Written by Dale Carnegie and first published in 1936, it has sold 15 million copies globally. It was a New York Times best seller for 10 years.
- ↑ Seriously, the author of Rocket Boys (great book BTW) wrote this? It's enough to make one wonder which hack ghost writer wrote this and how did his publisher ever convince Hickam to allow his name on the cover? There is just no way the author of several great books on coal mining and amateur rocketry, and a West-By-God-Virginian to boot, also wrote this. The mind boggles.
- ↑ If you remember the ads in comic books and supermarket tabloids during the 1970s and 1980s for a book telling you how to draw riches and lovers to you with your magnetic gaze, this was that infamous book. The hilarious illustrations and terminology the author invents are not to be missed! See it here
- ↑ http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/07/21-burned-walking-on-hot-coals-at-tony-robbins-events.html
- ↑ FranklinCovey is not to be confused with Franklin Electronic Publishers.