Self help



If you’re reading it in a book, folks, it ain’t self-help. It’s help.

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. Self-help books, courses, and groups 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, moralizing religions, or some practitioners of martial arts. Most self-help doctrine 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. Many self-help systems derive in fact from very dubious principles drawn more from pop spiritualism than from 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 religious practice, the modern form was born in the 19th and early-20th centuries with books like Samuel Smiles' and Dale Carnegie's  Today, it is especially popular in the United States, due to that country's inculcation of  and emphasis that virtue is rewarded. If one's society or culture is very unequal, and one's place in it largely depends on accidents (like who one's parents are, particularly in terms of class and race), then that would be too horrible to contemplate, so it must be wrong!

Self-help books have, through time and by design, consistently stood against social change by blaming the individual, rather than (for example) institutionalized racism or sexism, for not having enough will to advance in society. This was exemplified in 2018 by Tony Robbins' public shaming of a sexual-abuse survivor and of the #MeToo movement in general.

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.

Any self-help system or theory will work just as well as any other — for a time. (The placebo effect may play a role here.) But given the nature of human nature, somehow each system needs continual reinforcement ("Buy the next book!" — "Come to our next church service!" — "Take the next course!") — or else the "seeker" moves on to the next self-help fad. Either outcome further fuels the vast and burgeoning self-help industry and its market.

All self-help systems peddle two different notions:


 * 1) People have the potential to be, have, or do anything they want.
 * 2) 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.

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.
 * 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.
 * Redfield, James. The Celestine Prophecy - how to vibrate yourself off the planet.
 * 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.
 * Trump, Donald The Art of the Deal — 1987, an entirely ghostwritten "autobiography" of Donald Trump's. The book is an 11 step program for business success directly inspired by Norman Vincent Peale's works. The ties to Peale and Trump run deep; Trump went to Peale's church and Peale presided at his first wedding.

Some generic stuff that needs crystallising

 * Trudeau, Kevin — an ever-growing list of books "they" don't want you to read.

Skepticism for the whole damned movement

 * Brown, Derren — Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine ISBN 978-0552172356
 * Salerno, Steve — SHAM: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless ISBN 978-1400054091