The Power of Positive Publishing: How Self-Help Ate America
Everybody is an expert. Self help books abound and their advocates are convinced and are often enthusiastic promoters of their efficacy.
Too bad the reality is very different. The best of the self help books remind us that common sense is often our best guide. They also reinforce the notion that self help can’t fix everything. Consult a real expert is the mantra when problems are overwhelming. The worst of the self help books usually center around the idea that a) the experts are all wrong, serve corporate interests, serve their own interests and are all a part of a conspiracy to keep you dependent and b) because you are so special/smart/kind/wonderful you don’t need an expert, all the tools to solve any problem can be found within you.
In particular, New Age ideas have helped legitimize magical thinking. You can be anyone you want to be, succeed at at anything you want succeed at and become a very special person because, well, you already are a very special person. It matters not one bit you may not have the talent, aptitude or mental health- you are special and that is all that matters.
This kind of thinking eventually lead to the acceptable treatment of depression for example, as a physical illness. In fact, just about whatever ails us nowadays can and is dealt with by self help experts.
Very rich self help experts.
The Power of Positive Publishing: How Self-Help Ate America. « Sigmund, Carl and Alfred
How-to writers are to other writers as frogs are to mammals,” wrote the critic Dwight MacDonald in a 1954 survey of “Howtoism.” “Their books are not born, they are spawned.”
MacDonald began his story by citing a list of 3,500 instructional books. Today, there are at least 45,000 specimens in print of the optimize-everything cult we now call “self-help,” but few of them look anything like those classic step-by-step “howtos,” which MacDonald and his Establishment brethren handled only with bemused disdain. These days, self-help is unembarrassed, out of the bedside drawer and up on the coffee table, wholly transformed from a disreputable publishing category to a category killer, having remade most of nonfiction in its own inspirational image along the way.
Many of the books on Amazon’s current list of “Best Sellers in Self-Help” would have been unrecognizable to MacDonald: Times business reporter Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit, a tour of the latest behavioral science; Paulo Coelho’s novel The Alchemist, a fable about an Andalusian shepherd seeking treasure in Egypt; Susan Cain’s Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, a journalistic paean to reticence; publisher Will Schwalbe’s memoir The End of Your Life Book Club, about reading with his dying mother; and A Child Called “It,” David Pelzer’s recollections of harrowing and vicious child abuse. And these are just the books publishers identify as self-help; other hits are simply labeled “business” or “psychology” or “religion.” “There isn’t even a category officially called ‘self-help,’ ” says William Shinker, publisher of Gotham Books. Shinker discovered Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus and now publishes books on “willpower” and “vulnerability”—“self-help masquerading as ‘big-idea’ books.”
Twenty years ago, when Chicken Soup for the Soul was published, everyone knew where to find it and what it was for. Whatever you thought of self-help—godsend, guilty pleasure, snake oil—the genre was safely contained on one eclectic bookstore shelf. Today, every section of the store (or web page) overflows with instructions, anecdotes, and homilies. History books teach us how to lead, neuroscience how to use our amygdalas, and memoirs how to eat, pray, and love. The former CEO of CNN writes the biography of an ornery tech visionary and it becomes a best seller on the strength of its leadership lessons. The Nobel-laureate psychologist Daniel Kahneman writes a subtle analysis of our decision-making process and soon finds his best seller digested and summarized in M.B.A. seminars across the country