"There is no book so bad,” said the bachelor, “but something good may be found in it."
—Cervantes, Don Quixote
Since Self-Help, Inc. was published a few years back, I've often been asked "but is there anything good about self-help culture?" Sometimes people will ask me to recommend self-help books—"you've read so many of them, there must be a couple that are good."I welcome these questions because they allow me to clarify that my real beef is not with self-help literature itself, but with an individualist rhetoric that proposes that solutions to personal problems or troubles will lead, inevitably, to a better world for everyone.
It may be fine to "become the change that you want to see in the world" (to quote Gandhi out of context), but individual solutions and actions without structural or policy changes are limited at best. While Gandhi was meditating and spinning cotton and gathering salt (then illegal under British rule) he was also an active leader in a the Indian National Congress. He wasn't engaged in an isolated individualist set of self-improvements. And other folks in the Indian Nationalist movement were blowing up trains to cripple the grip of the British empire. (By the way, I am not advocating blowing up trains, but simply mentioning that such tactics have long been part of colonial struggles for independence.)
So while we like to imagine that individual actions can change the broader world, unless those actions are linked to organizations with the ability to impact policy and law, those individual actions toward a better world are lovely, enchanting, sometimes inspiring, but seldom effective.
So Self-Help Inc. is a critique of individualism, and of the pressures that are brought to bear upon individuals in our advanced stage of capitalism, as seen through the lens of motivational and self-improvement literature.
That's a fact. And that is also how I leave aside the question of whether there are any "good" self-help books—the question of whether any of them have any "good" advice.
In the future I may take up this question more seriously as I have recently been introduced to Henry Jenkins' marvelous idea of the "aca-fan": the academic or scholar who is also an active fan of a genre. In Jenkins' case the object of his study and fan-dom has been the world of video games and new digital media. The aca-fan model may just work for me as I'm thinking about the best, the worst, and the broader implications of makeover culture.
