In his book Sham: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless, Steve Salerno exposed the multi-billion dollar self-help industry as a fraud. His thesis is simple: the self-help movement has not helped Americans become more self-reliant, it has made us more helpless. In this blog post, we’ll provide a summary of Salerno’s key points and explain why the self-help industry is nothing more than a sham.
The self-help movement began in the early 19th century with books like Samuel Smiles’ Self-Help and Benjamin Franklin’s The Way to Wealth. These books preached the gospel of hard work and personal responsibility, and they were immensely popular. However, as Salerno points out, these books were written at a time when Americans were still largely self-sufficient. There was no welfare state to fall back on, no safety net to catch you if you failed. As a result, people who failed to help themselves often found themselves destitute. he self-help message of hard work and personal responsibility was more than just good advice, it was a survival strategy.
In contrast, today’s self-help movement is largely geared towards middle-class and upper-class Americans who are already quite comfortable. Books like The Secret and The Power promote the power of positive thinking and the law of attraction, promising riches and success to those who believe. But as Salerno points out, these books don’t offer any real advice on how to achieve these things.
The situation changed dramatically in the 20th century. As the welfare state expanded and the safety net became more robust, Americans became less self-reliant and more reliant on government assistance. At the same time, the self-help movement morphed into something very different from what it had been in the 19th century. No longer about hard work and personal responsibility, the self-help movement of the 20th century was about feel-good platitudes and empty promises. It was about selling snake oil to desperate people who were looking for any way to improve their lives. And it was very, very profitable.
The self-help industry is now a multi-billion dollar business, and it shows no signs of slowing down. Thanks to the internet, there are now more self-help gurus than ever before, and they’re all peddling their own brand of snake oil. Whether it’s The Secret or The Law of Attraction or some other New Age nonsense, the self-help industry is nothing more than a giant money-making scheme. The people who peddle this snake oil are preying on the desperation of their customers, and they’re making a fortune doing it. But what’s even more dangerous than the self-help industry’s fraud is the way it’s eroding our sense of self-reliance.
As Salerno points out, the self-help movement’s emphasis on positive thinking and the power of affirmations has led to a culture of victimhood, where people believe that they’re powerless to improve their lives. This is a dangerous mindset, and it’s one that is actively encouraged by the self-help industry.
The self-help industry is a sham, and it’s time we exposed it for what it is.In Sham, Salerno interviews some of the biggest names in the self-help industry, and he exposes them as charlatans and frauds. Tony Robbins, for example, is nothing more than a motivational speaker who yells a lot and tells his audiences what they want to hear. Deepak Chopra is a quack who peddles pseudoscientific nonsense. And Oprah Winfrey is nothing more than a self-help guru who uses her vast wealth and influence to sell books and products that don’t work.
The self-help industry is a billion dollar business because it sells false hope to desperate people. It tells them that their problems can be fixed if they just buy the latest book/program/course/seminar/retreat/etc., when in reality these things never work. If you’re feeling lost and helpless, don’t waste your money on snake oil solutions from so-called gurus. Do what Americans used to do before the self-help movement took over: pick yourself up by your bootstraps and help yourself.
Well penned, Farah! Here is another book you can do a review on:
From Bernie Zilbergeld’s The Shrinking of America:
“It is a basic tenet of the therapeutic ideology that people are not okay as they are; that’s why they need therapy. Therapists would make the whole world into a hospital. Most forms of human discontent are the result of the disparity between what we have and are and what we feel we should have and be. Therapeutic thinking serves to widen the discrepancy both by finding out more things wrong with how we are and by holding out increasingly utopian notions of what we should be. Vast dissatisfaction with oneself is one of therapeutic thinking’s most important products.
Therapists tell us we should trust our feelings but they have made us fearful of trusting anything not validated by experts. The more we rely on professionals, the more we have to rely on them because we fail to develop our own resources. We forget that logical and critical thinking are not the special province of a particular group of experts and that we could just as well check our own thinking or get help from those around us.
There are limits to how much each of us can change. Life is not a continuous series of peak experiences or a process of ever-expanding satisfaction. Murphy’s law is not amenable to therapeutic manipulation. Somewhere deep down we also know that life in profoundly unfair and democratic. Therapy is not a cure for the human condition. The aimlessness, loneliness, confusion and dissatisfaction we feel and that lead many of us to try to change, are simply some of the prices we pay for liberating ourselves from traditional belief systems and the institutions that supported them. The simple fact is that freedom is not easy to live with. But neither is anything else. The care provided by counselors may be comforting, at least for a while, but it has no answers to the riddles and hazards of our time. Every human characteristic is double-edged. In short, everything has a price.”
Thanks Jack.
The other book you mentioned seems very interesting, I’ll check it out today. Expect a summary soon. Cheers.
The three points you made are excellent and worth mulling over at least 3 times each morning (for best results). The first is the concept of dysfunction, which, as Szasz pointed out, is a constantly changing term. Every decade has new disorders and illnesses. New types of behavior are seen as dysfunctional, old types of behavior that were seen as dysfunctional before, are suddenly highly functional..
This is confusion, not progress. Mental health is like a fashion that ebbs and flows depending on the political narrative being pushed.
“Therapy is not a cure for the human condition. The aimlessness, loneliness, confusion and dissatisfaction we feel and that lead many of us to try to change, are simply some of the prices we pay for liberating ourselves from traditional belief systems and the institutions that supported them.”
The modern world we live in helps numb our pain. Each person, depending on their income and geographical location, has access to some kind of drug that would take care of business. If drugs or alcohol are not available, do not despair (pun intended), there an array of other options, including reality TV shows, soap operas, Netflix, sports, political entertainment (otherwise known as the “news”), and most recently, a supercomputer in your pocket, with social media platforms ready to transform your anxiety into nothingness.
Hence the tradeoff the author mentions. This is a theme that I have written a lot about. It is unfortunate that our world is one with very little nuance, where people want to fix things, without understanding the nature of the thing it is they are fixing, or even whether the thing they are trying to fix is actually broken.
A word on what you said about critical thinking. That is the most insidious part about all this – people are conditioned to believe that they are simply not capable of thinking for themselves. The slogan of our time is “trust the experts” and the irony is that we probably have never had as much access as we do now, to as much information that proves how consistently and often “experts” get it dead wrong in every single domain imaginable… And as you said, because it only becomes acceptable to trust experts, we feel we are helpless to figure anything out for ourselves. That’s not to say that it is never appropriate to consult an expert, but like any technology when taken to an extreme, it leads to addiction and helplessness.