Self-help’s explosion proliferated while public wellbeing indicators collapsed
Evidence
Popular and even occasionally market dominant across its history—Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help outsold every book except the Bible in the mid-nineteenth century—self-help differentiated and nichified in the later twentieth century, opening up ever more avenues of help (and sales): not just morality, spirituality, or psychology, but the physical body (exercise, fitness, makeovers, diets), economic success (personal finance, highly effective habits), and relationship success (the marriage of Venus and Mars, speaking love languages). The monetary profit many authors earn from self-help (not only in book sales but in banquet speaking and retreat leading) would seem to contrast with the elusive benefit to the average consumer, since the reams of positive-thinking and personal-empowerment literature have coincided with rising suicide rates, epidemic drug addiction, a $15-billion-per-year psycho-emotional pharmaceutical market, declining life expectancy, and exponentially expanding consumer, household, medical, and education debt. Appearing in ever more refined genres, self-help is big business, a magically self-perpetuating commodity. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 160
Categorization
Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims
- QUESTION: The claimed correlation between self-help’s dominance and declining wellbeing is provocative but correlational — worth chasing whether there’s a causal argument or just juxtaposition.
- XREF: The juxtaposition of self-help’s commodity success with declining wellbeing echoes Adorno’s critique of the culture industry and could be pushed against Jameson’s account of postmodernism’s commodity logic.