Self-help profiteers while its promised benefits coincide with declining well-being
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
- XREF: The claim that self-help’s growth coincides with psychological deterioration parallels the Frankfurt School’s critique of the culture industry and Adorno on popularized psychology replacing ritual. — connects to: Capital privatizes stress as illness then profits from treating it — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1500
- CANDY: Smiles’s Self-Help outsold every book but the Bible in mid-1800s England is a fun shelf-talker fact.