Self-help nation

Americans spend billions of dollars a year trying to improve themselves. Is this quest for perfection a sign of perpetual optimism -- or fear of a hostile world?

By Laura Miller

Aug 12, 2005 | Self-help, in all its ever-proliferating forms -- books, seminars, video, audio and digital -- is a multibillion-dollar industry. That much, at least, we know for sure. And most of us would agree that the lingo, theories and attitudes of the self-help industry have soaked into every corner of American life. A coworker jokes that he's in denial about the fact that he needs to buy a new computer; a friend blames another friend's obnoxious behavior on low self-esteem. Even people who claim to hate self-help find themselves using its buzzwords and echoing its clichis. But do we really understand how much the industry has affected -- or infected -- our world?

Not according to Steve Salerno, author of "SHAM: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless." "You may think Dr. Phil is the greatest thing since sliced bread," he writes, "or you may chortle at his braggadocio and his sagebrush sagacity. But almost no one worries about Dr. Phil. Like the rest of SHAM [Salerno's acronym for the "Self-Help and Actualization Movement"], he slips under the radar."

Dr. Phil is on Salerno's radar, all right, and it's certainly true that the author worries about the TV shrink, but saying that in this book Salerno has thought deeply about the self-help industry would be pushing it. "SHAM" is one of those slapdash fulminations -- invented decades ago by the political left but recently perfected by the right -- ranting on some current deplorable aspect of society. It's spun out from a few well-researched articles Salerno wrote for magazines and padded with a grab bag of shopworn anecdotes and secondhand data culled from other, similar books. (Sally Satel's dubious "PC, M.D." is a favorite source.) You know the drill by now: Salerno's stance is flabbergasted indignation at the countless outrages against common sense being committed on a daily, if not hourly, basis by people whose perfidy or idiocy is a cause for perpetual wonder.

Commentators rarely go broke when capitalizing on the pleasure Americans take in sneering at their fellow citizens, but Salerno doesn't bring much clarity to the ongoing national infatuation with self-help. He casts his net so wide he winds up blaming the self-actualization industry for such grouch fodder as frivolous lawsuits (yes, that old spilled McDonald's coffee story gets hauled out yet again) and the devolution of electoral politics into sloganeering. He's done some solid, shoe-leather reporting on such self-actualization gurus as the infomercial icon (and hot-coal walker) Tony Robbins, and "SHAM" offers valuable glimpses into the empires built by these figures. But credit for coming up with real insight into the self-help juggernaut more properly belongs to Micki McGee, a faculty fellow at New York University and the author of "Self-Help, Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life."

McGee regards the self-actualization industry almost as warily as Salerno does, but she has a far more sophisticated grasp of its appeal. Self-help, she argues, is not (as the cultural commentator Christopher Lasch once insisted) the manifestation of a rampant "culture of narcissism." Instead, it's an understandable -- if also misguided -- response to fundamental changes in our economic and social worlds. Today, she writes, "constant self-improvement" is presented to us as "the only reliable insurance against economic insecurity." The result is what McGee calls "the belabored self," the personality as a perpetual renovation project, driven by the fear that "with lifelong marriage and lifelong professions increasingly anachronistic, it is no longer sufficient to be married or employed." When your spouse might leave you or your boss might fire you at any moment, you have to be ready to hit the market again at any time; "it is imperative that one remains marriageable and employable."

The way Salerno sees it, the self-help industry is a modern boondoggle and annoyance -- more disturbing than, but akin to, that damn noise the kids call music these days. It's a waste of money, it saps folks of their gumption, and no one can prove it works. In his self-designated role as the hardheaded Everyman journalist, Salerno claims he has never before "covered a phenomenon where American consumers invested so much capital in every sense of the word -- financial, intellectual, spiritual, temporal -- based on so little proof of efficacy." During a brief stint as an editor at the Men's Health division of Rodale, a book publisher specializing in the genre, he was astonished to learn that the most likely customer for a self-help book is someone who'd bought a similar book within the preceding 18 months. "If what we sold worked," he observes, "one would expect lives to improve. One would not expect people to need further help from us."

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