Self-help nation

Salerno's point is well-taken (McGee makes a similar one), but it's not exactly revelatory. Hasn't he noticed how one diet book after another roosts on the upper reaches of the bestseller lists, despite the fact that Americans keep getting fatter? People buy the books and often lose weight on the diets, but they eventually gain it back and so move on to the next plan, thinking that maybe this one will finally do the trick. If you ask, they'll swear the original diet worked, and it was really their own fault for not sticking to it.

Probably, somewhere in the very back of their minds, these people realize that a particular diet or list of highly effective habits is not likely to "revolutionize" their lives as promised. But hope springs eternal that the perfect plan awaits somewhere. That prospect appeals to the optimistic, risk-taking side of our national character. And like a slot machine, these self-improvement schemes very occasionally pay off, if only for a while. As any behavioral psychologist will tell you, nothing fascinates a human being like intermittent reinforcement. It may not be rational, but that's how human beings work.

So many words have been written about relationship-oriented self-help books sold mostly to women (from "Women Who Love Too Much" to "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus"), that the light both Salerno and McGee shed on success coaches such as Robbins or Stephen R. Covey, author of "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People," is particularly welcome. Salerno, who wrote a magazine profile of Robbins, details the gradual method by which the Robbins-industrial complex coaxes its adherents into spending first small and then eventually whopping sums on his various "Life Mastery" programs (including purchases of vitamins supplements and a pendant called the QLink that supposedly protects you from the radiation emitted by cellphones). Having sunk that much cash into this stuff, Robbins' followers become invested in believing it works.

Salerno chooses to focus on success mavens because they give him the best ammo: It's relatively easy to measure how well their programs work (and therefore prove that they don't). If you want to figure out if sales went up after a daylong motivational seminar, you look at the numbers, but how can you tell when you've learned to love just enough? McGee studies success gurus because she believes that at heart what drives people into the self-help section of their bookstores is economics. For all his no-nonsense posture, Salerno's analysis of the self-help industry is a haphazard collection of self-contradictory, sometimes extraneous and frequently knee-jerk attitudes. McGee has an analysis, one that essentially amounts to following the money, and despite her ivory tower gig and stiff, academic prose, she's by far the more tough-minded of the two.

Salerno divides the self-help movement into two main branches: "Empowerment" (which promises total mastery over one's self and one's surroundings) and "Victimization" (which offers support to people it has diagnosed as so damaged they're lucky to be alive). McGee prefers to divide the field into rational and expressive approaches. The rational ties your capacity for transformation to a system of self-discipline and control; the expressive encourages its adherents to surrender to the workings of some vague, New Agey, cosmic force (often called simply "energy"), which will guide the properly attuned person toward fulfillment. In an economy that grows ever more ruthless and competitive, faced with downsizing, outsourcing and stagnant wages, the rational school offers people the illusion of mastery while the expressive provides a dreamy sanctuary from the cruel marketplace.

McGee's grasp of the philosophical underpinnings of both notions is formidable. She traces Robbins' mind-power fantasies back to the New Thought movement of the early 20th century, led by Ralph Waldo Trine, who preached "a pragmatic idealism in which wealth and opportunity were characterized as equally available to all through a kind of cosmic abundance." She finds threads in contemporary time-management gurus like Covey that lead back to Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin, and in New Agers that lead back to Emerson. (You have to love a book that describes Tony Robbins as someone who "leaves behind the Enlightenment notion of the reasonable creature and moves in the direction of a Nietzschean model of 'giving style to one's life.'") Instead of Salerno's born-yesterday notion of self-help as the folly of a post-'60s generation of navel gazers and complainers, McGee recognizes that most of these ideas have been with us for a long time.

Next Page: Is self-help the spawn of feminism?

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