- This video is brought to you by Keeps.
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Hey Wisecrack, Michael here.
You don't have to own an exploding candle
scented like Gwyneth Paltrow's nether regions
to know that the self help industry is booming.
Americans seem to be fundamentally obsessed
with the mission of improving ourselves.
We want life hacks, four-hour work weeks,
desert retreats.
- And I went to the desert to seek answers,
and now, I have them.
- And someone to tell us
if micro-dosing at the office is okay.
Is it, Alec?
And in some ways,
teaching people how to lift themselves up
by their bootstraps has become a celebrity-worthy job
in its own right.
- It's all like laddering up to one thing,
which is optimization of self.
Like, we're here one time, one life.
Like, how can we really milk the (beep) out of this?
- Goopiness aside, there are plenty of people
eager to help you milk the hell
out of this thing called life,
whether it's Tim Ferris telling you that
nine-tenths of your work week is unnecessary
so long as you outsource most of your administrative tasks
to third-world secretaries,
or any slew of productivity bloggers
promising to somehow quintuple
your productivity overnight with nootropics.
Now, the quest to be a better,
more functional member of society
isn't necessarily a bad thing.
Like, I want to improve my sleep hygiene
and to quiet the existential dread
that hangs over me like a dark cloud,
and I'm really making progress on that first one,
but what if the industry surrounding these kinds of goals
has a lot to do with why we need help in the first place?
We'll explain in this Wisecrack Edition on
"Self Help: What Went Wrong."
But before we continue,
I want to give a shout-out to this week's sponsor, Keeps.
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Now, back to the show.
Before we understand how self help
went from a very cool set of ideas
that really meant to transform the world,
into a bunch of self-proclaimed gurus
promising to manifest a better you for just $395,
we need to start with the founding father
of the modern American self help movement.
Believe it or not, this dude was
a failed car salesman, slash failed actor,
slash failed novelist turned YMCA public speaking coach.
No, really, Dale Carnegie,
who was born to dirt-poor farmers in the late 19th century,
arguably created the modern American self help industry
with the publication of his bestseller,
"How to Win Friends and Influence People."
Now, the book is pretty much what it sounds like.
The guidance is all rooted in the idea that success,
in business and in life, is primarily the result
not of smarts, not even of super hard work,
but of personality.
Though in Carnegie's defense,
he couldn't have anticipated the rise of
supremely likable Mark Zuckerberg.
Anyway, Carnegie's success wasn't exactly random.
It had a lot to do with the times he lived in,
before and during the Great Depression.
From the turn of the century onwards,
community ties and religious institutions were buckling
as the pressures of modernity
led to vast migration into cities,
leaving many people alienated and alone.
Without family or community to turn to,
people looked inward instead.
This inward turn was also greatly facilitated
by the rise of psychology,
with dozens of popular books tying the emerging field,
perhaps dubiously, to all aspects of life.
There was,
"Psychology and Sex Life,"
"Psychology and the Christian Day School,"
"Psychology of Fasting,"
"Psychology of Murder," "Psychology of Your Name,"
but my personal favorite is,
"Psychology of Group Insurance."
Carnegie biographer Steven Watts
notes the birth of what sociologist Philip Rieff
famously called the "psychological man."
who, bolstered by the popular craze,
sought to solve their problems by solving their minds,
often with the assistance of self help books.
It makes sense.
If your mom can't give you
reliable Bitcoin investment advice,
why not trust this best selling author?
This burgeoning field would serve as a springboard
for Carnegie to launch his own philosophy, and it worked.
He would go on to be named one of Life Magazine's
most influential Americans, and his writing,
with all its folksy wisdom and wholesome anecdotes,
established core stylistic elements
of the modern self help book.
Of course, the rise of self improvement
as a means to unlock your wildest dreams, if anything,
was a little surprising given what came before.
Now, the idea of self help can be spotted as far back
as Ancient Greek mentors and Nigerian Hausa folktales
and Ben Franklin's self-improvement-happy autobiography,
but Carnegie arose in the wake of a culture
where self-fulfillment was not exactly a kosher goal.
That is, he came of age as Victorian America was dying.
Remember, one of the guiding forces of American culture
was "The Protestant Work Ethic,"
meaning you had to work yourself to death
while not enjoying anything,
lest you end up in the bad place.
- We're trying out the new butthole spiders.
- Ah!
- They're enormous.
- And in general, middle and upper-class Victorian values
idealized self-denial, i.e. not getting laid
and not eating that extra chocolate chip cookie.
This culture, however, imploded, in part due to
the ever-expanding reach of mass manufacturing.
America went from a producer-oriented society
where you or your neighbors
made everything you needed to survive,
to a consumer-oriented society,
where you and your neighbors
spent all your money trying to impress one another
with dope consumer goods.
Instead of constantly repairing and maintaining
the one nice shirt your mother made you 15 years ago,
you could now get cheap and disposable threads
that were cranked out in a factory.
Over time, mass-manufactured trinkets and toys
and chocolates and hamburgers and dishwashers proliferated.
Eventually, America became a place where it was very easy
to blow your paycheck on an 80-piece china set
your millennial grandchildren
under no circumstances want to inherit
and store in their one-bedroom apartment.
According to historian Warren I. Susman,
while this consumer-happy shift was happening,
the Western world simultaneously
saw another massive cultural change,
from the Victorian ideals of crafting
an upstanding character based on public propriety,
stern morality, and a supreme work ethic,
to the modern individualistic idea
of cultivating a great personality.
This idealized personality was, according to Susman,
particularly characterized in self help books of the time
as "fascinating, stunning, attractive, magnetic, glowing,
masterful, creative, dominant, forceful,"
and various other adjectives I've used on dating profiles,
and Carnegie's book promised that
cultivating such a personality
was possible for anyone, even your boring Uncle Colm.
- This must have been, ach, we're talking eight, half eight,
for I was half-way through me dinner.
- Carnegie also called upon a different movement
which wanted to harness your mind power
to improve your lot in life, "New Thought."
Basically, it was the secret,
except you were supposed to tell God what you wanted most.
Within just a few decades,
an opportunistic reverend spun "Mind Power"
into a literal "think yourself rich" ethos.
Carnegie merged these two intellectual movements
in a way that was perfectly suited
for a culture newly defined
by mass consumption and individualism.
His methods explicitly created to help you,
yes, I mean you, advance
were perfect for an increasingly self-absorbed society.
His rise also luckily coincided with
the rise of the corporate management class,
people whose very living depended on, well,
befriending and influencing people above and below them,
but that still doesn't fully explain
the phenomenon of "How to Win Friends."
Carnegie's biographer, Steven Watts,
credits one more crucial force
for Carnegie's massive success.
It wasn't just social alienation,
it was economic devastation.
The Great Depression left people devastated
financially and emotionally.
As Watts recounts, Americans were almost
universally humiliated at the sudden onset of poverty
they experienced when the stock market crashed.
More than blaming a lack of banking regulations
or reckless speculation for their suffering, people,
especially the insecurely-middle class, blamed themselves.
In this time of crisis,
rather than advocating for "revolutionary agitation,"
most were in favor of the simple
"reinforcement of basic institutions," as Watts explains.
These panicked folks doubled down on
preserving a mystical American way of life,
and were determined to seek out
their piece of the proverbial pie, and there was Carnegie,
promising that his book could help you
rise above your station
and succeed in this uncertain climate,
so long as you really wanted to.
In a time when people desperately needed
the wholesale support of their communities and country,
Watts goes so far as to argue that,
"Dale Carnegie saved the culture of individualism."
You can see it from his marketing,
which was rooted in ideals
of personal responsibility for success,
never mind that plenty of people
still couldn't afford to feed their families.
In one ad, he cautions prospective students that,
"If you have sincere desire to improve yourself,
come along, but if you haven't
a real urge to improve yourself,
save your time and money for no one can help."
Harsh.
And again, it makes sense why people
want to read a book about
how to ascend to the managerial class
so they can not spend all day in food lines,
but this mentality also does a great job
at refocusing attention away from, say,
the causes of the Great Depression,
which an ordinary person couldn't do much about anyway,
towards the thing you could do something about, yourself.
But ironically, this egocentrism was implanted
into a philosophy that just 100 years earlier
had sought to do the exact opposite.
One that wanted to take
the logic of self help and revolutionize the world,
and not in the corny "join an MLM" kind of way,
because long before Carnegie,
the foundation of today's self help industry
was created by, uh, anarchists.
Well, anarchists, socialists, and other revolutionary types.
See, despite its associations with
$66 jade yoni eggs and $500 online courses,
the self help industry actually has
deeply working-class roots.
Once upon a time in early to mid 19th century England,
"self help" meant blue-collar workers
collectively helping one another.
This was epitomized by secularist
and radicalist George Jacob Holyoake's book from 1857,
"Self Help by the People,"
which, like some of the earlier
self help materials seen in America,
urged folks to learn useful skills
they could then employ to help
their communities and fellow working men.
Writings like these grew out of
British "mutual improvement associations,"
groups where working class folks would gather,
sometimes in dingy old garden sheds,
to learn reading, writing, and arithmetic
in hopes of improving their conditions.
Born around the end of the Napoleonic Wars,
these groups especially blossomed
during the mid 19th century
and continued to operate through World War I.
They were often established by political radicals,
and in their heyday, existed in many industrial towns
and villages in England.
Now, these were the same decades
when Britain was desperately trying to banish illiteracy,
offering adult education
in the form of mechanics' institutes.
However, such institutes were funded by
middle class sponsors who mainly saw the schools
as vessels for imposing
their own values onto the working class,
and mutual improvement societies emerged as
an alternative education option,
even in places where
there were plenty of mechanics' institutes.
According to Harrison, this suggests that
workers were dissatisfied with
the institutionalized formal education,
perhaps because students were often not
allowed to discuss politics or religion in class.
Basically, mutual improvement societies
were what Harrison calls
the "working man's solution to his own educational needs."
The self help legacy of cooperation didn't vanish overnight.
Even in America, scholar Beth Blum notes,
up until the 70s, self help still commonly referred to
groups of people working together to improve themselves.
This was epitomized by the feminist self help collective
that compiled the book "Our Bodies, Ourselves"
to teach women medically-taboo information
about their bodies.
That's a far-cry from the self-centered philosophy
of something like "Lean In."
So what does this have to do with Tony Robbins
and Sheryl Sandberg and the thousands of dollars
of credit card debt NXIVM classes put me in?
Enter Samuel Smiles,
who visited some mutual improvement associations in Leeds
and was impressed by their "admirable self-helping spirits."
The Scottish author, and then editor of a radical newspaper,
would give them inspirational lectures
about successful men who had risen up from poverty.
Eventually, each lecture would become
a chapter in his bestselling book from 1859,
called "Self Help."
This officially gave a name to the fledgling industry
that would spawn a million Tim Ferrisses,
but from the time he first visited
mutual improvement societies in 1845
to the time he published his book,
Smiles's views seem to have evolved.
In the book, the working class roots
of English self improvement
seem to have merged with
middle-class values of individualism.
Smiles, for his part,
took the collective self-advancing ideology he admired
and essentially boiled it down to individual work ethic,
going so far as to caution that
poverty could be a great motivator,
and institutional support a great demotivator.
It's important to note that
some think Smiles' rejection of government aid
is often misunderstood
and conflated with laissez-faire conservatism,
but either way, while his book proved inspirational
for working folks all over the globe,
Smiles' ideology essentially functioned as a
"middle class reply to workers' demands
for better social conditions."
He argues that anyone could improve themselves,
without the help of the government,
simply if they wanted to.
In that vein, it arguably implied that
working class people who remained poor and ignorant
were basically "morally deficient."
After all, they just needed to try harder
to rise in the ranks by studying arithmetic
when they got home from work, right?
While the self improvement methods
that Smiles expounded upon,
hard work, hyper diligence, and frugality,
would differ drastically from
Carnegie's charismatic approach to getting ahead in life,
his book furthered an individualistic image of self help
that would prove incredibly salient to this day,
which is how the idea of self help
went from a collectivist dream of a better world,
to essentially an ideology of personal betterment
spurred by individual ambition.
Smiles would be a major influence on Orison Swett Marden,
author of a shocking fifty or more
self help books and booklets, including,
"Pushing to the Front or Success Under Difficulties."
Marden would become a central inspiration
for one Dale Carnegie, cementing the transition of self help
from collective working class advancement to an ethos of
"manipulate your coworkers,
so you can get a raise and buy more (beep)."
Since then, self help has retained this laser focus
on the individual and their personality,
frequently in relation to
improving their worth in the labor market.
It's also explicitly sought to help people
adjust to sweeping social changes,
like when Helen Gurley Brown counseled women
on how to succeed in a deeply sexist 1960s workplace,
or when Jane Fonda taught nearly-middle-aged Baby Boomers
how to hang on to the physiques of their youth.
- Are you ready to do the work-out?
- But our favorite era of late 20th century self help
started in the early 70s,
a time of economic contraction and widespread anxiety.
Self help books emerged with super-chill titles like
"Looking Out For #1" and "Winning Through Intimidation"
to urge just what it sounds like,
ruthless self-interest and the gospel of greed.
Some books had even bleaker titles like,
"You Can Profit From A Monetary Crisis,"
and "How To Prosper During the Coming Bad Years,"
a kind of blatant appeal to self interest
amidst widespread suffering that makes Dale Carnegie
look almost communitarian in contrast.
What's more, as scholar Micki McGee notes,
"within self help culture,
values from the competitive world of the marketplace
have been transplanted to
the personal world of intimate life."
Never has this been more apparent
than in the 1980s relationship advice books
that urged women to see their relationships
as a matter of maximizing profit.
Not cynical at all.
And what about today?
Self help has found a lucrative niche
in helping Americans cope with and survive in
an increasingly unstable labor market and social climate.
While Victorian advice books were about
being successfully married and employed,
today's advice books are about
the struggle to remain marriable and employable, forever.
In keeping with the trend of previous decades,
self improvement books treat the self
as your most valuable commodity,
and your primary duty as maximizing its value.
- If I can help people
feel more in control of their life,
more stable,
that will minimize their interest
in doing those negative things.
- Books like "You Are A Badass" function as
"How to Win Friends and Influence People"
for the shitty flexible gig economy
where nobody's labor is particularly valued
and everyone's goal is to become their own boss
via their Etsy wooden wind chime store.
Self help has never been more profitable or more popular,
constituting an 11 billion dollar industry,
as underpaid workers seek out new skills and tips
in hopes of making their way up the socioeconomic ladder.
Many workplaces, especially MLMs,
even employ self help vernacular to keep people motivated
in spite of their shitty paychecks.
With the right mindset, you can rise above your station,
or so the saying has gone
since the fateful day Carnegie loaded up his typewriter.
But, as in the Great Depression, we're living in
extraordinarily horrible times for getting ahead,
and it's understandable that people would take advice
from these finance gurus
who promise them unheard-of wealth
if they follow simple tips,
like tape coupons together so they're worth twice as much,
put double-sided tape on your dog's paws
so he picks up quarters when he walks around the street,
and join 10 churches,
take some money out of the tithe bucket each week,
and a lot more where that came from.
But as we all struggle to
manifest new mindsets or be more badass
or package our personalities on five social media platforms,
it's worth asking.
Are we, like folks during the Great Depression,
turning to self help
because we blame ourselves for our struggles,
rather than blaming blatant institutional failures
like massive student debt, stagnating wages, and so on?
And don't get us wrong, there's nothing nefarious
about wanting to improve yourself.
It's admirable, even, and most studies on the topic
even show that people do find self help books
to be, well, helpful, but we think it's only healthy
to question something that's become
as institutionalized as the self help industry,
and it's worth wondering why the message,
much like Carnegie's back in 1936, remains,
if you read this inspirational book
and you don't become massively successful,
it's because you didn't try hard enough.
But what do you guys think?
Is the self help industry
just trying to make us better people,
or is something a lot uglier going on?
Let us know in the comments.
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Later.
(upbeat music)
Start a religion!
You don't have to pay taxes if you start a religion,
so just start your own.
Perform a miracle to get people involved,
and then just let that cash roll in.
Do we have to stop now? I've got more.