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This is a common type of HN thread where the linked article is pretty bad, but the headline topic is interesting enough that people want to comment on it from their own experience. In this case, every single comment (100% as of this posting) is a riff on the headline topic and says nothing at all about the content of the article.
Well, I will say one thing about the article. It summarily dismisses Stephen Covey's Seven Habits as nothing special, without engaging the content of the book in the slightest, and criticizes Covey for not talking about racism and sexism. If you want this article and its writer in a nutshell, there you go.
There are a ton of articles like this out there, even on this exact topic of ridiculing self-help from the compulsive, perfunctory woke standpoint that dominates our elite media culture. This one was very middle-of-the-fairway. The best I can say about it is that it contained a tiny bit of history, and we were spared the usual exhortations to adopt more collectivist politics. (In their prescriptions for America, the writers always talk exclusively about politics, never even thinking about what people could be doing differently in their own families, friendships, neighborhoods and communities. Slaves to individualism in their own way, they would never imagine that anything but the State can save us.)
Frankly, these dull, robotically woke articles from legacy media are a much more nauseating aspect of this cultural moment than bad self-help books. And Seven Habits is more worth your time than anything this author will ever say.
Agreed. These articles are becoming a formulaic bad trope.
1. Grab some classic American media.
2. Look at it through a perverted lens it wasn't meant to address.
3. Decry this lack of coverage as some evil ploy to suppress an outgroup.
Seven habits is a great book that anyone would be better for having read.
> robotically woke
I like this phrase a lot. Woke or not, we all agree that we hate the roboticality. It's just a cheap/shallow conviction, lack of depth and thoughtfulness, etc. is what I consider actually harmful.
> woke
please. Dang should be down on this word, its designed to elict bad responses. It adds nothing.
Self help has a very interesting consequence on the politics of social service delivery to people. I've had this conversation a LOT with US voters, and they resent their tax dollars funding type-2 diabetes intervention precisely because its perceived as a self-acquired voluntary disease.
Never mind the horrific health economics outcome of ignoring it, some wierd, quasi-moralistic "I shouldn't HAVE TO" enters the room.
I believe quite strongly this is a consequential corollary of the self-help movement. Which btw, has deep roots in the American political landscape, from well before the obsession with Dale Carnegie. You could argue the whole "go west" and invitation to land-pegging which fuelled the expansion of the states into the territories depended on it.
Samuel Smiles wrote histories of great men which fuelled a sense of ability to become what you wish to be, and was part of the victorian british self-help movement too.
If I looked for a word to describe the other point of view I get to "collectivist" but within seconds Its descended into name calling around socialism.
Europe and Asia have a different sense of what is, and is not worth funding and managing collectively. US Americans in particular are driven to self-reliance in all things, including things which demonstrably are counter productive.
Self-Help and Self-Advancement, and simple self-managed self-actualisation are all a part of this.
There aren't seven habits of highly effective people: There's the benefit of money, and not reading pop-sci and thats about it.
Wokists make jokes about Ayn Rand because she died poor, lonely and deprived, dependent on the state. The ultimate payback, no? Asocial is, as Asocial does.
For humour value, consider Gurdjieff. Where would you put Gurdjieff and Krishnamurti on the 'woke' agenda, given they believed strongly in ... self-help?
The article is a book review. The book is reviewing Seven Habits. The article is reviewing - criticising, in the sense of expanding and commenting on, if you read the details - the book. So that section is a mix of opinion.
It's unfortunate you missed this rather relevant fact, and chose instead to write a diatribe about how "woke" is very bad and people on HN only ever comment on articles without really reading them.
Of course if you believe that public criticism of books like Seven Habits in obscure journals is somehow corrosively 'un-American' you're going to need to explain why you have that rather exotic view.
Your comment got me to read the article. But.
1. First, the style is atrocious. I am not a native speaker but the style is circumvoluted, jumping from details to details. I believe the main idea could have been summarized and exposed clearly in fewer paragraphs ("process of cultural homogenization for its own sake in/through historical American self-help literature" or something).
2. > Well, I will say one thing about the article. It summarily dismisses Stephen Covey's Seven Habits as nothing special, without engaging the content of the book in the slightest, and criticizes Covey for not talking about racism and sexism. If you want this article and its writer in a nutshell, there you go.
Isn't that a stretch ?
> Although Covey’s tract pays no more attention to the harms of racism and sexism than the other works McHugh examines, she finds its controlling agenda tempered by a soft-focus emphasis on “principles,” “proactivity,” and “interdependence.” Such qualities, she asserts, are in short supply in similar works of success literature, introducing a critical element of vulnerability into the usual morale-raising, virtue-forming proceedings: “In interdependence,” she writes, “there was a recognition of individual limitations, even fallibility, in a way that rarely happens in this type of literature.”
It's less a critic of Covey for not talking about racism and sexism than a general observation than all those work of literature are ignoring racism and sexism issues. Most probably because there were fewer outlets to express these issues than there is today.
> And Seven Habits is more worth your time than anything this author will ever say.
You make a bit point out of what is said about Covey's book in the article but seven habits and its relevance for entrepreneurs/businessmen is not the author's subject and its dismissal is more anecdote than central to the point.
People who fix themselves are a danger to the cathedral.
I don't like your generalization, but this particular article was underwhelming I agree. I'm actually not even sure what point it is making.
This was definitely a snooze-worthy review of what seems like a dull book, but I don't have a problem with articles pointing out racism and sexism.. especially as there's so much of it in our culture and history.
Many Americans don't have communities to fall back on. I was raised by a single mother 6000 miles from her family. We didn't have family or community to rely on. I was alone a lot as a child. As such I didn't get all of the socialization that many people got. I like to think of it like growing up without hearing language. I didn't get it as a part of my upbringing. I had to seek it out and learn it, in the same way you would a language.
In the beginning I didn't have the tools to seek it out with other human beings. I didn't speak the basic "language". I feel incredibly fortunate that there were books out there that I had access to that helped with where to start. Simple things like how to ask for help. Eventually (20 something years later) I have enough "language" in my vocabulary, thanks in great part to amazing books written by incredible writers who have devoted their lives to helping other people, to navigate a complex social life. I am incredibly grateful to these authors.
This is an issue plaguing Americans. There are threads everyday on Reddit and the like with people asking questions like "How do I make friends?" and "How do I get involved in a community?". We're an incredibly lonely society.
Can you please list some of the books that have helped you the most?
America, in contrast with most other countries, has very little cultural infrastructure to guide people. Freedom and individualism (however shallow) is emphasized.
To quote an american catholic saying something very uncatholic, but very american: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe and the mystery of human life.”
We should not be surprised that into this psychic vacuum rushes various alternatives such as self-help, sports-worship and so forth.
> America, in contrast with most other countries, has very little cultural infrastructure to guide people. Freedom and individualism (however shallow) is emphasized.
This is very accurate. Having lived in other countries, I can say the "other" side suffers from a different extreme: Sticking to flawed social constructs that impede their progress and/or happiness, no matter how much research and/or self help you throw at them.
> Freedom and individualism (however shallow) is emphasized.
It's really not though.
By Western standards, America is a very conformist country. You can see this in how schoolchildren are required to pledge allegiance to the flag, to the slow acceptance of gay rights, to controversy over saying over "Happy Holidays."
I deeply wish America was a country that supported individualism in the sense of supporting and even celebrating the right to live your life as you see fit.
All too often, however, it seems that this love of "individualism" only surfaces when someone needs help or asks for cooperation.
That's not individualism. This simply selfishness.
I've been binging Adam Curtis documentaries recently, and the unifying thread has been the rise of individualism and its being coopted by commerce. In a discussion regarding HyperNormalization [1], he argued that we're beginning to realize how shallow this individualism is, and religion will rear its head at some point to fill this void.
Here is a list of 200 most popular books sold at Ozon, the biggest on-line retailer in Russia:
https://www.ozon.ru/highlight/top-200-knig-po-mneniyu-chitat...
Of the Top-12, 6 to 8 are some form of a self-help book:
* 1st: The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fck.
2nd: Say Yes To Life, a self-help book from an Austrian Holocaust surviver.
* 4th: Ben Graham's Intelligent Investor.
* 5th: A Russian-author book on the art of "convincing" & "influencing" people (sound familiar?).
* 6th: Another American book, "Radical Forgiveness: A Guide to Spiritual Healing"
* 8th: Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.
* 11th: Women Who Love Too Much: If Love is Causing Suffering. Also a US book.
* 12th: Atlas Shrugged. I suppose it's not a self-help book, but it's very much in line with the spirit of "open-your-eyes" literature.
* If you go down the list, there is a bunch of other titles like Rich Dad Poor Dad, the full set of Nassim Taleb's quasi self-improvement books, etc.
We can sort of argue whether some of these books are self-help adjacent or not (like Ben Graham or Nassim Taleb), but the trend is clear: self-improvement literature is very popular in Russia.
This shows that the self-help cottage industry is not limited to the US. I think people just like the idea of self-improvement.
edit: formatting
Sports-worship is a strong feature of many religious and traditional nations as well. Think of European football fans, among many other examples.
> America, in contrast with most other countries, has very little cultural infrastructure to guide people. Freedom and individualism (however shallow) is emphasized.
Very true. I went to a public school in Eastern Europe and everyone had to go through the same curriculum no matter what you wanted to focus on after graduation. The basic principle here is to expose students to all subjects and let them decide what they want to focus on in places of higher education.
However, in American schools it seemed that you could pretty much weave your way through public schools only taking courses you think you need after you cover some of the basic subjects. There are several problems with this approach. First of all, you're never exposed to subjects that you didn't originally have interest in, but could potentially have appreciation for had you invested some time learning about them. Secondly, your scope of knowledge ends up being pretty narrowly limited to things that you're interested in while having little to no idea about everything else. Lastly, I think colleges and universities end up picking up the slack here when they start teaching coursework that should've otherwise been part of public school curriculum.
All-in-all, it is my belief that having at least surface-level understanding in various subjects does make a difference as you get older because it gives you just enough knowledge to be able to look at life in a different light and, at the very least, have a general idea how to start making adjustments. Not to say that you won't need help. In fact, you still might but you're in a much better place than where you would be blindly following someone's advice in a gimmicky self-help book.
I believe this comes from confusion between freedom as a choice with consequences, and freedom as a choice without consequences.
The latter definition has taken hold over the last few decades because it is seen as offensive to reinforce good choices. Suggesting that people maintain a good diet and exercise is seen as offensive to obese people. Suggesting that people marry a good, stable partner before having children is seen as offensive to single mothers. Suggesting that people focus on jobs and careers that provide stable income is seen as crushing someone's self-actualized aspirations. And suggesting that any of these groups be responsible for the outcomes of their choices is unthinkable.
When such basic advice is off-limits, what cultural infrastructure could we possibly have?
Edit: removed distracting example.
Well, if your view is around individualism and shaping yourself then maybe the whole self-help industry isn't so accidental. Maybe its a progression of a strong need for materials to support that view. Other countries also have it as well but its nowhere near the seemingly overwhelming desire as in the US.
Or perhaps theres a travelling sideshow element to self-help that appeals to the PT Barnum types. But I'm not so cynical.
> "… and so forth."
… celebrity worship, corporation worship, politician worship, money worship, conspiracy theories …
What is cultural infrastructure in other countries? Is it just religion / worship?
I enjoy some self-help books because they seem to articulate an underlying gameplan for pursuing whatever one considers "success," which are ideas my parents and school only taught me implicitly or inaccurately. My parents' advice to me as a kid was "do what you love and the money will follow," which is not true, and/or "join the Navy," which I had no desire to do. So I've ended up trying to find my own way in life, however imperfectly.
Essentially, a lot of these books are about executive functioning skills, the meta-level planning and goal-setting and failure-analysis efforts that are necessary to make progress in whatever field. I think it is also true, as other commenters note, that to some extent they fill an ethical or existential void left by the decline of religion.
> "join the Navy,"
Maybe they hoped this way you'd get to learn the science technology? :-)
While I doubt my experience is even remotely unique, a variety of experiences (and perhaps genetics) from my childhood, teens, etc. left me in my 20s as an outgoing but (very) insecure person. I was constantly seeking but failing at relationships. I had dropped out of college, and was flighty and inconsistent with my career.
Maybe I'd come out of all that just by time passing / aging... but I decided to read about the things I was failing to accomplish. Having a self-identity and the integrity to maintain my identity when faced with challenges. Understanding boundaries in relationships. Learning how to accomplish tasks at work and succeed in projects.
I suspect a combination of the bad experiences, surviving them, learning from mistakes and the things I learned from books all contributed to an overall more capable person. I gained confidence, stability in relationships, greater diligence and sense of responsibility at work. Not everything is sunshine and roses. There's still a long list of projects I dreamed of or started, but failed or abandoned. But the list of people that seem to trust me and seek me out for "adult" advice has grown.
In many ways, I am not the picture of American success, but I am happy with what I've done with myself, with the potential I've tapped, the relationships I've built, and so on. I think of myself as leaning towards the side of being discontent with unpleasant circumstances that I'm capable of changing. There's plenty that's bigger that I might not be happy about, but by having a clear picture of your locus of control, the gist of the Serenity Prayer applies. And improving your self is top of the list of things you can change.
I gravitate towards self help because expert help has almost always resulted in very large expenses and my actual problem not being solved.
Every experience I've had with a doctor that was less severe than "I am actively dying" has just been "Take pain killers for a couple weeks and come back if it isn't fixed by then, also here is a $200 bill."
The one time I hired someone to fix something on my house (to fix some water damage), I had a literal stream of water coming in to my house above the repair the next time it rained.
In most cases, it seems you need to know the answer to the problem yourself before you can trust someone else to diagnose and fix the problem correctly.
The poor quality of so much professional work has been a surprising realization for me as I've gotten a little older. I used to think that most professional plumbers would be really great at plumbing and could easily fix most problems wothout issue. Same for electricians, doctors, mechanics, etc. In practice, I run into blunders and extremely shoddy work more often than not.
Hiring a person for a home repair often takes just as long as learning how to do it myself, given how often they make mistakes or do poor quality work. Same for doctors; I can't remember the last time I was told something by a doctor I didn't already know from researching it myself. They mostly just gatekeep medicine, IME.
This isn't at all meant to say that I'm particularly good at research, mostly I'm talking about knowledge that's a quick DDG search or youtube video away.
My experience with doctors is not too different from yours. I had been experiencing sinus pain debilitating enough to affect work. I was referred to a doctor who was an hour late, whose only actual advice was use saline solution, and then charged me $150 (deductible not yet met).
I've been using "concierge" medicine ever since.
Most of us work in a profession where we hire teams of people to maintain systems with a fraction of the complexity of the human body (not to mention our understanding of how computers work is orders of magnitude higher than our understanding of the body). Contrast that with a doctor seeing a patient for the first time.
Trusting other people to administrate your home computer is totally ok though because they're actually experts.
Conversely, sometimes you need that outside expert perspective to help open your eyes to the real problems.
Humans are always looking for things to believe in. When people become less religious, they still need something to put their faith in.
Motivation and happiness are vague words or concepts.
Existentialism and existential nihilism explain this.
Those books are not based on science, and if they were, they would talk about it.
Apart from saving the world from climate change and tax justice I cannot find any meaning I could find in those books.
Well I'm not American and I read mostly "self-help" books, from "In Search of Meaning" to "Code Complete" to "Extreme Ownership" to "High Output Management" to "Never Split The Difference". I always read one before I go to sleep.
Code Complete is a self-help book? I never imagined that book would be categorized as self-help. With a definition of "self-help" broad enough to include it the question in my mind is "What isn't self-help?"
I think you are confusing "Self-Help" with "non-fiction".
Thinking of Mortimer Adler's How To Read A Book...
Self Help is either a How To book or Philosophy?
Both have quite a bit of value to the individual. Even as the author describes this as feeding the business machine, both self help and philosophy can make you aware when this is happening.
I read these genres and can see clearly why my boss was told to repeat company statements. I sit back and witness corporate propaganda/marketing and am aware they are coming for my brain.
Without self help and philosophy, would I be hacked into mindless compliance?
> was to enshrine the central myth of early America—that the origins and long-term viability of the American experiment rested on the image of “the yeoman farmer as patriot and model citizen.”
It's not a myth. It's the truth about early America. Big businesses really didn't arrive in force until after the Civil War.
Most important take is people want help
Maybe don't know how to get it, don't have money, feel ashamed...
Society needs help and reform
While the quality of self-help material is variable, what I think is valuable (and I guess pretty American) is the focus on that which you can change for yourself.
It seems more popular recently to talk about external problems that you realistically can't impact ("why should anyone be a billionaire") rather than focus on what you can actually change ("how do I grow valuable skill sets and market myself better to increase my compensation.")
Obviously, not every self-help book is going to be good, or right for you, and you may not absorb and implement it, but I'd much rather bet on someone who at least tries to steer their own ship.
While America seems to spend a lot of time talking about "how to improve / change yourself", and the "American Dream", every study I've seen (for example https://www3.weforum.org/docs/Global_Social_Mobility_Report.... ), shows it does poorly for social mobility.
If we never talk about external problems such as systems that make it impossible to meaningfully increase one's compensation, then no amount of change in self could actually fix anything. Let's say you're a disabled person who can't even get married because then you lose your income and therefore become financially dependent on your partner, which creates a super uncomfortable relationship between the two of you. What can you change yourself, or should you instead talk about the fact the government's laws and merit-gating has royally fucked you over and advocate for systemic changes? Maybe through writing a blog post or opinion article in a newspaper...
Actually getting help is often associated with high costs, risks and stigmas of various kinds.
Obsession?
Hardly.
I'm going to try and give up self-help and business books and podcasts and only read sci-fi.
My career is fine, I'm fine, I know enough about tech and engineering management to be at least mediocre.
There is a 50 book 40k series out there I think I'd rather spend more time with.
There are productive (empowering) and unproductive (parasitic) forms of self-help. I have found the former to be useful for as long as I can remember; the latter to be strongly avoided.
For an excellent book on this see "The Dark Side of the Light Chasers".[1]
[1] - https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Side-Light-Chasers-Reclaiming/dp...
As a Canadian and a French citizen, America definitely has this puritan streak of trying to be the best person you can be - or the purest you can be. Work harder, drink less, exercise more, etc.
My French grandparents lived until they were 100, were perfectly content, had 8 kids, ate great food during long meals and drank lots of wine. I don't think they jogged a day in their lives.