Self-help's big lie

[Thom Little]

Ever since the United States began weaning itself off the sociological junk food of victimization and its culture of blame, the pop-psychology menu increasingly has been flavored by an antithetical concept — empowerment — that can be summarized as: Believe it, achieve it.

Nowadays, Fortune 500 conglomerates draft business plans with bullet points drawn from Laker coach-cum-inspirational guru Phil Jackson's Zen optimism. Couples write partnership covenants based on the utopian blather of John Gray. Millions of everyday Americans owe their feelings of "personal power" to erstwhile firewalker Tony Robbins, arguably the father of today's mass-market empowerment. And there is Oprah, who is seldom categorized as a guru in her own right but whose status as the movement's eminence grise is beyond dispute: The road to self-help's promised land, and a bite of its $10-billion fruit (as tracked by Marketdata Enterprises), runs straight through Harpo Productions. The nostrums delivered by these and other self-help celebrities form a cultural given, an uncontested — and, we are led to believe, incontestable — foundation for today's starry-eyed zeitgeist.

Lost in the adulation is the downside of being uplifted. In truth, the overselling of personal empowerment — the hyping of hope — may be the great unsung irony of modern American life, destined to disappoint as surely as the pity party that it was meant to replace.

In U.S. schools, the crusade to imbue kids with that most slippery of notions — self-esteem — has been unambiguously disastrous (and has recently been disavowed by a number of its loudest early voices). Self-esteem-based education presupposed that a healthy ego would help students achieve greatness, even if the mechanisms necessary to instill self-esteem undercut scholarship. Over time, it became clear that what such policies promote is not academic greatness but a bizarre disconnect between perceived self-worth and provable skill.



http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/sunday/editorials/la-op-selfhelp1jan01,0,2998986.story?track=hpmostemailedlink