There is something both slightly embarrassing and unsettling about the decidedly modern doctrine of self-help. Needing help and support certainly shouldn’t be regarded as a weakness, yet the self-help phenomenon, as its name implies, places its onus on you – the individual. It is a deeply ideological phenomenon that attempts to hide its ideology in its abrasive positivity (literal positivity rather than philosophical). In Minima Moralia Theodor Adorno writes that ‘wrong life cannot be lived rightly.’ Self-help is a doctrine that attempt to do precisely this. In self-help ‘wrong life’ is unimportant; what is crucial is the living, the acting and the doing. It is about a successful adaptation to one’s environment. I am reminded of something else Adorno wrote in Minima Moralia: ‘no science has yet explored the inferno in which were forged the deformations that later emerge to daylight as cheerfulness, openness, sociability, successful adaptation to the inevitable, an equable, practical frame of mind.’ Self-help is the precise opposite of Adorno’s imagined science. Rather than looking at how these ‘deformations’ take place, the purveyors of self-help are responsible for the engineering that makes it possible.
Unsurprisingly, self-help is big business. In a book called Self Help inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life, Micki McGee writes that ‘the self-improvement industry, inclusive of books, seminars, audio and visual products, and personal coaching [was] said to contribute a 2.48 billion dollars-a-year industry.’ However much self-help seems disturbing, or just plain irritating, it nevertheless occupies a large part of western life and so cannot simply be ignored.
Ordinarily I might have tried to ignore it, but recently these thoughts about self-help have begun to resurface. What is more, they have surfaced in an intriguing and unsettling way. This is because a book called The Little Book of Confidence came into my possession. This is a book written by Susan Jeffers, one of the most famous and successful self-help writers. Her book Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, according to this Daily Mail article, has sold fifteen million copies in 100 countries.
My reaction to the book was initially one of derision; I found this pocket-sized book laughable. Its promise to ‘transform your fears into confidence, energy – and love’ appeared to me to be naive and silly. It was all a bit too shiny happy people – as demonstrated by the cover illustration of a stick drawing of a figure with lines radiating from its simply sketched body – supposedly a shiny, happy person.
However, as I flicked through the book, each page a ‘capsule’ (as Jeffers herself puts it) of positive thinking, my initial cynicism mutated into a curiosity. These capsules, or aphorisms, of positive thinking began to envelop me. What had at first seemed glib and hollow began to take on a weird and unsettling resonance. Glancing through the book was like the moment a lame and insipid pop song comes on the radio, only to surprise you by having an unexpected and slightly embarrassing emotional resonance. In one of the most interesting of these ‘capsules,’ Jeffers notes how positive thinking is sometimes met with a certain cynicism: ‘Some people make fun of positive thinking. Why would they prefer to look at the gloom instead of the light? Thinking positively transforms your experience of life… for the better. It makes sense, doesn’t it?’ Reading this placed me in a position of rather uncomfortable self-awareness. The ironical detachment, with which I was reading, became implicated and implicitly referred to by the book. It seemed to me as if the point Jeffers was making was that this very detachment, this cynicism is part of the problem – your problem. The rhetorical question at the end of the section – ‘It makes sense, doesn’t it’ – is incredibly ambivalent. With what sort of tone is this meant? The friendliness and intimacy of the book, announced from the very outset, was no longer quite so stable, no longer quite so laughably obvious and unsubtle. For the tone of this final rhetorical flourish seemed to me to be accusing and sarcastic. I felt as though I was being goaded, as if this tiny book that I had initially dismissed was having its own back, twisting my cynicism and throwing it back into my face. Perhaps Jeffers never intended to throw anything back in my face, but it struck me how this little book of positivity could have such an effect on me. It created an instance of cognitive dissonance; I wanted to dismiss the book, but I was also faced with the terrifying fact that these positive insights might in fact be beneficial to me.
This cognitive dissonance was related, furthermore, to a feeling of embarrassment. I felt I had been caught out; my understanding of the world – of myself and this ludicrous book – had been ‘shown up’. I am reminded of a remark made by the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips: ‘We are humiliated not by our acts but by our ideals.’ We might easily replace Phillips’ humiliation with embarrassment, but the result is surely the same. What is crucial is that it is our conceptual understanding of ourselves and our realities that emerges in embarrassment, rather than certain actions or specific physical incidents. If it seems that actions are embarrassing or humiliating, it is because of how these acts fit within our conceptual understanding. Jeffers book, then, elicits embarrassment because it does something to our ideals – something happens in the way we see the word (I know I am using ideals and conceptual thinking a little too interchangeably, but our concepts that delineate and produce our reality always contain certain kinds of ideals or wishes within them), upsetting the stability of our ideals and subsequently making us feel rather uncomfortable. The book knows you too well; more, perhaps, than you know yourself.
Yet if the book has unsettled me because it speaks to my sense of personal lack, it is more interesting for the fact that its very existence is testimony to a more general lack in contemporary life. ‘Know your presence makes a difference in all areas of your life. If you don’t understand that your life really does make a difference, act as if you do make a difference.’ Perhaps positive epithets like this are useful. Yet what are intriguing are not the epithets themselves, but rather that such positive rhetoric should be printed and made into the subject of a book. For life is always lived in lack and deficiency – we, after all, would be nothing without desire. Yet Jeffers’ book speaks of something more fundamental – an inability to face the problem of lack directly. Politics or philosophy were once the tools through which we engaged with the deficiency or lack that characterises human life; it seems that these tools have become impotent, leaving open a space with plenty of room for a book like The Little Book of Confidence.
Jeffers’ book might well be trying to tell us how to live wrong life rightly; yet Jeffers book seems to be asking an unsettling question – can wrong life be transformed by living rightly? I think Adorno would have dismissed the question out of hand. However, I’m not so sure. I’ll remain cynical about self-help, yet at the same time I’ll have to live with the uncomfortable feeling that Jeffers might just have me down more than I’d like.
Cryptic Murmurs 