The Politics of Self-Help

The implicit assumption of the phenomenon we call "self-help" is that people, as individuals, are the causes of their own problems--which is why they can fix their problems, because they need only "fix" what is wrong with their behavior, outlook, etc.. "Systemic" views have no place here, to the point that even if few go so far as to flatly declare that "Society, there is no such thing" in so many words that is exactly how they think about the matter in practice.

At the same time in telling people how to solve the problems they themselves must ultimately be causing the tendency in self-help is to see the answers as essentially banal, familiar ones, with the sufferer only needing an Authority figure to tell them, or maybe just remind them, that acting on these "truths" is really just that simple (with even the recalcitrant mainly needing some Red Forman-style parenting).

It seems to me indisputable that all this reflects a particular politics. The individualism that holds the individual harshly to account as it disdainfully brushes aside systemic views--and not incidentally, also brushes aside any critical examination of society or call for change with which they tend to be connected; the sense that the rules for living are one-size-fits-all, quite simple, and have long been widely known--that "we have made no discoveries, and . . . think that no discoveries are to be made . . . in morality" as a certain philosopher once had it; the authoritarianism implicit in the teaching discussed here, and the implied need for authoritarianism, not least a low opinion of human nature and human intelligence, the view that this makes it natural and right and necessary for a few "superiors" to boss around the rest, who can do little better than follow their orders, or imitate those above them; bespeak a very conservative world-view in the classical sense of the term, and a very bourgeois one as well. By contrast the leftist--by which I do not mean the identity-politics practitioner (whose politics are fundamentally anti-leftist), or the so-called "bleeding-heart liberal" (human sympathy is one thing, a serious critique of society's structure another), but someone who really is persuaded that the System does matter and society exists, and that the stress on individual "responsibility" and view of what people must do to get along or have no one to blame but themselves is false, simplistic and cruel, if not also dishonest, and as a result often entirely irrelevant to dealing with people's real problems.

The result is that the prevalence of self-help in America testifies to the extreme conservatism of the mainstream of the media and official culture in the country traditionally, as well as (however much many may feel unrepresented by or satisfied with these understandings and attitudes) the acceptance, or at least acquiescence, of much of the public in that conservatism (especially that relatively privileged part of it that has the time, money and inclination to buy and read books, to go by the content of our bestseller lists). At the same time self-help culture has been a powerful force for conservatism, promulgating the building blocks of a conservative view of the world far more widely and subtly and effectively than the vast promotion of the tenets of conservative philosophy in more academic fashion online, and sometimes more than that, such that phenomena like Jordan Peterson are by no means coincidental--all as, contrary to what Nathan J. Robinson says of the matter in an otherwise formidable argument for his position, it is unsurprising that the left has not produced such figures. The left simply cannot offer the same kind of "product" and still be "left"--all as one ought to remember that the media's prejudices have had it treating a Peterson with a respect it would never bestow upon any figure really recognizably of the left.