Mr. Ed
Be what you is not what you what you ain’t
- Location
- Central NY
In a sense, the currently popular conception of self-help also dates back to colonial times. It’s not far-fetched to propose that Benjamin Franklin wrote the first American SHAM book—1732’s Poor Richard’s Almanack, with its bounty of homespun witticisms. Advice columnists and others offering “tips for better living” have been with us more or less continuously ever since. Two genuinely historic works flowered from the spiritual dust bowl of the Depression, and in the same year, no less: 1937 saw the publication of Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich as well as Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, which many still consider the quintessential self-help book. For sheer longevity, it’s hard to argue.
On a September day some sixty-six years after its publication, How to Win Friends still came in at number ninetynine in Amazon.com’s sales rankings. Sales haven’t been hurt by the book’s prominence in Dale Carnegie Courses taught by an army of twenty-seven hundred facilitators worldwide. Corporate trainers will tell you that the book is as relevant today as it was in 1937. Another landmark self-help tract in the Carnegie mold was Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking, published in 1952.
Significantly, though, until the advent of modern self-help, and with the handful of exceptions just noted, writers usually saw themselves as mere conduits of information, not experts in their own right. When she started her column in the 1950s, even the supremely opinionated “Dear Abby,” Abigail Van Buren (given name: Pauline Friedman Phillips), would invoke recognized authorities in addressing readers’ questions. “Abby’s” real-life sister, Ann Landers, also relied on outside experts; Landers “had a Rolodex to kill for,” according to Carol Felsenthal, one of her biographers. M. Scott Peck, the psychiatrist whom some rank with Carnegie as a seminal force in modern self-help, felt compelled to source and footnote his signature 1978 work, The Road Less Traveled. Peck credited many of his key concepts to such “name” forebears as Jung and Freud, and he bulwarked his opinions with ample excerpts from scholarly journals.
Then, in 1967, came the revolution that Carnegie’s book had foreshadowed: the rise of the guru, the transformation from simple advice giver to cultural and motivational soothsayer. That year witnessed the publication of psychiatrist Thomas A. Harris’s smash hit I’m OK—You’re OK, which transformed self-help in three critical respects. First, it answered any remaining questions about the viability of self-help publishing as an ongoing genre. Second, it refocused psychology’s lens: Harris sought less to make sense of the individual per se than to make sense of the way that individual functioned in, and was shaped by, relationships— a pursuit that has occupied virtually all of self-help, as well as a good deal of standard psychology, ever since.2 Third and most important, although Harris strained for an upbeat tone and always insisted that he intended his book as a blueprint for happier living, the overriding inflection was that most people aren’t OK. The author explicitly posited that the average person is damaged early in childhood and walks around thereafter in a paranoid, self-pitying state Harris called “I’m not OK, you’re OK.” (Harris’s other three basic states of relational being were “I’m not OK, you’re not OK”; “I’m OK, you’re not OK”; and—hallelujah— “I’m OK, you’re OK.”)
t would be unfair to hold Harris personally responsible for all that happened in his book’s wake. But this much is certain: The melancholic view of people and personality set forth in I’m OK—You’re OK succinctly captured the sense of Victimization that dominated self-help—and, to no small degree, American culture—for the next quarter century.
Be all that you can be!”
But, in fact, the self-help movement still divides, roughly, into two camps.
There is Empowerment—broadly speaking, the idea that you are fully responsible for all you do, good and bad.
And, in contrast, there is Victimization, which sells the idea that you are not responsible for what you do (at least not the bad things).
Victimization and Empowerment represent the yin and the yang of the self-help movement. It is likely that this schism will always exist, no matter which guru or message becomes the flavor of the day. Further, it’s important to realize that visibility is not the same as influence; though one or the other side may seem to go underground at any given time, its effects continue to be felt, sometimes in seismic fashion.
While nothing as wide-ranging and multifaceted as SHAM follows a neat time line, clearly after Thomas Harris’s success and the rise of self help publishing, Victimization held sway for more than twenty years, from the late 1960s through the 1980s.
The earlier of those two end points, of course, represents more than a date. The 1960s were and are an ethos, a time conjured in words and phrases that remain freighted with personal disillusionment and cultural discord to this day: Vietnam. Integration. The Sexual Revolution. Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out. In a society that seemed to be losing its bearings, the narrative of Victimization, with its backstory writ of excuses and alibis, appealed to growing numbers of Americans.3 Whether the climate of rising social unrest fueled the culture of blame or the culture of blame helped fuel the unrest, the two currencies undoubtedly catalyzed each other, with an explosive effect on the average person’s understanding, or misunderstanding, of his relationship to the outside world.
This is not to say that all of the Americans who began flocking to self-help during the late 1960s embraced Victimization. Just a few years after Thomas Harris encouraged people to dwell on their childhood traumas, Werner Erhard touted a regimen known as “est,” in which trainers would literally scream obscenities at followers in an effort to bully them past their hang-ups to a higher, more tough-minded plane of “beingness.”4 But est remained on the fringe. It was too quirky, and its chief architect too flaky, to capture the popular imagination. Besides, like other upstart regimens that sold unabridged Empowerment, it depended on a worldview that was out of sync with what most people could plainly see happening around them. (Arguing for full control of one’s destiny was not easy in the era of the draft.) On the contrary, Victimization’s success—then as now—was that it appealed to, and indeed legitimized, the human tendency to feel sorry for one’s self.
On a September day some sixty-six years after its publication, How to Win Friends still came in at number ninetynine in Amazon.com’s sales rankings. Sales haven’t been hurt by the book’s prominence in Dale Carnegie Courses taught by an army of twenty-seven hundred facilitators worldwide. Corporate trainers will tell you that the book is as relevant today as it was in 1937. Another landmark self-help tract in the Carnegie mold was Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking, published in 1952.
Significantly, though, until the advent of modern self-help, and with the handful of exceptions just noted, writers usually saw themselves as mere conduits of information, not experts in their own right. When she started her column in the 1950s, even the supremely opinionated “Dear Abby,” Abigail Van Buren (given name: Pauline Friedman Phillips), would invoke recognized authorities in addressing readers’ questions. “Abby’s” real-life sister, Ann Landers, also relied on outside experts; Landers “had a Rolodex to kill for,” according to Carol Felsenthal, one of her biographers. M. Scott Peck, the psychiatrist whom some rank with Carnegie as a seminal force in modern self-help, felt compelled to source and footnote his signature 1978 work, The Road Less Traveled. Peck credited many of his key concepts to such “name” forebears as Jung and Freud, and he bulwarked his opinions with ample excerpts from scholarly journals.
Then, in 1967, came the revolution that Carnegie’s book had foreshadowed: the rise of the guru, the transformation from simple advice giver to cultural and motivational soothsayer. That year witnessed the publication of psychiatrist Thomas A. Harris’s smash hit I’m OK—You’re OK, which transformed self-help in three critical respects. First, it answered any remaining questions about the viability of self-help publishing as an ongoing genre. Second, it refocused psychology’s lens: Harris sought less to make sense of the individual per se than to make sense of the way that individual functioned in, and was shaped by, relationships— a pursuit that has occupied virtually all of self-help, as well as a good deal of standard psychology, ever since.2 Third and most important, although Harris strained for an upbeat tone and always insisted that he intended his book as a blueprint for happier living, the overriding inflection was that most people aren’t OK. The author explicitly posited that the average person is damaged early in childhood and walks around thereafter in a paranoid, self-pitying state Harris called “I’m not OK, you’re OK.” (Harris’s other three basic states of relational being were “I’m not OK, you’re not OK”; “I’m OK, you’re not OK”; and—hallelujah— “I’m OK, you’re OK.”)
t would be unfair to hold Harris personally responsible for all that happened in his book’s wake. But this much is certain: The melancholic view of people and personality set forth in I’m OK—You’re OK succinctly captured the sense of Victimization that dominated self-help—and, to no small degree, American culture—for the next quarter century.
Be all that you can be!”
But, in fact, the self-help movement still divides, roughly, into two camps.
There is Empowerment—broadly speaking, the idea that you are fully responsible for all you do, good and bad.
And, in contrast, there is Victimization, which sells the idea that you are not responsible for what you do (at least not the bad things).
Victimization and Empowerment represent the yin and the yang of the self-help movement. It is likely that this schism will always exist, no matter which guru or message becomes the flavor of the day. Further, it’s important to realize that visibility is not the same as influence; though one or the other side may seem to go underground at any given time, its effects continue to be felt, sometimes in seismic fashion.
While nothing as wide-ranging and multifaceted as SHAM follows a neat time line, clearly after Thomas Harris’s success and the rise of self help publishing, Victimization held sway for more than twenty years, from the late 1960s through the 1980s.
The earlier of those two end points, of course, represents more than a date. The 1960s were and are an ethos, a time conjured in words and phrases that remain freighted with personal disillusionment and cultural discord to this day: Vietnam. Integration. The Sexual Revolution. Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out. In a society that seemed to be losing its bearings, the narrative of Victimization, with its backstory writ of excuses and alibis, appealed to growing numbers of Americans.3 Whether the climate of rising social unrest fueled the culture of blame or the culture of blame helped fuel the unrest, the two currencies undoubtedly catalyzed each other, with an explosive effect on the average person’s understanding, or misunderstanding, of his relationship to the outside world.
This is not to say that all of the Americans who began flocking to self-help during the late 1960s embraced Victimization. Just a few years after Thomas Harris encouraged people to dwell on their childhood traumas, Werner Erhard touted a regimen known as “est,” in which trainers would literally scream obscenities at followers in an effort to bully them past their hang-ups to a higher, more tough-minded plane of “beingness.”4 But est remained on the fringe. It was too quirky, and its chief architect too flaky, to capture the popular imagination. Besides, like other upstart regimens that sold unabridged Empowerment, it depended on a worldview that was out of sync with what most people could plainly see happening around them. (Arguing for full control of one’s destiny was not easy in the era of the draft.) On the contrary, Victimization’s success—then as now—was that it appealed to, and indeed legitimized, the human tendency to feel sorry for one’s self.
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