In early 2019, an investigative report by Buzzfeed found that Tony Robbins - perhaps the most iconic figure in the self-help movement - had turned his seminars into sexually predatory and otherwise unsafe environments where women were being targeted by Tony for harassment. The report identifies Tony as having an extensive history of berating victims of rape and violence and, according to accusations made by former staffers and followers of Robbins, a habit of making inappropriate and upsetting sexual advances toward women.

For anyone who’s kept up with Robin’s career as of late, this story likely comes as no surprise.

In 2018, Robbins went on a tirade against a woman, Nanine McCool, during one of his seminars after she critiqued his characterization of the MeToo movement as made of people who “try to get significance and certainty by attacking and destroying someone else”. McCool said that Robbins was doing the MeToo movement "a disservice" with his characterization, which prompted Robbins to engage in a bizarre exercise where he pushed McCool around the room and explained how MeToo is actually hurting women because it's making men angry. 

Yet Robbins’ behavior and ideas are not an aberration within the self-help movement. Rather, they are an encapsulation of what the self-help (or as Robbins prefers, "personal enrichment") movement has embodied for years: An immaterial and individualistic world devoid of politics where one’s mindset is the most important part of one’s well being. MeToo, in the world of self-help, is not about systemic discrimination and injustice - it’s about personal failure in the context of interpersonal strife - failure that rests at the feet of those being victimized, oppressed, or otherwise harmed, rather than those doing the harm.

We need only look to the origins of the contemporary field of self-help to see that this sort of outlook and behavior is ingrained in the very core of self-help philosophy (Origins which are, not coincidentally, deeply intertwined with pseudo-scientific theories of white male excellence and corporate propaganda).

Before going any further, however, it’s important to make a distinction between the popular understanding of self-help and the general concept of self-directed development. Some version of “self-help” as a concept has been around for centuries and encompasses a wide range of ideologies and practices, some more legitimate and respectable than others. Unless otherwise noted, when the use of "self-help" refers exclusively to the current popular understanding of the term.

With that out of the way: How exactly did all of this begin?

What we now call “self-help” first started to gain traction in the US in the early-to-mid-1800s with the release of George Combe’s The Constitution of Man and later, with the publishing of Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Combe, along with his brother, founded the Edinburgh Phrenological Society and his opus, The Constitution of Man, revolved around propagating phrenology as the ultimate theory explaining humanity’s place in nature and our ideal path toward fulfilling our species’ potential. While Constitution was primarily a blinkered white-supremacist treatise on junk science with little obvious relationship to the practice of self-help, there was a core argument that would go on to survive long past the use of calipers. Entwined with bizarre racist ramblings about the profound significance of brain pans and the compromised genetics of non-Europeans was the notion that all humans contained in themselves the ability to provide for all their needs. Combe believed that humans were naturally capable of creating good, happy lives for themselves and that the only limit to this was our own understanding of our nature (and any “deformities” in our skull shapes).

This notion of our own will and nature being the ultimate arbiter of our well being would be echoed and expanded upon in Emerson’s Self-Reliance. Unlike Combe, Emerson was, for his part, a staunch abolitionist and believed slavery to be a horrific injustice. This belief, however, was rooted in a particular moral ideology - that living beings deserved to be treated with dignity - and existed separately from what he saw as scientific evidence for superiority of the races. This was, after all, a man who once professed, "I saw ten, twenty, a hundred large lipped, lowbrowed black men in the streets who, except in the mere matter of language, did not exceed the sagacity of the elephant."

Emerson’s text was based in his belief that independence, individualism, and self-development were the most meaningful endeavors a human could pursue. But Emerson took things a step further than Combe - it wasn’t just that it was in our nature to live well, it was that our participation in community life and our connections to others compromised our ability to care for ourselves and that living a happy, well life was about embracing our own individual impulses. Emerson saw community life as a distraction from self-growth and claimed that the needs of friends and family were harmful constraints on one’s own development.

Emerson felt that all growth and development in life should happen internally, away from others, and that ultimately it was one’s own mindset, not their environment or their relationships or their community, that would determine whether they lived a happy, good life. That Emerson was taken care of through childhood by his mother and aunt and an array of extended family, supported through his early career by his friends and colleagues, kept afloat by his neighbors after his house burned down, and was cared for throughout his entire adult life by his wife (and in his sick years by his children) was somehow not considered at odds with his belief that his success and development was purely a solitary process. That his aunt, whom he called his “earliest and best teacher,” described Self-Reliance as a "strange medley of atheism and false independence" also did nothing to deter his confidence in the tenets of individualism.

While these texts were successful in their time, the full impact of the works of Combe and Emerson wouldn’t be felt for nearly a century, long after they had time to marinate and be absorbed into the general cultural consciousness. The apotheosis of this “nature”-centric vision of self-help established by Constitution and Self-Reliance finally reached fruition in 1936 when Dale Carnegie published How To Win Friends and Influence People.

The power of How To Win Friends..., and the durability of the self-help movement as a whole, comes from taking a set of common axioms and using them to justify increasingly grandiose notions of self-reliance and bootstrapping. Can you do things as an individual that improve your life? Great, then that means that all things revolve around your choices as an individual and your individuality is the most important thing about you. Carnegie simply took that premise and applied it to personal and professional relationships, and the way those relationships could ultimately be used to further your own success.

Carnegie's basic argument was that the mindset and attitude one brought to their relationships was essential in determining one's success in life, be it personal or financial (Carnegie, in fact, believed one’s attitude was the most important factor in determining one’s success). He wrote that if you want better relationships you should smile more, argue less, and approach interactions in good faith – i.e. with a sincere interest in understanding and communicating with the other person - and that these changes would lead to more positive outcomes in all realms of life.

It was, and remains, reasonable advice.

But reasonable advice does not a bestseller make, nor was this simply a set of tips for improving your social skills. What made How To Win Friends... such a roaring success was Carnegie himself and the notion that following his advice would lead you to success beyond your greatest dreams. Carnegie was the archetypal manifestation of the rags-to-riches fantasy that had dominated the American imagination for generations. That Carnegie, the living embodiment of the American dream, was handing out the secret to his success and that it was accessible to everyone because it required nothing more than willpower and the right attitude, made How To Win Friends… an instant sensation.

Between the structurally sound advice at the book's core and Carnegie's own extraordinary success, How To Win Friends... was quickly lionized as one of the greatest tools available for anyone looking to improve their lives, particularly for those looking for success in the business world. 

Of course, no one actually achieves success by their own will, nor are personal relationships things that can be mastered or cultivated through one-sided changes in behavior. Likewise, attitude and charm alone are not enough to overcome material circumstance or larger political constraints and following a simple set of rules is not going to lead you into financial liberation.

Just as Carnegie’s own success was less to do with personal excellence than a confluence of extreme luck and systemic advantages so, too, was his book successful largely for reasons outside its own merits. How To Win Friends… didn’t actually become a hit because it was such an incredible work of prose or because Carnegie actually possessed any deeply valuable insights. Instead it was timing, not content, that made Carnegie’s opus the success it was.

How To In Friends… came out in 1936, just as FDR’s New Deal was hitting its stride and the world was gathering itself for a second world war. It’s hard to imagine a better time for a book about personal agency overcoming material reality to hit the market than 1936. Historic economic and social policies were reforming the foundations of life in the US and things were slowly returning to normal after the devastation of The Great Depression. Jobs programs and a thriving economy meant that opportunity was seemingly everywhere for those (white) Americans who wanted it and the dream that Carnegie embodied seemed more achievable than ever, particularly in contrast to the previous years of hopelessness and destitution.

Carnegie was marketing self-help to a country in the thrall of the greatest public works projects in modern US history. All around the average American was apparent evidence that one’s attitude and mindset was, in fact, the key to personal and financial success. That this illusion could only exist because of the macroeconomic and community-centered policies being put in place by FDR's Democratic Socialist government was lost on a populace caught up in the romantic narrative of self-determination that Carnegie put forth. 

At the same time, the American public was about to be inundated with pro-war propaganda that combined an emphasis on American identity with “individual responsibility and patriotic duty” to build support for the impending draft. If the burgeoning self-help wave would’ve lost momentum on its own, the war ensured that it was here to stay.

Just as important as the material ways that people's lives were being improved by post-Depression social safety nets and jobs programs was the way Carnegie's story dovetailed with the promise of the American Dream. This piece of ideological ephemera became particularly salient during, and after, WWII when the notion of defending “American values” was vital for involvement in a war the public was largely reluctant to become involved in.

How To Win Friends... embodied decades of stories about bootstrapping and self-determination; our destinies had been in our hands the entire time and now we had a concrete guide for directing them. Self-help wasn’t just a means for improving your life and rising up the economic latter - it was downright patriotic.

Carnegie's business-facing argument for self-help laid the foundation for all that would come after: from motivational speaking to life coaching to vast swaths of pyramid schemes and get-rich-quick grifts. The movement's next major epoch, however, would be ushered in from the opposite end of the spectrum: The New Age anti-business zeitgeist of the 60s and 70s.

Peace, Love, and Unlicensed Medical Practices

As the generation born in wake of Carnegie came of age, it brought with it the anti-establishment anti-business counterculture of the 1960s. For many young people, post-war America represented not a sparkling-clean utopia of economic opportunity, but a socially repressive land of nationalist and corporatist propaganda. The counterculture movement was a reaction to the restrictive and narrow-minded norms that had taken hold after the end of the Great Depression.

Life was no longer about getting a job and a house and having 2.5 kids just so you could be sent off to war for a government you didn’t believe in, it was about experiencing all the world had to offer and questioning the norms and received wisdom of generations prior.

At the core of this cultural wave was an ephemeral belief in the importance of spiritual engagement and transcendence, seen by many as the essential antidote to the rigidity of the status quo established in the 1950s. Incidentally, while this commitment to higher thought and expanded consciousness was intended to combat the buttoned-up soulless formality of the mainstream, it grew out of a shared ideological foundation: That the secret to happiness and well being was rooted entirely in the self.

While Carnegie’s self-help was largely about business success, the incoming spiritual self-help movement was all about existential success.

It began quietly with the Human Potential Movement.

The Movement was characterized by people who believed that mass social change would come from individuals realizing their full potential through self-actualization, a concept put forth by Abraham Maslow wherein one becomes their best self through inner reflection and analysis. The thesis of the Human Potential Movement was that individuals who reached their full potential would then teach others to realize their full potential and so on until society had transcended its shackles. This idea of attaining an undefinable but definitely real full “potential” or “capacity” through self-actualization would become a refrain for many future manifestations of self-help ideology.

One of the earliest and most influential institutions in the movement was The Esalen Institute, founded by Stanford graduates Michael Murphy and Dick Price in 1962 and named for the native Esselen tribe upon whose lands the institute was constructed (with no support or endorsement from the tribe itself). The first lecture on offer in 1962 was from writer and philosopher Alan Watts and it wasn’t long before Abraham Maslow himself would become involved with the institute. By the fall, the institute had expanded and began offering workshops with names like "Drug-Induced Mysticism" and "The Expanding Vision".

Carnegie’s theory of personal development as a means for achieving social and business success was being replaced with a new theory, where personal development became a means for activating a limitless potential within not just individual’s communal and professional lives, but in their very existence itself.

While the wave of self-help brought on by Carnegie was defined by a few key texts, The Human Potential Movement was something quite different - an actual movement. There were meetings, events, conversations, and figureheads, but it wasn’t unified the way things were under Carnegie. While Maslow and Esalen kicked things off, the movement itself was amorphous, with different approaches and schools of thought spawning different organizations. This looser, more open-ended iteration of self-help meant there was plenty of room for a more structured monetization-centered institution to step in and take the lead. and in 1971, Erhard Seminars Training, commonly known as “Est”, did just that.

Est was a San Francisco-based organization founded by Werner Erhard - an Episcopalian autodidact born John Paul Rosenberg - that provided a 60-hour course of seminars held over two-weekends (and the evenings of the weekdays in between). The course was framed as “transforming” one’s way of living so that the things in life one had been struggling with or trying to change would resolve naturally simply through the process of living itself.

Est was ostensibly about taking the transcendentalism of the Human Potential Movement and turning it into a formal course akin to the guide to personal betterment Carnegie had published almost 40 years before.

However, instead of providing a list of individual steps or actions like in How To Win Friends..., Est would offer experiential and directly personal first-hand seminars. Est "trainers" would engage in one-on-one interactions with participants challenging them to “let go” of the past, including their pre-existing conceptions of self and identity, while encouraging them to embrace the present, in both identity and circumstance. Underpinning this practice was the theory that most of our personal struggles were rooted in a lack of integrity – a failure to keep our word to others and to ourselves. The course would, among other things, emphasize the control we have to live our lives the way we choose and the power that being in integrity with ourselves can bring to our lives.

Similar to the approach of How To Win Friends…, Est utilized previously established philosophical and psychological practices as a foundation to justify it’s more grandiose conclusions and ideas. But where Carnegie and the Human Potential Movement offered an open-ended approach where one could determine their own level of engagement, Est demanded complete control of participants' environments.

During Est retreats, the seminar leads would dictate when participants were allowed to eat, sleep, use the bathroom, and even leave the retreat altogether. This was framed as being necessary for participants to experience the promised "transformation" but it also meant that trainers had plenty of leeway for choreographing these moments of "transformation,” ensuring that participants would feel they were getting their money's worth.

Naturally, Est's promised “transformation” granting greater ease, contentment, and above all, “wholeness,” came at a cost. Participation in Est was reserved for those who could afford a fee of, in today's dollars, over $1200 and who could set aside two weekends and a week’s worth of evenings to attend the mandatory seminars. That this design inherently selected for middle and upper class individuals was not addressed as part of Est’s teachings.

The efficacy of Est’s approach to addressing life’s challenges was, of course, directly proportional to the wealth and power of the individual being addressed. By creating a program that would self-select for people of means - and thus people whose lives were already materially stable - the directors of Est could ensure that the only hurdles in participants lives were psychological, and therefore any positive lessons they could impart would feel transformative to attendees primed to experience some form of enlightenment.

By marketing personal transformation to the financially solvent, Est would go on to become one of, if not the, most influential self-help organizations in the world.

Parallel to the rise of Est, however, was the arrival of another soon-to-be pillar of the self-help movement: Timothy Gallwey’s 1974 sports psychology book, The Inner Game of Tennis.

The Dawn of the Coach

In Inner Game... Gallwey suggested that athletes imposed mental barriers on themselves and that the key to great performance was, you guessed it, to change one’s mindset to overcome these self-imposed limitations. As Gallwey saw it, the first step to this was encouraging people to focus on the present and learning to distinguish between what is actually true and what we think is true, or, as coaches would later put it, “The stories we tell ourselves”.

The book not only launched Gallwey into the world of business consulting (Corporate-America saw itself in Gallwey's tale of the aspiring-sports-legend-held-back-by-his-own-doubts and was eager to have Gallwey as their in-house cheerleader), its re-positioning of self-help principles as something "coachable" helped provide the language and framework for a whole new wave of self-help guides and leaders. 

While Est established that people were willing to pay for self-help to be taught to them directly, it did so only in the context of a single geographically-restricted retreat. Est was exclusive, expensive, and difficult to attend. But Gallwey introduced the possibility that self-help - changing one's mindset to change one's life - could be something that individuals are "coached" through at their own convenience and pace. This novel approach to self-help blew the doors wide open for a new wave of gurus and institutions to take hold, creating an entire profession in the process in the form of life coaching (also known as "personal coaching" or "personal enrichment").

Despite this breakthrough in self-help culture, it wasn’t until a man named Thomas Leonard, a former Est employee, decided to start his own program that life coaching was finally made into the formally structured and codified enterprise it is today.

In 1988, Leonard launched a life-planning course called ‘Life Creates Your Life’, thus officially beginning his foray into the world of life coaching. In the years that followed he would create, or help develop, coaching training programs and institutes such as The Coach Training Institute (1992), Coach U (1993), the International Coach Federation (1994), and Coachville (1999).

With Leonard's coaching enterprises, self-help had reached critical mass.

After over a century of mixed successes, self-help had finally taken shape as a standalone field of expertise complete with its own set of institutions that would teach you how to provide self-help to others. Decades of self-help philosophy being taught through disparate books, seminars, and courses (or coached, if you were an athlete or banker) had been refined into something you could receive like therapy, and something you could provide - with training, credentials, and all – as part of a recognized professional field. With this newfound codification came an air of legitimacy and authority that previous independent self-help projects had lacked, making the field more inviting and marketable than ever before.

Of course, none of this was legally regulated, which itself would prove crucial to the field’s survival. Therapists and counselors had been providing the sort of guidance life coaches promised for years, but those professions required schooling and licensing overseen by the state. The higher average fees and legal restrictions made traditional jobs in the field of psychology unappealing to the burgeoning demographic of coaches looking to make a living off of quick results and spurious concepts of positive self-talk interspersed with seminar jargon. The lack of legal oversight made the life coaching field accessible to all in a way that the well-regulated fields of counseling and therapy, for better or worse, were not.

Life coaches became to the field of psychology what nutritionists had been to dietetics - a competing pseudo-legitimate profession freed from the legal restrictions and accountability of their legitimate counterparts. As a result, life coaches could preach and promise something no legitimate profession could - the complete and utter transformation of every aspect of your life through a change in attitude alone. 

How To Win Cash and Influence People

In all fairness, approaching self-help as a means of personal betterment is not an inherently flawed practice. At the most basic level, self-help takes the idea that some of the problems we experience in our lives are of our own making and that changing how we think about ourselves and our relationships, and adjusting our behaviors accordingly, can lead to greater happiness and success, while at the same time suggesting that with the right support we are capable of guiding ourselves through parts of this process.

It is, of course, plainly true that some of our problems are self-imposed and that we have as individuals have some degree of control over the potential for our lives to improve. If, for example, you go around kicking people for no reason, your life will almost certainly improve if you stop doing that. If you think you're doomed to fail and so never try anything new, the chances of your life spontaneously improving are slim. It's a perfectly reasonable and even healthy idea to suggest that there's value in taking agency over our own betterment and recognizing the ways in which we may be impeding our well being.

The twelve step program developed by Alcoholics Anonymous, for example, was established through the merging of particular self-help principles with the religious concept of an interventionist deity as a way to address alcoholism. Whatever your feelings about the twelve step program, its usage in conjunction with the creation of community spaces has been one of the more effective means of supporting people with addictions in their recovery without promising anything greater than that. 

This is generally the full scope of what self-help can offer: A means for addressing the struggles in our lives, and opportunities in our lives, that are psychological and interpersonal in nature. It's not the only means for approaching these things, or even the best, it's simply one of a number of options available. 

It is here where Dale Carnegie, Est, Tony Robbins, and the rest of modern self-help culture differentiate themselves from what amount to fairly reasonable and understandable axioms about the nature of the human experience.

With their help, self-help has become an $11 billion industry and in the US, coaching has become a billion dollar industry unto itself. Everyone knows someone who has a self-help book, sees a life coach, or swears by a particular seminar - belief in psychological bootstrapping as the secret to material well being is culturally ubiquitous. 

It's in this context, of decades of grifting and charlatanism creating a powerful and lucrative industry whose core tenets make it immune to outside critique, that Tony Robbins' did what he did and said what he said. It isn't that Robbins distorted the lessons of the history of self-help culture or coaching mentality, it's that he was explicitly applying that philosophy to sociopolitical matters in a way highlights the apolitical, or even anti-political, foundations of self-help. 

Where the root ideology of self-help offers a method for self-guided self-improvement, modern self-help culture suggests that externally guided self-improvement is the key to bettering the material circumstances of your life. The practices, ideas, and perspectives offered by coaches and self-help books can be genuinely useful, but their usefulness cannot replace or overcome the material political and economic realities that the self-help movement downplays, disregards, and even fights against.

Self-help culture as a solution for economic and social liberation relies on a refrain that maintains an unspecific, apolitical, and ahistorical conception of society. Are you struggling financially because of generational poverty and structural racism or is that just a story you tell yourself?

Systemic injustice and hardship are re-framed through the lens of personal narrative, or outright attacked as excuses through the cynical interrogation of one's own integrity. In modern self-help, the self is everything and the external is an endlessly malleable construct in service of the self - failure is simply a matter of not manipulating that construct effectively.

Part of why this approach has proven so enduring is because none of us perceive the world wholly objectively or in perfect integrity with ourselves. As a result, there is always room for self-improvement and there is always room to lay responsibility for life's hardships at the foot of the individual. It’s not difficult to point out times where if someone had thought or behaved differently, a given situation may have gone better. The key then is to convince people that improving the outcomes of such situations is the ideal path to a better life and that these moments of personal agency are more important than larger communal, or political, struggles and opportunities.

Using basic psychological principles, educational philosophies, and lifestyle tips, self-help advocates are able to convince others that the modest personal improvements one experiences from adhering to their recommended practices and mindsets are an indication that all struggle is within the power of the individual to overcome. Of course, this process can be difficult and since there is always more to learn, it is essential that one be willing to pay cold hard cash for continued access to the necessary advice, guidance, and support that self-help speakers, writers, and coaches is offering. The key to a better life is inside you, but only these particular outsiders can help you find it.

Self-help is guided self-improvement as directed and defined by the interests and goals of those profiting off of the process.

And yet, what about the results? Many people swear by the self-help as having saved their lives or brought them to a better place. Even if self-help could be seen as a bad faith placebo or con job, does it really matter if it leads to genuinely good outcomes?

In much the same way as a malnourished person will feel better after a period of sufficient nourishment, so, too, do many people experience psychological improvements after engaging in various forms of self-help. It's not that their lives have been "transformed" and they're now on a ceiling-less trajectory toward self-actualization, it's that they've been taught fundamental life skills they previously lacked and the shift from inadequate to adequate feels, and is, revelatory.

Sufficient nourishment, however, isn’t the only factor in maintaining good health, nor are all health outcomes within our control – an accident that leaves you with a broken limb or being born with a chronic illness is not a hardship that can be transformed through eating better. In the same way, self-help is just developing the skills for managing and caring for oneself in the process of becoming a better more whole person, it’s not a secret cure to all of life's ills.

Gaining the skills to reflect on your life and differentiate between narrative and truth is a normal and healthy part of securing the basic building blocks to being an emotionally accountable adult. Society doesn't always provide those tools and gaining them is important, however that occurs, but they aren't a panacea and they have limits of their own.

Crucially, the supposed power of self-help to improve lives has little to do with any of this. If the positive outcomes attributed to self-help were largely about emotional maturity or learning how to reflect more clearly on one’s own potential and limitations, that would be one thing. But the value of self-help has long been argued to be of even greater significance. Proponents of self-help and coaching claim that these practices can produce economic stability, social mobility, and even ameliorate mental health struggles.

Self-help, then, is often credited with achieving political outcomes through apolitical means, material outcomes through immaterial practice. It’s here where it becomes impossible to divorce whatever positive impacts come from modern self-help culture with the overarching consequences of convincing people those outcomes mean they should be less politically engaged and more psychologically libertarian.

Still, while self-help ideologues and practitioners do everything they can to ignore or downplay the significance of politics and external factors in one’s well being, the movement’s own success has been deeply entwined with the political and economic circumstances under which it developed.

The Political Reality of Being Apolitical

From the post-depression context providing for the success of How To Win Friends… to the flourishing of Est in the wake of the identity revolution of the 60s to the economic bubbles of the 80s and 90s and even the recent pseudo-progress in the wake of the Great Recession, self-help narratives have resonated the strongest during times of great hardship when the middle and upper classes have perceived there to be surges in economic and political opportunity.

If material conditions are, on average, improving because of macro-level policy developments, what better time to sell people on the notion that the gains they’re experiencing are actually to do with the mindset and beliefs you’ve cultivated in them through coaching/speaking/seminar-ing?

Far from a world where our personal choices and mindset determine the state of our well being, we live in a world where the state of our well being is frequently dictated by forces far outside our direct control.

“You may not be able to control what life throws at you, but you can choose how to respond,” say self-help supporters, appropriating a relatively benign maxim that speaks less to the tangible effects of material inequity and structural restraint than it does to one's emotional temperament and outlook on life. (Even here this doesn't entirely hold up as science increasingly presents links between material stressors and mental illnesses like depression and anxiety, as well as demonstrating that the cognitive impacts of poverty are tantamount to going without sleep. Sometimes even our choices of emotional response are limited by our circumstance).

The self-help concept that our ability to control our reactions is tantamount to having control over our entire well being is like saying climate breakdown isn't the problem, the problem is how we respond to the weather. If only we could learn to embrace 100 year floods we would see that climate breakdown isn’t actually the crisis we’ve been seeing at as all along.

Despite what self-help culture says, for the most part, we are less the architects of our lives than we are interior decorators working on a budget. To the degree that we can control our emotional/psychological responses, embracing a narrative that our well being is entirely within our control as individuals is does little support collective action for systemic change - the only reliable means for changing political and economic circumstances - to say nothing of what it does to erode community bonds and a sense of connection and appreciation for our relationships.

But then, greater community cohesion, political justice, and more curious and connected relationships have never been the goal of self-help.

Life coaching and self-help as a response to material stressors has always constituted palliative care: better to alleviate the symptoms of material struggle through re-configuring our perceptions of our circumstances than to attempt to address the source(s) of our struggle as there is nothing there that can be done. (Naturally, the self-help rebuttal would be, “We are addressing the source of struggle because the source is internal”).

The core ideology goes something like this, “Material circumstances may change, but you can’t control those conditions, all you can do is control your responses to those conditions.” It begins by taking a simple axiom – we can only control ourselves – and uses it to suggest that the limits of our control should define the scope of our values and pursuits. If we can only control ourselves, then that’s all we should be focusing on (because, of course, control is the most important thing).

This belief is then used to argue for the practice of addressing material struggle through individualized goals. We should tailor our ambitions solely to our own emotions and our “hero’s journey” so that our definition of success becomes primarily about our own well being, not our community’s or that of our relationships. In this context, personal achievement is the greatest measure of a life well lived. The more energy one spends focusing on oneself, the better.

Most important of all in this context, material well being is presented as secondary to one’s mindset – as long as you’re happy, you’re okay. And since happiness is “a state of mind,” you can choose to be happy regardless of the material conditions of your life. Embrace an ontological Stockholm Syndrome to lessen the tensions around systemic exploitation and injustice and then you'll feel happy regardless of the outcome.

The value of being able to find resilience or hope in dire situations, or of learning to find happiness during periods of struggle, is taken to the extremes and used to cultivate an ambivalence about the world as a whole. If you can learn to separate your happiness from the well being of others or from the well being of the world, then you no longer need to care about what happens to anyone but yourself.

While this de-politicizing philosophy has been sold to audiences in countless different settings and context, it is particularly effective with audiences largely compromised of people whose major challenges in life are self-induced and who lack the self-reflective capacity to resolve those issues without outside guidance. Market to people who lack material struggle, direct them to resolve their surface-level psychological issues through positive self-talk, then use their testimonies of newfound jubilation as evidence that your practice works to change lives.

This is not about personal development as much as it is political hospice. Protect your moment-to-moment happiness at all costs. Whatever you do, do not organize around shared political goals, where in doing so you may struggle or experience hardship for the sake of greater justice and equity. You must always orient yourself around bespoke personal projects and embrace the present political context as full of possibility for happiness such that nothing need change for you to live a good life, or for change to center around your self-determined emotional needs.

Far from being curative or even stabilizing, this approach of presenting basic life management skills as a solution for all life’s struggles amounts to building an economically and socially predatory house of cards predicated on a false conception of individual agency and structural reality.

In fairness to coaching and self-help seminars, they almost always come with an ontological disclaimer: they don’t explicitly promise to directly alleviate our material stressors, they simply promise to “transform” our sense of possibility so that we cease to place limits on ourselves and are thus able to overcome whatever barriers are holding us back. Our material situation will improve, they say, but only if we follow their advice properly. If our situation fails to improve it is because we have not fully embraced their practices yet.

Coaches and self-help organizations are quick to point out that they aren’t substitutes for therapists or other kinds of specialists and that coaching can’t replace the need for other types of care. But this is like the warning on spurious bottles of medicine that says, "This product is designed to boost happiness and well being*. *These statements are not supported by any scientific studies or regulating body of government.” It’s a concession to legal protections that runs counter to every other component of their marketing and branding. Self-help promises a cure all, even if the fine print says otherwise.

No Quick Fixes

If you convince people that there is one set of solutions to life’s struggles, and that those solutions are entirely about focusing on yourself, you drive people away from genuine connection and community and toward a single-minded devotion to practices and beliefs that undermine larger political and social movements. It turns the very real and very complicated struggles of the present human experience into a semantic and narrative struggle where the real hurdle is our perception and the path forward is about allowing ourselves to see our limits as possibilities.

But the “limits” of mental illness are not “transformed” by re-imagining “life’s possibilities” - they’re “transformed” through a carefully managed combination of strong relationships, therapy, community support, and/or medication. The “limits” of structural racism aren’t due to a failure to see the “possibilities” of one’s circumstance and they aren’t solved through a $500 weekend intensive or Skype calls with someone asking you if your inability to pay your rent is true or if it’s just a story you’re telling yourself.

These sorts of limits – societal, structural, biochemical, etc. - cannot be divorced from our experience of hardship in our daily lives. They’re not merely contextual decorations that we have been conditioned to believe are important, they’re tangible components of our existence that have real and lasting effects on our well being. While challenging our perspective and improving our capacity to self-reflect can better our experience of our lives - and indirectly lead us to making changes that might better our material circumstance - those shifts alone cannot transform the total conditions of our existence the way many coaches and self-help guides promise they can.

As people living within unjust systems facing material struggles and oppression, we are taught by coaches and self-help books that we are patients with imaginary ailments and it’s up to us to see through our self-imposed maladies and learn to thrive within whatever environment we are in. But our circumstances and environments are not natural nor are they intractable – they are systems deliberately created and maintained that likewise can deliberately be altered and overcome. Moreover, these structures can only be altered and overcome when those living under, and within, them become organized around change and a commitment to something better.

Political history is the history of oppressed peoples and marginalized groups fighting for their humanity and making strides toward justice by challenging the fundamental structures that constrain their humanity. The life coaches and self-help gurus that gain followings in times of political and economic struggle instead begin from the premise that any desire to change these systems should be suppressed lest we “burn out” on resisting our own oppression. We should instead embrace our lives for what they are and view the material conditions of our circumstances as simply a matter of fortune or even simply perspective, with our primary responsibility being to embrace a mindset of satisfaction with our lives, ignoring concepts of power, history, and social context.

A generous interpretation of these professions would be that these are well-meaning efforts by people simply trying to help others cope with the enduring hardships of living under late-capitalism and predatory globalization.

But one need only look to the ideas and attitudes expressed by superstar self-help expert Tony Robbins to recognize that this work is often the domain of opportunistic sophists and grifters looking to exploit the desperation of people at their most vulnerable for their own financial gain. There is, after all, a reason why these self-help seminars and coaching retreats price out people living in poverty - presumably the people who would benefit most from said seminars and coaching, if they could actually deliver on what they promised. You don’t get rich giving free talks and discounted sessions.

Which brings us back to the faulty premise at the core of self-help advocacy. The problem with self-help and coaching isn’t that everything that’s being said is wrong or that there’s no value in personal growth or changing one’s perspective on one’s circumstance. The problem is that the gap between what self-help can offer and what it promises is not only irreconcilable, it’s actively detrimental to community life and the greater political well being of our world. Self-help isn’t bad because guided self-improvement is bad, self-help is bad because it promises the impossible - that through self-work alone we can transcend the boundaries or barriers facing us in all parts of our lives.

At a time when our world and communities need greater connection, cohesion, and humility to survive and flourish, self-help steers us toward disconnection, individualism, and arrogance. At a time when we need politics to mean community organizing, grassroots movements, and collective accountability, self-help tells us that politics is personal, ancillary, and detached from our immediate well being. And at a time when the strength of our relationships and ties to not just humanity, but all life, would deeply benefit from improving our ability to see ourselves clearly and work on our personal growth, the self-help movement has weaponized these valuable pursuits in service of capitalist greed and individual glory.

If the platonic ideal of the self-help movement is Dale Carnegie - a straight white able bodied man who became a millionaire telling people to buy his book so they could become millionaires too - then it should be no wonder that the self-help movement has little good to offer a sexually, racially, ability, and gender diverse world on the brink of climate breakdown resulting from economic and political inequality fueled by the ideological leanings and beliefs of the wealthy, powerful, and excessively self-confident.

We are, ultimately, a part of a living world - our well being connected and entwined with that of all living things around us. There are ways that we can sometimes make life harder on ourselves and ways that we can sometimes help ourselves do better. But there will always be ways that our environment hurts us and our community helps us and the natural world cures us and our economic systems deprive us. Who we are, what it means to be “well”, and how we improve is inseparable from our connections to the world. There are legitimate lessons that can be learned through the lens of self-help, but nothing self-help offers can replace the impact our relationships, our community, and our material circumstances have on our lives.