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If the essence of neoliberalism is an ideological faith in the righteous virtue of individual choice, then self-help books are the true heirs of Milton Friedman. In self-help, the self is all, and “help” consists in convincing readers that there is nothing else. Readers of self-help books, of course, don’t expect to read about politics or society. The genre is about unlocking the key to individual health, wealth, and wisdom, to use the categories from Tim Ferriss’s 2017 *Tools for Titans*. People pick up self-help books to find out how to get ahead in the world we’ve got. If you want to read about how to change the world, you read something else. It’s unreasonable, you could argue, to expect a genre called “self-help” to try to help people other than yourself. But self-help doesn’t just happen to be apolitical. Its rejection of social context and political engagement is explicit and even evangelical. In self-help, you help yourself precisely by refusing to think about societies or structures. So, what’s the problem with giving people a sense of empowerment? Self-help is a $500 million industry; lots of people obviously find self-help books inspiring and...well, helpful. People want to feel that they have control over their lives, and self-help gives them a sense of control over their lives. What’s the harm? The harm is, in a word, neoliberalism. Neoliberal ideology broadly argues that the market, when left to its own devices, chooses winners and losers based on merit. People’s own virtue and drive determine their free choices, and those free choices in turn determine their prosperity or suffering. Collective action to right wrongs or help the suffering under neoliberal ideology is wrong, unfeasible, or some combination of the two. Under neoliberal ideology, as in the world of self-help books, the individual is all. And when you banish politics and reduce the world to the individual, you lose all ability to critique social structures. What’s good is what is good for the individual. That makes it virtually impossible to articulate an ethic beyond “might makes right.” Self-help’s celebration of the wealthy is unpleasant, but its loathing of the poor and unsuccessful is worse. This loathing is generally implicit—but the implication is nonetheless quite strong. If your fate is in your own hands, if you can change your life through sheer willpower, then failing to do so is your fault and your fault alone. In the world of self-help books, poverty, racism, sexism, injustice, physical and mental illness, and simple bad luck don’t exist. Instead, failure is always a form of self-sabotage. http://dollarsandsense.org/archives/2018/0318berlatsky.html _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
