Sham Read online

  Another cultural signpost: A fair percentage of these book-buying transactions take place at the five thousand New Age bookstores now spread throughout the United States. (Industry sources thought the New Age trend had peaked a few years ago, when the number of stores hit four thousand.) Thus it should come as no surprise that the fastest-growing self-help sectors are also the softest and least utilitarian. Sales of inspirational, spiritual, and relationship-oriented programs and materials constitute a third of overall SHAM dollar volume and are tracking upward. The more brass-tacks stuff—business and financial materials, tactical training—constitute 21 percent and are tracking down. Americans seem to think it’s more important to get along than to get ahead.

  For today’s budding self-help star, the usual progression is to parlay one’s pseudoliterary success into a thriving adjunct career on TV or radio, on the lecture circuit, or at those intensive multimedia seminars known to the industry as “total immersion experiences.” According to Nationwide Speakers Bureau founder Marc Reede, whose specialty is booking engagements for sports celebrities, “personal-improvement experts” account for no small part of the 9,000 percent increase in membership in the National Speakers Association since 1975. Just the top dozen speakers grossed $303 million in 2003; their fees generally ran between $30,000 and $150,000 per speech. More than a decade after her ethereal book A Return to Love dominated best-seller lists, Marianne Williamson’s personal appearances still sell out as quickly as Springsteen concerts. Mass-market single-day presentations by Tony Robbins must be held in basketball arenas and convention centers. He attracts upwards of ten thousand fans at $49 a head—still a bargain-basement price for salvation when compared to his weeklong Life Mastery seminar at $6,995. “You have to have something for all the market segments,” Robbins once told me. “You can’t ignore the folks who can only afford a quick dose of inspiration.” By 1999, more than a decade of having something for all market segments had paid off big-time for Robbins; Business Week pegged his annual income at $80 million.

  It was the lure of such lucre that sparked the mainstreaming phenomenon among Hopkins, Ziglar, and other training specialists from fields closely allied to sales and motivation. Ziglar, the author of arguably the most successful “crossover” book ever written, See You at the Top, now preaches to thousands of eager disciples at his sky’s-the-limit tent revivals. (Herewith a free sample of the indispensable advice Ziglar offers to husbands: “Open your wife’s car door for her.” And, as an added bonus, a bit of all-purpose wisdom: “You have to be before you can do, and you have to do before you can have.”) Suze Orman followed Ziglar’s lead as well as his advice and soared to the top: Starting with a background in institutional finance, she mastered the art of talking about money in a way that sounded as if she was really talking about “something more meaningful.” She then threw in a dollop of spirituality for good measure and became a touchstone for millions of women who’d always felt unwelcome at the financial party.

  A truly hot SHAM artist may franchise himself. Relationships guru John Gray presides over just a handful of the estimated five hundred monthly “Mars and Venus” seminars that bear his imprimatur. The rest he entrusts to a cadre of handpicked stand-ins who can parrot his kitschy trademark material. And then there are the barnstormers, like the aforementioned Peter Lowe, who took the seminar industry to another level by packaging a number of speakers into themed motivational road shows. His evangelical tours teamed an improbable rotating cast of eclectic presenters, ranging from former United Nations ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick to actor Edward Asner to professional football coach Mike Shanahan. They also featured a formidable, at times almost overwhelming, menu of ancillary products.

  Ah, the ancillaries. All major seminarists reap a substantial added windfall from their so-called ancillary products: the $10 workbooks, the $19 videos and DVDs, the $49 series of CDs and cassettes for the car, to give you that all-important motivational jolt during the commute to work. To keep the good vibes flowing once you’re ensconced at your desk with your misanthropic boss hovering over you, there are the inspirational trinkets, like those $29 paperweights engraved with uplifting slogans. Robbins occasionally takes time out from his usual seminar patter to hawk unrelated products—like QLink, a pendant that, he says, will protect you from cell-phone radiation, electromagnetic pulse, and other types of harmful ambient energy. The pendant costs anywhere from $129 for the bare-bones model to $839 for a version finished in brushed gold—the perfect complement for one’s newly gilded self-image. Tom Hopkins, at one time the unquestioned dean of trainers in the field of real-estate sales, now depends on his low-cost success seminars to generate sales of his ancillary goods. The modest fee for the seminar is Hopkins’s loss leader for an array of high-margin products.

  Topping it all off are the miscellaneous do-it-yourself “personal-enhancement” products and “revolutionary new technologies!” sold via infomercial. Dale Beyerstein, a philosophy professor who has written extensively on pseudoscience, argues that the customary formula calls for taking a modicum of legitimate research and “piggybacking” onto it—that is, extending and misapplying its conclusions in a way that’s just plausible enough to skirt criminal sanctions by the Federal Trade Commission or the U.S. Postal Service. The hubris of some of these pitches—not to mention the contempt for the consumer—almost defies description. For a while during the 1980s, a company called Potentials Unlimited was selling subliminal audiotapes to cure deafness.

  Which begs the question: What has America gotten in return for its $8.56 billion investment?

  The answer: There is no way of knowing. So much money, so few documented results.

  Yes, SHAM gurus have no trouble producing the obligatory testimonial letters, the heartrending anecdotal stories of women who found the courage to leave abusive men or men who found the courage to face up to the demons within. But in any meaningful empirical sense, there is almost no evidence—at all—for the utility of self-help, either in theory or in practice. There’s only one group of people we can prove benefit from the books: the authors themselves.1

  For example, as Martin Seligman, a past president of the American Psychological Association, told Forbes in 2003, though some of Tony Robbins’s preachments may be worth listening to, they remain altogether untested—despite the unambiguously rosy claims made for Robbins’s material and the quasi-scientific pretense of the material itself.

  Actually, that’s not quite true. A growing body of evidence challenges SHAM’s ability to do what it says. For one thing, despite all the talk of personal empowerment, limitless potential, and a world in which glasses are always at least half full, Americans have become ever more dependent on chemical modification. Almost four decades after Thomas A. Harris’s landmark self-help tract I’m OK—You’re OK, we live in a culture in which some of the most profitable products made are named Prozac, Paxil, and Xanax. Evidently a great many Americans don’t think they’re all that “OK.” In the final analysis, it’s not the thousands of seminars or millions of books with their billions of uplifting words that Americans seem to count on to get them through the day. It’s the drugs.

  That’s no great shock to Archie Brodsky, a senior research associate for the Program in Psychiatry and the Law at Harvard Medical School. “Psychotherapy has a chancy success rate even in a one-on-one setting over a period of years,” observes Brodsky, who coauthored (with Stanton Peele) Love and Addiction. “How can you expect to break a lifetime of bad behavioral habits through a couple of banquet-hall seminars or by sitting down with some book?”

  Brodsky alludes to twelve-step recovery meetings, which don’t often feature celebrity speakers or hordes of pricey ancillary products but do have a strong and loyal following nonetheless. The twelve-step movement developed as an outgrowth of Alcoholics Anonymous and now encompasses programs for a staggering range of problems, whether compulsive shopping, or loving too easily or too much, or overeating. These days, if it’s a problem for someone,
somewhere, it’s a treatable disorder. And a support group likely exists for it. At the apex of the Recovery phenomenon, in 1992, American Demographics reported that twelve million Americans belonged to at least one of the nation’s five hundred thousand support-group chapters.

  Americans for some reason assume that Recovery groups work, when in fact there is little or no hard evidence of their ability to help people recover from anything, as this book will document. Consider, for the time being, this one fact: The results of a 1995 study conducted by Harvard Medical School indicated that alcoholics have a better chance of quitting drinking if they don’t attend AA than if they do. Americans seldom hear about such results, in part because AA and its sister organizations have actively opposed independent research that could test their programs’ effectiveness.

  The dearth of good science can be recognized throughout SHAM. In her revealing book PC, M.D.: How Political Correctness Is Corrupting Medicine, psychiatrist Sally Satel complains bitterly about the faulty (or nonexistent) research underlying the nostrums and home remedies that contemporary SHAM artists preach. “We have a generation of healers who unflinchingly profess to know everything that’s good for everybody,” Satel told me in an interview. “They make no distinctions between science, pseudoscience, and pure fantasy. They liberally dispense their dubious prescriptives as if they’d been blessed by an NIH double-blind study.” Tony Robbins, for example, contends that diet is an integral part of a successful lifestyle—not an eyebrow-raising notion, except that he goes on to counsel his audiences on the “energy frequency” of popular foods. The energy frequency of Kentucky Fried Chicken, for example, is “3 megahertz.” Satel knows of no such food term and has no idea what it could possibly mean in any case. I checked with Yale University’s Dr. Kelly Brownell, one of the nation’s foremost experts on diet and nutrition. He was similarly mystified.

  This is not to say that all SHAM rhetoric is patently false. In fact, there are whole categories of self-help precepts that can’t possibly be disputed. That’s because they’re circular—the guru who espouses them is saying the same thing in different ways at the beginning and end of a sentence. The conclusion merely restates the premise.

  Here’s a perfect illustration, from Phil McGraw’s New York Times number one best seller Self Matters: “I started this process by getting you to look at your past life, because I believe that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. That being true, the links in the chain of your history predict your future.” The “that being true” makes it sound as if McGraw is rousing to some profound conclusion. But he isn’t. The part after “that being true” merely repeats what he said in the first sentence, with slightly altered wording. It’s not a conclusion at all. It’s what logicians call a tautology. I am reminded of Larry Bird’s priceless response to an interviewer who besieged the Indiana Pacers executive with statistics. The reporter demanded to know what Bird made of them and what they implied about the Pacers’ chances in an upcoming play-off series. “All I know,” Bird replied wearily, “is that we win 100 percent of the games where we finish with more points than the other guy.”

  Other SHAM kingpins, or ambitious pretenders, achieve a certain contrived plausibility by using puffed-up, esoteric-sounding jargon. In August 2004, Dan Neuharth, PhD, the author of Secrets You Keep from Yourself: How to Stop Sabotaging Your Happiness, told the readers of the magazine First for Women that “avoidance is a knee-jerk response to a core fear that threatens your ego.” Translation: We avoid things we’re really afraid of.

  Far too often, the SHAM leaders delivering these pompous philosophies of life and living have no rightful standing to be doing any such thing. “There’s a tendency on the reader’s part to think these people are unimpeachable authorities speaking gospel truth,” says Steven Wolin, a professor of psychiatry at George Washington University. “That’s hardly the case.” In truth, writes Wendy Kaminer in I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional, the only difference between a self-help reader and a self-help writer may be “that the writer can write well enough to get a book deal.” In Kaminer’s view, the end result is that consumers make sweeping changes in their lives based on “something their aunt or auto mechanic could have told them.”

  By the time the most powerful woman in American media plucked him from obscurity and conferred the Oprah Touch, Phil McGraw had given up on clinical psychology, in part because, he later said, he was “the worst marital therapist in the history of the world.” But McGraw, at least, holds a degree to practice what he now preaches. As we’ll see, others of similar SHAM stature hail from far less convincing backgrounds; they proclaim themselves “relationship therapists” or “dating coaches,” made-up specialties that require no particular licensing yet sound credible, thus duping unsuspecting patrons by the millions. At meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous and other support groups, the leader’s sole credential may consist of his being in recovery from whatever the specific addiction is. Society, again, seems to think this makes good sense. I would ask two questions: Isn’t it possible that fellow sufferers are a bit too close to the problem to lead effectively and impartially? And if your problem was, say, that the electrical fixtures in your house were acting funky, would you really want a workshop taught by some other homeowner who couldn’t get his lights to work right (and who, by his own admission, still had the problem)? Or would you want a trained electrician?

  In today’s SHAM marketplace, individuals who stumbled into celebrity sans talent, or who managed to “conquer adversity” entirely by accident, now collect hefty fees for talking up their experiences as if they’d planned the whole thing out as an inspirational crucible. Get stuck on a mountain for a while, lose some body parts, and presto!—instant motivational icon. I refer to Beck Weathers, the Texas pathologist who lost his nose, his right hand and part of his left hand, and nearly his life in the notorious May 1996 Mount Everest disaster that was chronicled in Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air. Weathers, now in his late fifties, travels the lecture circuit, expounding on the theme of “surviving against all odds.” You wonder, though: How many people live in situations that are truly analogous to what Beck faced up on the mountain? For that matter, what role did any of Weathers’s own actions play in his survival? According to Krakauer, Weathers was like a hapless pinball bounced around the mountaintop for sixteen hours, and he almost surely would have died if others hadn’t helped him down the treacherous slopes at significant risk to themselves, and if his wife had not arranged for a dangerous helicopter rescue. (To be blunt about it, Weathers probably had no business being up on that mountain in the first place, as Krakauer himself strongly implies.) So what do we learn from a Beck Weathers? Tellingly, he informs his admiring audiences that “Everest, in many ways, was one of the best things to happen to me.” At $15,000 per speech, he’s not kidding. Even pathologists don’t make that kind of money.

  The bizarre case of Beck Weathers boldfaces the huge question mark that punctuates so much of SHAM doctrine and its myriad applications. The sitcom Seinfeld, in the famous words of its creator and title character, was a “show about nothing.” Much the same could be said of SHAM. To a disconcerting degree, it is an $8.56 billion social crusade about nothing. It is a religion whose clerics get very, very rich by stating the obvious in a laughably pontifical fashion. As Anne Wilson Schaef, best known for her book Co-Dependence: Misunderstood—Mistreated, informs us in a later work, Living in Process, “Life is a process. We are a process. The Universe is a process.”

  To which a cynic might add: Making airy, asinine statements meant to impress or hoodwink gullible people is also a process.

  NO WAY OUT

  In the summer of 1993 the Los Angeles Times Magazine sent me to Santa Fe, New Mexico, to do a story on the Pecos River Learning Center. Now a part of the vast Aon Consulting network, Pecos River was the brainchild of former NFL cornerback, car dealer, and motivational superstar Larry Wilson; it was the most well regarded of the faddish boot camps then surreally popu
lar among the Fortune 500. Even leading software companies were sending their befuddled, sunshine-averse developers to Santa Fe to climb trees and fall backward off walls into their comrades’ waiting arms—all for about $4,000 a head. Wilson promised that such activities would pay off in esprit de corps, consensus building, and self-reliance. (And how did Wilson reconcile self-reliance and consensus building, two core goals that would seem to be at least potentially incompatible? I asked and got a rambling, obfuscatory 650-word reply that was not usable in my story.)

  The climax of the Pecos River program came with its infamous zip line, a sharp half-mile descent from a rocky cliff to ground level via cable, which participants executed one by one, dangling and sliding like runaway human ski lifts. I stood at the bottom of the line and interviewed the shrieking, hyperventilating outdoor adventurers as they reached terra firma. My most memorable exchange took place with a real-estate salesman I’ll call Eric.

  “You look pretty stoked,” I told him.

  “Oh man,” Eric replied. “That was something.”

  “Pretty exhilarating stuff?”

  “Definitely.”

  “You think it’s gonna help you sell more homes?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “How?”

  This time he had no ready answer. He just looked at me, his breath settling back to normal, his smile giving way to a grimace. I stood there holding my mini cassette recorder aloft in the New Mexico air, which seemed to have chilled considerably. He didn’t want to have to think too hard about the experience. I was raining on his parade. This impromptu interview occurred toward the end of my visit to Pecos River, by which time I recognized Eric’s reaction as a knee-jerk proclivity among participants and staffers alike. Wilson himself, earlier in the week, had characterized the dividends of his program as “largely inexpressible. You sense that something inside you has clicked over. You can’t articulate it. You just have to go with it.”