Sham Read online

  Minutes seemed to pass before Eric finally stammered, “I don’t know how, but I’m sure it will.” And he turned and walked away.

  I don’t know how, but I’m sure it will.

  To its credit, Pecos River, in contrast to most of SHAM, has tried to measure the effectiveness of its programs. Its follow-up studies do appear to show improvement, particularly among larger sales outfits. But most of the quoted results reflect “soft” improvements: “People are willing to make mistakes in order to get where we want to go”; “There’s a greater sense of the big picture”; “The alignment to total operational objectives is focused and condensed and the effectiveness and mood of the team has risen exponentially.”

  You don’t see “hard,” balance-sheet testimonials, such as “Sales jumped 92 percent!” Almost any motivational effort pays short-term dividends in morale. This is common in sales organizations. But the euphoria doesn’t last, and it seldom shows up demonstrably in the bottom line, because the motivational effort hasn’t changed anything specific about the manner in which people go about their jobs. Perhaps workers do feel more inclined to produce when their employers pay attention to them. Perhaps these efforts do cheer people up for a while, and cheery people tend to work harder and longer. So what? The same effect might be achieved by taking the staff out for dinner and drinks once a month. A top sales trainer I knew, Danielle Kennedy, used to argue precisely that. “Don’t blow the budget on high-priced boot camps,” Kennedy liked to say. “Just do little nice things for your people on a more frequent basis. It’s cheaper, and you don’t have to worry about ticks.”

  Clearly many criticisms can be lodged against the organized, entrepreneurial SHAM juggernaut. We’ll be discussing them in detail in the course of this book. But if the movement has a most egregious, overarching sin, it’s the climate of false hope it has unflaggingly promoted and sold to a nation desperate for answers—a nation made vulnerable by that very desperation. I don’t know how, but I’m sure it will. At this moment, across America, millions of hopeful Erics and Ericas are repeating those words in various forms, dutifully droning their affirmations each morning, telling themselves that what they’re saying and doing is bound to make life better, richer, fuller, less scary. And how, exactly, will this wondrous transformation happen? What is the mechanism, the link between their self-talk and the course their lives may take? (And while we’re on the subject, what if the folks they hope to beat out for that promotion are also home repeating affirmations of their own?) Never mind! Those are the questions SHAM artists teach you never to ask, because to even entertain such doubts reveals a negative attitude, and lord knows you can’t achieve anything in this life without your positive mental attitude. Unless, that is, you’ve entrusted yourself to a guru who’s selling Victimization. In that case, you’re supposed to think ill of yourself. And somehow, by accepting the fact of your powerlessness, you’ll gain the upper hand in life. Got it?

  So stop asking. Just keep repeating and affirming, and buying those books, and watching those shows, and writing those checks for all those seminars—and when you get there, by gosh, remember to buy that gold-plated pendant!—and one day we’ll all meet in the Kingdom of Happy. Over meatloaf, if you like.

  PART ONE

  THE CULPRITS

  1

  HOW WE GOT HERE—

  WHEREVER HERE IS

  If you’re reading it in a book, folks, it ain’t self-help. It’s help.

  —Comedian George Carlin

  As a concept, self-help is no Tony-come-lately.

  The term self-help was not coined as a synonym for psychobabble. It has a long and rich tradition of usage in connection with far more reputable practices in the realm of law. Legal self-help refers to a raft of situation-specific remedies available to a complainant directly—that is, without involving lawyers or even courts. This facet of American jurisprudence, in marked contrast to the type of self-help this book mostly tackles, has always been about action, not words. Remedies of this nature are formal step-by-step procedures designed to bring about lawful satisfaction for the individual. Properly handled, they enjoy full courtroom standing, should they later be challenged by those on the receiving end. Some of America’s most familiar legal instruments include self-help provisions. Depending on the state in which you live, your auto loan may contain a clause that stipulates your banker’s right to simply come out to your driveway and retrieve your car the minute you fall into arrears on payments.1 That is legal self-help.

  Some of the earliest self-help books were written in this vein. In “300 Years of Self-Help Law Books,” a fascinating piece for the Web site of the legal publisher Nolo, Mort Rieber tells us that as early as 1784 the book Every Man His Own Lawyer was already in its ninth edition here in America, after original publication in London. Every Man, writes Rieber, was touted as “a complete guide in all matters of law and business negotiations for every State of the Union. With legal forms for drawing the necessary papers, and full instructions for proceeding, without legal assistance, in suits and business transactions of every description.” The book may have been one of the self-help industry’s first best sellers. According to Rieber, Every Man’s author, John Wells, states in his introduction that the first edition “was prepared and presented to the public many years ago and was received with great favor, attaining a larger scale, it is believed, than any work published within its time.” So-called layman’s law was a hot publishing genre. Rieber reports that from 1687 to 1788, every law book published in America was intended for use by laypeople, not lawyers.

  Even in psychiatric settings, self-help didn’t, and doesn’t, always refer to the softer, frothier stuff of Drs. Phil and Laura. Serious-minded clinicians use the term to describe efforts by mentally or emotionally impaired patients to live independent, productive lives. A sizable contingent of the psychiatric industry is engaged in this cause, and legitimate practitioners bristle at the pejorative ring the term self-help has acquired in recent decades.

  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 ninety-nine 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.”)

  It 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.

  A WORLD OF VICTIMS

  Victimization.

  Some readers, especially recent arrivals to the self-help arena, might be surprised to see that term associated with the movement. The most visible and successful proponents of today’s self-help are not out of the Thomas Harris mold. Dr. Phil McGraw, Tony Robbins, and their various imitators spend little time wringing their hands over the childhood traumas that leave one ill equipped for coping with life. They more closely resemble Dale Carnegie and Norman Vincent Peale, who, long before it became an army recruiting slogan, were essentially screaming, “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.

  But above all, Victimization thrived because there existed a ready-made template for reaching out to—and inside of—people. It was a template that already enjoyed some respect, one that, the movement’s leaders soon realized, could be cloned and applied to almost any problem. It offered not just explanations but also the precious hope of recovery from whatever ailed or troubled you. That template was the twelve-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA).

  The twelve-step approach spawned an entire submovement—Recovery—that has profoundly influenced not just SHAM but society as a whole. The specific twelve steps are generally credited to Bill Wilson (the much-mythologized “Bill W.”), a salesman and contemporary of Dale Carnegie who in 1935 cofounded AA with a proctologist/surgeon, Robert (“Dr. Bob”) Smith. Wilson was an interesting character—among other things, an inveterate spiritualist who fancied Ouija boards and regularly conversed with the dead. After starting AA, Wilson and some of the organization’s early members codified the steps of Recovery in the book Alcoholics Anonymous. With minor variations in nuance as well as some adaptations to fit changing mores, the twelve steps have remained pretty much the same ever since, regardless of the specific problem being “treated.”

  All members of Recovery groups have engaged in the following twelve steps:

  1. Admitted they were powerless over their addiction—that their lives had become unmanageable.

  2. Came to believe that a Power greater than themselves could restore them to sanity.

  3. Made a decision to turn their will and their lives over to the care of God as they understood God.

  4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of themselves.

  5. Admitted to God, to themselves, and to another human being the exact nature of their wrongs.

  6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

  7. Humbly asked God to remove their shortcomings.

  8. Made a list of all persons they had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

  9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

  10. Continued to take personal inventory and when they were wrong promptly admitted it.

  11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve their conscious contact with God as they understood God, praying only for knowledge of God’s will for them and the power to carry that out.

  12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, they tried to carry this message to other addicts, and to practice these principles in all their affairs.

  If you’ve had little exposure to the twelve steps, you may be surprised at the religiosity of the foregoing. In truth, through the years, while the steps have remained fairly constant, Recovery’s “tone” has grown more secular, featuring greater emphasis on a generic “Power” and less overt mention of God per se. This is particularly true of twelve-step programs that originated in the antiestablishment 1960s, as God fell out of fashion and twelve-step impresarios understood that by hewing so closely to the old spiritual line, they risked alienating their target audiences. Some of today’s most “progressive” twelve-steps fudge the issue by arguing that the higher power is something that resides in a person’s untapped “spiritual consciousness.”r />
  But no matter who or what the “Power” is, kneeling before it is integral to the twelve steps. “The overriding message is that your own will is basically what got you into this mess in the first place, which is why you have to surrender it,” Steven Wolin, a professor at George Washington University and a practicing psychiatrist, told me. “In a sense, the argument is that in order to salvage yourself, you have to surrender yourself.”

  Bill W. and his twelve-step program symbolized a revolutionary outlook on a problem—alcoholism—that had long been treated as a character flaw or moral failing. Since a character flaw or moral failing wasn’t normally seen as something you’d “recover” from, like chicken pox, AA’s twelve-step method represented a landmark moment in America’s appraisal of addictions. Despite the twelve steps’ discussion of “defects of character,” the unmistakable implication was that alcoholics had a disease. By the late 1960s, that new way of looking at alcoholism had gained institutional support from both the American Psychiatric Association and the American Medical Association. At this point, all it took to pave the way for the SHAM juggernaut was someone to expand the validity of those assumptions and treatment concepts beyond alcoholics.

  Enter Thomas Harris. Pre-Harris, the tendency to excuse one’s own faults or blame them on others was seen as a character flaw in itself. The particular genius of I’m OK—You’re OK and the books it inspired was that such works broadened the context: Suddenly it wasn’t just alcoholics who were dogged by self-destructive tendencies they could not control or even fully explain. Victimization became socially permissible, if not almost fashionable in certain circles. (If you didn’t confess to being haunted by the demons of your past, you were “in denial.”) If Harris could be believed, almost all of us had something we needed to “recover from.” Thomas Harris took Victimization mainstream.