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  All of which begs two questions:

  (1) If self-help is so effective at what it’s supposed to do, then why is there so much evidence that Americans, and the society they inhabit, are so screwed up?

  Some have argued that things would be even worse without self-help; no doubt they imagine a nightmarish world in which every marriage ends in divorce, and crime sprees claim the lives of all teens in any given city on any Friday night. This is not to say that the self-help movement is directly responsible for all the problems around us: Any number of variables have conspired to tear at the social fabric over the past generation. But as we will see in Part Two of this book, SHAM exacerbated some of those variables. And in any case, the self-help movement, if it works, should have been able to make some major areas of human interaction measurably better than they used to be. Wasn’t that SHAM’s founding covenant with individuals and society? Didn’t it promise to make things better? Make America happier? Make life more rewarding and stress-free? That simply hasn’t happened. Which leads to the next question:

  (2) What if it’s actually SHAM that’s screwing people up?

  If SHAM simply induced individuals to waste their money on self-help books and seminars that don’t dramatically change their lives for the better, we as a society wouldn’t really have that much of a problem. Granted, many SHAM artists bear a closer resemblance to con artists; and worse, sources that millions of Americans trust—think Oprah Winfrey and the Today show—lend legitimacy to gurus’ self-help programs. But a close investigation of the self-help movement leads to even more troubling questions about its larger consequences. While social trends arise from a complex set of circumstances, SHAM doctrine has so pervaded our culture—from our schools to our offices to our homes and even to our hospitals—that we have to confront the role it has played in what’s happened in our society since SHAM took root.

  Does it not make sense that a society in which everyone seeks personal fulfillment might have a hard time holding together? That such a society would lose its sense of community and collective purpose? That the self-centered individuals who compose that society would find it difficult to relate to, let alone make sincere concessions to, other self-centered individuals?

  Yet SHAM artists and their apologists refuse to accept responsibility for the collateral damage self-help does to society. That’s no surprise, really, given that they refuse to be held accountable even when they harm the very individual consumers whom they lure in with grand promises of transformation, happiness, and success. Invariably, in fact, they project the blame back on the individual. For example, Zig Ziglar, a seminarist extraordinaire, will tell his audiences, “There’s no immunity to the disease of self-doubt. It’s always in there, waiting to flare up again!”

  Therein lies the beauty of it all, from the guru’s point of view. If SHAM doesn’t transform your life, it’s not because the program is ineffective. It’s because you’re unworthy. Victimization-based formats make this point unflinchingly, telling participants whose lives remain stagnant that they are slaves to their dysfunctions, that they’ll have to invest more effort if they hope to rise above their innate handicaps. And so you go away thinking, Well, maybe the next book or seminar will do the trick. Or the next after that . . .

  Surprisingly, Empowerment subscribers are no better off in this regard. Empowerment preaches that you can achieve whatever you set out to achieve, that success is a function of desire and/or commitment. But there is an inescapable converse: that failure is a function of a lack of desire and/or commitment. In its purest form, Empowerment admits no circumstances that are unresponsive to the human will. Every shortfall in achievement must be accounted for somehow. And if it’s not the program’s fault, or the guru’s fault . . . then whose?

  Whether you’re plagued by inner demons you can never quite exorcise (as Victimization intones) or by your demonstrated inability to “conquer all” (as Empowerment insists you must), you arrive without fail at the same despairing place: the dismal state of woe-is-me-ism.

  2

  FALSE PROPHETS, FALSE PROFITS

  Titans in the field may preach self-reliance, but the self-help industry thrives on repeat business.

  —New York Times

  In a highly entrepreneurial industry that grosses $8.56 billion annually, a comprehensive listing of all the practitioners and pretenders, and their assorted channels of delivery, would be impossible. Consider that trailblazing figures like Dale Carnegie, Napoleon Hill, Norman Vincent Peale, and Thomas A. Harris still play a role in today’s SHAM marketplace, even posthumously. Other significant figures include the seminarist Jim Rohn and the late, great super-salesman Og Mandino, who generate little buzz nowadays except among cliques of true believers but who had as much to do with SHAM’s core rhetoric as Tony Robbins. Mandino’s The Greatest Salesman in the World (1968), despite its parochial-sounding title, examined the whole landscape of human motivation and is another of publishing’s great “crossover” success stories. One also thinks of quirky L. Ron Hubbard and his Dianetics, which posited that all human failure and frustration stemmed from the so-called reactive mind, in which agglomerated pain was stored and then “used against you” later. Despite its shaky scientific foundations, Hubbard’s work spawned not just a New Age movement but also a quasi-religion: the Church of Scientology, conspicuously embraced by A-list entertainment celebrities including John Travolta and Tom Cruise.

  Some SHAM artists enjoyed flashes of brilliance hot enough to rate a mention in the movement’s epidemiological history, though they’ve lost greater or lesser amounts of their luster since they emerged on the scene.

  RICHARD CARLSON. Today, all but the most avid Carlson fans probably wouldn’t know the name, but there’s no forgetting his signature book: 1997’s Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff . . . and It’s All Small Stuff. It wasn’t the first time anyone said it, but Carlson elevated the bumper-sticker banality to a cultural rallying cry. The holder of a PhD in psychology, Carlson had written more than a dozen modestly performing self-help books before he scored big with Small Stuff, which enjoyed a stunning two-year run on best-seller lists. No dummy, he followed it up with Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff for Women, Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff at Work, Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff for Teens, The Don’t Sweat Affirmations, and The Don’t Sweat Guide for Couples. In 2003 he tried something different: What About the Big Stuff?

  DEEPAK CHOPRA. A decade ago, Chopra’s beatific face was everywhere. An endocrinologist by trade, Chopra has been a key figure in the New Age movement since the mid-1980s, but he launched himself to the top of the heap with his 1994 SHAM classic, The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success. Over the next few years the uncommonly versatile guru weighed in on everything from astrology to preventive medicine to spiritually enriching golf. He also sold teas and spices, soothing music, and assorted wellness products, and ran a pricey health spa in California. A powerful literary agent told me that Chopra simply spread himself too thin and “burned out his audience.” Still, his books continue to sell rather well, if not at the level of The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success.

  JACK CANFIELD. Together with his coauthor/editor Mark Victor Hansen, Canfield, a motivational speaker and self-styled godfather of self-esteem, conceived what Time magazine eventually would label “the publishing phenomenon of the decade” for the 1990s: the endlessly segmented Chicken Soup for the Soul book series, now with seventy-two books in print in English alone. Notable recent entries include Chicken Soup for the Horse Lover’s Soul, Chicken Soup for the Prisoner’s Soul, and Chicken Soup for the NASCAR Soul.1 The original book’s manuscript was famously rejected by thirty-three publishers during its first month of circulation alone before tiny Health Communications picked it up. Sales of Chicken Soup books have leveled off somewhat from their initial peaks, but the brand has become an industry in its own right.

  ROBERT FULGHUM. Fulghum is the one-hit-wonder author of All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten (1988), a sweet but forgettab
le paean to minimalism about which the brilliant social critic Wendy Kaminer wrote, “Only people who die very young learn all they need to know in kindergarten.” For a time the book made Fulghum a superstar on the SHAM circuit; he got deals for several subsequent books, none of which quite matched the success of the first.

  A handful of SHAM luminaries, however, have achieved such eye-popping success that they have affected not just the course of the movement but American culture itself. Accordingly, their careers tell us as much about ourselves as they do about them. Two of these megastars, Tony Robbins and Phil McGraw, merit their own chapters in this book. Four others who gained prominence in the 1990s and retained their lofty position into the twenty-first century include radio host and author Dr. Laura Schlessinger, relationship adviser John Gray, author and lecturer Marianne Williamson, and personal financial expert Suze Orman.

  One other observation must be made here. It’s no coincidence that three of the four shot to the top of the heap after being blessed by the person who, though not formally part of the self-help movement, is as responsible as anyone for its ascendancy: Oprah Winfrey. Winfrey’s ability to single-handedly make or break a book (or a perfume, or a hotel, or a vacation destination, or a car line, or a diet, or beef) by now is common knowledge. But few observers have given her appropriate credit (if that’s the right term) for legitimizing self-help in American society. Those whom Oprah smiles upon get the full force of her billion-dollar corporation, Harpo Productions, behind them. They’re granted repeat guest spots on her show, where they can schmooze her 22 million viewers. They’re offered guest columns if not regular bylines in her magazine, where they can put their names and faces and expertise in front of her 2.7 million readers. They get priceless value-added PR when she mentions them in casual conversation with an interviewer or gives them an outright endorsement during the course of a show. They may become adjuncts to her Personal Growth Summit, a Winfrey-sponsored barnstorming spectacular.

  The trajectories of Gray, Williamson, and Orman offer unmistakable evidence of why Time anointed Winfrey one of the most influential people of the twentieth century.

  DR. LAURA—HER WAY

  What to make of a doctor who isn’t a doctor . . . an Orthodox Jew who isn’t an Orthodox Jew . . . a crusader against pornography whose naked come-hither image is splashed all over the Internet . . . a critic of premarital and extramarital sex who’s indulged in both . . . a champion of family values who was so far removed from her own mother’s life that she didn’t even know it had ended till months later?

  All of this self-contradiction exists in one person, the nonpareil “Dr. Laura” Schlessinger.

  Schlessinger rose to fame on a platform of moral clarity, vowing to undo the damage wreaked by SHAM’s Victimization wing, which gave followers an endless supply of self-serving rationalizations to use in excusing dissolute behavior. She told her listeners to take responsibility for what they did and to accept the consequences of their mistakes. She favored adoption, not abortion. She wanted couples to actually marry before having kids, or even having sex, and expected American mothers to assign a higher priority to caring for their children than ensuring they had just the right shoes to wear to work with that new Donna Karan outfit. Introducing herself each day, she would say her name, followed by “and I am my kid’s mom,” an in-your-face reproach to feminism and its contempt for domesticity. Millions embraced her message, which seemed long overdue in postmodern America. And if Schlessinger frequently went overboard in reproving her callers, branding them bums and sluts and pigs and shack jobs—well, who phoned whom?

  But Schlessinger also has become a striking and, in some ways, tragicomic poster girl for everything that’s wrong with SHAM: how its practitioners play fast and loose with the truth, ignore rules they mandate for others, put entertainment value before true helpfulness, and prize their own careers above all else. Moreover, the rise and not quite fall of Dr. Laura Schlessinger underscores how people desperate for solutions—or just a “higher power” to entrust themselves to—overlook untidy loose ends in order to allow themselves to go right on believing.

  Schlessinger’s holier-than-thou persona has taken some serious hits since the spring of 1998, when Talkers magazine, a trade publication covering talk radio, ranked The Dr. Laura Show number one on the airwaves, surpassing even the mighty Rush Limbaugh. In those days an estimated 250,000 listeners tried to get through on her show each week, while another 20 million tuned in to shake their heads over the woes of those who did. Schlessinger’s clout and cachet were such that in 1997, when she opted to sell the ownership of her three-year-old syndicated show, Jacor Communications ponied up a staggering $71.5 million.

  Schlessinger’s books, too, flew off the shelves. At the apex of her popularity she was Amazon.com’s most “preordered” author, thanks to her canny, highly accessible “10 Stupid Things _____ Do to Mess Up Their _____” formula. She followed up 1994’s 10 Stupid Things Women Do to Mess Up Their Lives with 10 Stupid Things Men Do to Mess Up Their Lives, 10 Stupid Things Couples Do to Mess Up Their Relationships, and Stupid Things Parents Do to Mess Up Their Kids (released originally as Parenthood by Proxy: Don’t Have Them If You Won’t Raise Them, the latter a patented Schlessingerism that has won her no friends at the National Organization for Women). Having exhausted the “stupid things” motif, she began writing books more forthrightly linked to her growing absorption in Judaism: How Could You Do That?! The Abdication of Character, Courage, and Conscience and The Ten Commandments: The Significance of God’s Laws in Everyday Life. Then came the children’s books: But I Waaant It! Why Do You Love Me? Growing Up Is Hard, and Where’s God?

  By the time the last few titles saw print, however, America’s most unabashed pop moralist had been humbled by a succession of scandals. The worst was the Internet publication of the nude photos in the fall of 1998, courtesy of radio personality Bill Ballance, the ex-mentor and -lover who gave Schlessinger her start. As harmful as the photos were Schlessinger’s coy efforts at damage control; in a temporary injunction she simultaneously claimed that (a) the woman in the pictures wasn’t her and (b) she owned the copyright to the photos. Barely had that firestorm begun to abate when Schlessinger made a series of on-air comments about homosexuals that left even some opponents of gay rights shifting in their seats. She told one gay caller that her lifestyle was “unholy,” and during later remarks intended to quell the mounting controversy, she described homosexuals as a “biological error.”

  Then came the family tragedy. At the end of a Friday show on December 20, 2002, stunned listeners heard Schlessinger announce that her mother had been found murdered. According to police reports, the seventy-seven-year-old woman, who lived alone in a Beverly Hills condo, had been dead a long time. Granted, Schlessinger had made no secret of their estrangement, which she blamed on her mother’s aloofness. Yet her oft-given admonition to “honor thy father and mother” seemed gruesomely out of sync with the image of Yolanda Schlessinger lying dead for months and her celebrity daughter not even missing her.

  For not a few, the scandals changed the perception of Schlessinger’s over-the-top behavior toward callers, making her sound less like a zealous apostle of good and more like a mean-spirited hypocrite. This would take its toll among the faithful. At this writing her show is syndicated to 300 stations, down from a peak of 471. The unpleasantness also helped derail her TV show for Paramount, which appeared and disappeared in the span of a year. But beyond that, people began to look more closely at Dr. Laura herself. What they discovered has implications for anyone who feels himself falling under the spell of a SHAM guru.

  Among other things, Dr. Laura’s critics learned that she wasn’t even a psychologist. This no doubt came as a shock to the 75 percent of Schlessinger’s audience who, according to a survey reported by the Washington Post in December 1997, “think she is a psychologist, psychiatrist or therapist.” Schlessinger does hold a PhD from Columbia University—in physiology.2 The California Board of Beha
vioral Science Examiners reserves the title “doctor” for medical doctors and professors in the field of clinical psychology, and the use of a doctorate from one field to convey credibility in another is considered unethical in most professional disciplines. Schlessinger received a certification in Marriage, Family, and Child Counseling (MFCC) from the University of Southern California and set up a practice in 1981, but she has not kept that credential active.

  Schlessinger also turned out to be a woman with a morally undisciplined history. She had a habit of stealing the hearts of older authority figures, not all of whose hearts, and other physical paraphernalia, were technically or legally available. While in college in New York she met a dentist, Michael Rudolph, who became her first husband. A few years later she left Rudolph to answer the siren call of Los Angeles. One day in 1974 she phoned Bill Ballance’s radio show and got on the air. A zesty bit of byplay on the relative merits of divorce and widowhood, which Ballance allowed to go on for an unheard-of twenty minutes, led to a weekly slot on his show. It also led the still-married Schlessinger to his bed. (Decades later, at the height of the flap over the nude photos, Ballance gibed that his pet name for her should have been Ku Klux, since she was “a wizard in the sheets.”) Still later, while teaching at USC, Schlessinger met the very married Lew Bishop, who had three dependent children at home. Exit Ballance, enter Bishop. By some accounts their affair was messy; when USC did not renew Schlessinger’s contract, Bishop walked away from his tenured professorship in neurophysiology. He walked away from his wife as well, and he and Schlessinger lived together without benefit of matrimony for at least eight years before making it official in 1985. Bishop became Schlessinger’s business manager, though he showed less enthusiasm for tending to his erstwhile family’s business: His former wife had to go to court to extract child support from him. Further, his relationship with his children deteriorated after his marriage to Schlessinger, who, associates say, sought a clean break from Bishop’s past life, and thus his kids.