The industry of "personal growth" is a manipulation for reasonable

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Previously, for the sake of success in earthly life, it was necessary to sell the soul, but today you can get by with banknotes. The cult of self-realization, the pursuit of fame, money and "the best version of oneself" has driven the annual turnover of the global market for personal growth training to $ 8.5 billion. The success industry has reached impressive - and catastrophic proportions. How does the market for positive thinking work - and why doesn't it work on its own?

The Founding Fathers of the Science of Success

Many believe that the emergence of a cult of success is directly related to the so-called American Dream, that the American Dream is success embodied in money. However, this statement is far from the truth.

For the first time, the phrase "American Dream" is mentioned in "Epic of America" - a weighty book by James Adams, which he wrote in 1931. In it, the author writes that the people of the United States have "the American dream of a country where everyone's life will be better, richer and fuller, where everyone will have the opportunity to get what they deserve."

This postulate goes back to the text of the Declaration of Independence, which formulates the basic principle of life in America, where every citizen is endowed with "certain inalienable rights", including "life, freedom and the pursuit of happiness."

This pursuit of happiness - and there is the American Dream, and this has always been its beauty - yet happiness is a much deeper and broader concept than the ability to make more money. The creators of the Declaration of Independence - religious people, by the way - understood this very well.

The "American Dream" acquired its pragmatic meaning later, when the United States began to develop rapidly, turning into a land of opportunity, where everyone could get rich if they put in the necessary amount of effort.

America's image of a country of opportunity has been preserved to this day: we all know dozens of stories of famous people who started with a "dollar in their pocket" and then became millionaires. Andrew Carnegie, George Soros, Oprah Winfrey, Ralph Lauren - the list is almost endless.

How to get rich and where is God

Wallace Wattles, born in 1860, became the "founding father" of the science of self-development and the achievement of cherished goals. A native of a modest farm in Illinois, he was educated at an American rural school, where in the elementary school children were taught to read, count and write, and in the middle school they were taught the geometry and history of the United States. Wattles was an addicted person and loved to read: at his own request, he became acquainted with the works of Descartes, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Swedenborg, Emerson and many other philosophers.

All this, as his daughter, Florence later wrote, led Wattles to revise his views on life: he joined the New Thought movement, which was gaining momentum in the second half of the 19th century. The ideological concept of this semi-religious movement was based on one key principle: everything that exists in our world is God or a manifestation of His divine essence.

Human thought is a particle of this divine energy, which means that each individual can use thought as a tool to achieve his own good.

Wattles, who has always had great public ambitions, learned a lot from the teachings of New Thought, and after his defeat in the 1908 elections to Congress, where he was nominated by the US Socialist Party, wrote the book The Science of Getting Rich. It was published in 1910, a year before his death, and shows the significant influence New Thought had on Wattles:

And further:

Here's what he thinks about development:

The Science of Getting Rich was such a colossal success that it made Wattles' name famous throughout the country, and his work influenced many authors of self-help books in the future. Thus, the creator of the acclaimed book "The Secret", Rhonda Byrne, has repeatedly said that Wattles' text inspired her. In addition to her, the book was also praised by Tony Robbins.

When The Science of Getting Rich was reprinted in 2007, it quickly sold 75,000 copies across the United States, becoming a bestseller even 100 years later.

How the cult of success was born

The direct heir to Wattles' ideas was Napoleon Hill, who began work on his book Think and Grow Rich in 1908. According to the legend that he himself told, the start of his work was the desire to conduct a series of interviews with the wealthiest Americans in order to later write a small essay about each and, possibly, find something in common between them. He decided to start with the first billionaire in the history of the United States, Andrew Carnegie, who, according to Hill, was so fired up by his idea that he proposed to develop the project into a "book of success" - that is, after analyzing the life of rich people, make a manual for making money.

Whether this is true or not, it is no longer so important: the main thing is that Hill's book, published in 1937, just like Wattles's work, became wildly popular: by 1970, 20 million copies of it had been sold worldwide. At the same time, of course, he did not say anything fundamentally new: in comparison with the same Wattles, his advice only became even more specific, and the text closer to a real manual.

For example, here are 6 Hill steps that will lead a person to wealth:

• Determine the exact amount of money you would like to have. It is not enough to say, "I want to have a lot of money." Be pedantic. (Below, in the corresponding chapter, it is explained why the number is so important from a psychological point of view.)
• Tell yourself honestly what you are willing to pay for the wealth you desire. (Nothing is free, is it?)
• Schedule the term by which you will already have this money.
• Make a concrete plan to fulfill your desire and start acting immediately, regardless of whether you are ready to realize it or not.
• Write down everything: the amount of money, the time by which you want to have it, what you are willing to sacrifice in exchange, the plan for acquiring money.
• Every day - before bed and in the morning - read your notes aloud. While reading, imagine, feel and believe that the money is already yours.
• By the way, it was Hill who was one of the first to establish a foundation of his name to popularize his own ideas, where specialists trained by him were engaged in teaching people the “science of success” - already in old age, at 80, he also opened the “Academy of Personal Achievements”. Hill is also the author of the famous expression "both poverty and wealth are born in the head", which various gurus and coaches love to repeat today, reproaching the poor for their poverty.

A supporter of the idea that much in our life depends on the power of words was another mastodon of the “school of success” - Dale Carnegie, whose works, it seems, are familiar to almost every person on the planet.

He began his path to fame by teaching people oratory - thanks to him this occupation became so popular in America in the 1930s – 1940s that young people literally dreamed of a chance to go to such classes. Without them, as many thought, it was impossible to break through to a better life. The cult of oratorical courses even seeped into literature. For example, in the play "The Glass Menagerie" (1944), Tennessee Williams writes that the important merit of Jim O'Connor, the promising fiancé of one of the heroines of the work, is precisely the oratory courses he attends - the mother of his potential bride speaks about it literally aspirated.

Unlike his colleagues, who generally advised to set oneself up for good luck by repeating certain "mantras", Carnegie did not limit himself to this and wrote a number of books that are very useful from a purely practical point of view - and what to use them for, he left it up to him to decide to the reader:

During the preparation of his works, he turned to the works of many prominent thinkers of his time - in particular, the same Victor Frankl, who worked a lot with the word, but not from the point of view of a certain “divine energy”, but psychology.

This complete denial of the soul (sorry for the banality) played a cruel joke with him several times: when he wrote the book "Seven Rules for a Happy Marriage", his first wife left him.

And when he began to propagandize the theory that most diseases in a person arise from "twisted thoughts", he was diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease, and many friends and relatives turned away from him, so he died alone: some even argue that the cause of it death is suicide.

However, Dale Carnegie managed to create several imperishable world bestsellers, as well as found the company Dale Carnegie Training, which still successfully exists and operates around the world. If not for him, today store shelves would not be bursting with numerous books on psychology "for dummies", which so cheerfully write countless authors, simply rewriting the works of Carnegie.

From sales to personal growth

In Europe, the fashion for training came after the war: restoring the Old World, America imported many of its habits to the continent. Initially, it was only about professional and financial trainings - so already in 1946 Hans Goldman conducted his first training in Sweden with the self-explanatory title "How to Sell More in Post-War Europe". Well, after the Old World, the whole world pulled up to the new fashion.

Gradually, special trainings were replaced by classes on personal growth: as soon as the development of the economy allowed people to think about something else besides rebuilding their destroyed countries.

By the way, later Hans Goldman became the founder of one of the most famous international training companies - Mercuri International: it was she who first came to the Russian market in the 1990s, where this niche was still not occupied by anyone.

The doctrine of success received a kind of peak - and a new impetus for development - in the 1960s and 1970s, when the research of Martin Seligman laid the foundation for positive psychology. In one experiment, he placed the dogs in cages and, after a strong sound signal, gave the animals a short and weak electric shock. His dogs could not escape, no matter what they did. Seligman then transferred them to other cells, where their activity could save them from an electric shock, but in the new cells they did not try to make any efforts to protect themselves, only whining after a beep in anticipation of a shock.

Seligman, based on this experiment, introduced into psychology the concept of "learned helplessness" - for situations when an animal (or a person) stops trying to improve its life after going through several failures.

Including for the development of confidence in people and other positive qualities, Seligman began to develop the so-called positive psychology. She had to nurture the best qualities of a person - as opposed to the usual psychology, which was engaged in the correction of negative personality manifestations: depression, irritability, etc.

A short time after the birth of positive psychology, first specialists, and then journalists and various popularizing experts started talking from the pages of newspapers and magazines about the benefits of positive thinking, about the importance of a joyful view of the world, about the need to forgive your offenders in the past in order to face the future with confidence. …This view turned out to be so popular that even today, after several decades, having opened any glossy magazine, we will be able to find everything that positive psychology spoke about back in the 1970s: “8 valuable habits of a positive person”, “Think correctly: how to get rid of negative thoughts? "," 5 simple steps to a successful career ", etc.

Following this success, new authors appeared who happily began to reveal the secrets of personal and financial growth to their readers.

Most of these writers see the reason for someone's failure in the person himself, and not in the circumstances around him - in general, it's curious how cleverly the cult of individualism turned against us.

Coaches and training gurus do not give a person a single chance to justify his own failure by circumstances: he is taught that he and only he is to blame for his troubles. So, Marshall Goldsmith, whose works have been translated into 30 languages, writes in the book “Triggers. Form habits - build character :

“We are great masters of scapegoating and we are just as adept at indulging ourselves for our shortcomings. We rarely blame ourselves for mistakes or bad choices, because it is so easy to blame the environment. How often have you heard that a colleague takes responsibility for his mistakes with the words “What a bad luck!”? The guilt is always somewhere outside and never inside."

In this field, it is rather difficult to say something new, so the same Goldsmith, for example, introduced a new term “mojo” and even wrote a whole book about what it is - “Mojo: how to get it, how to keep it and how to get it back if you've lost it."

It is written according to all the rules of such works, it is not in vain that it is bought up like hot cakes: as it should be, it begins with an introduction with gratitude to relatives and friends who demonstrate the overwhelming level of happiness of Godsmith himself. The wife and several children are necessarily “loving”, the staff of the publishing house are “wonderful”, friends are “wonderful”, and the ordinary people who helped Goldsmith with advice are “inspired”. After listing the thanks, the author finally defines a new term that refers us all to the same positive psychology:

Mojo plays an important role in our pursuit of happiness and meaning because it accomplishes two simple goals: you love what you do and you are willing to demonstrate it. These goals form my operational definition:

Mojo is a positive attitude towards what you are doing at the moment, arising within you and spilling out.

From personal growth to capital growth

The books of another popular motivational author, Brian Tracy, also began to enjoy great success in the 1990s and 2000s. As his biography testifies, he was born into a poor family and did not even finish school - he left school to start working as a laborer on a steamer that traveled around the world.

After touring the world, he got a job as a sales specialist in an American firm and soon became its vice president. Along the way, Tracy analyzed his life path and the path of his colleagues, developing principles of success, which formed the basis of many of his future books and seminars.

In 1981, he launched the training project The Phoenix Seminar, and in 1985 his tapes, The Psychology of Achievement, appeared on the market. The course has thundered all over the world, so it is not surprising that Tracy decided to monetize his popularity: he wrote about 60 books, the most famous of which was the book "Get Out of Your Comfort Zone", which sold 1,250,000 copies.

Finally, in the 1990s, another outstanding training guru, Tony Robbins, who all of Russia learned about in 2018, also took off. The prices for his tickets have reached impressive figures - up to 500,000 rubles for the opportunity to personally touch Tony - although in principle he is no different from his predecessors, except perhaps in his charisma. But he is much more aggressive: in one of his promo videos, Robbins convincingly pronounces a phrase that claims to be the slogan of a "brave new world": "Self-development - or death." Sounds threatening.

It is interesting that in the "2000s" and nowadays fame came to such books as "The Secret" by Rhonda Bern, where a person is no longer even required to leave that very comfort zone.

It is enough just to correctly formulate your request to the Universe. Having completed a circle in a hundred years, science, to achieve its own goals, returned to where it started - that is, to the works of Wallace Wattles.

In all fairness, it should be said that training gurus are not the only ones from the West. Guests from the East have also been teaching this since the 1960s – 1970s. The fashion for mysterious and profound yogis today has reached even Russia: for example, last year at Sberbank they were proud of the fact that they invited the notorious Indian sage Sadhguru to their training. He loves to give advice that you certainly can't argue with, such as, "If you don't do the right things, the right things won't happen to you."

Is there something constructive in the idea of self-development

Do not think that all talk about self-development is pure profanation. Many outstanding thinkers have discussed this topic.

In particular, Gustav Jung, with his theory of individualization, saw the importance of a person's striving to achieve the integrity and balance of his self.

To some extent, the successor of his thoughts was Daniel Levinson, who introduced the concept of "dreams", meaning by it the personal development of a person under the influence of his own aspirations. However, the most serious contribution in this area belongs to Abraham Maslow: in his reflections he used a different term: "self-actualization."

According to Maslow, self-actualization can be called a person's striving for the most complete identification and development of his personal capabilities.

It was his research that served as the basis for the future formation of positive psychology, but he himself did not call for an optimistic view of the world to be considered the general norm - he understood that this would be wrong. In addition, the very concept of the norm raised doubts in him: “what we in psychology call 'the norm' is in fact a psychopathology of dullness,” he said.

Maslow was convinced that all people have different goals and values, and therefore, for example, making money cannot be a subject of dreams for every person:

- Abraham Maslow, The Psychology of Being

And further:

- Abraham Maslow, Motivation and Personality

At the same time, Maslow did not at all believe that everyone has the ability to self-actualize - according to his theory, only 1% of the world's population is capable of this. This means that not everyone has the need for endless self-development and some kind of tremendous success.

In his reasoning, Maslow was well ahead of his time. Something his views can be connected with the research of the French philosopher and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who believed that a person, in general, is not bad and he himself understands what position in society he can quite honestly occupy, and which will be "too tough for him." Accordingly, the notorious advice "to get out of the comfort zone" is unlikely to make him happy. He may succumb to it under the pressure of a society obsessed with success, but as a result, most likely, he will only achieve disappointment - he left his comfort zone, but did not get to the new "safe haven".

Who else has criticized positive thinking

Many opponents existed not only among the philosophy of success, but also among its individual epigones. For example, Everett Leo Shostrom was an ardent opponent of Dale Carnegie and even wrote the book "Manipulator", which is popularly nicknamed "Anti-Carnegie".

He pointed out that the eternal movement forward, as well as the perception of the world through rose-colored glasses, leads rather to fatigue and wrong actions, and not to happiness.

Shostrom, in the best traditions of Tolstoyism, called for almost non-action as a means of salvation for a person:

“From childhood, we are fostered with respect for vigorous activity, effort and hard work. However, let's not forget the value of humility and withdrawal of effort, which can certainly be considered a deeply ingrained human quality that helps a person experience great satisfaction. "Withdrawal of effort," or humility, James Bugenthal defined as "voluntary consent without effort and effort, without deliberate concentration and without making decisions." He believes that “stress relief” is the most important prerequisite for actualization”.

Modern training gurus also periodically come under fire. For example, in 2005, Steve Salerno released the book SHAM: How the Self-Improvement Movement Made America Powerless, in which he seeks to expose the training industry with a global turnover of $ 8.5 billion.

He points out that the vast majority of visitors to various trainings then return again and again to the show of their guru in order to experience a spiritual uplift - that is, a person may receive a dose of adrenaline at such performances, but this in no way solves his accumulated problems.

All these tendencies did not go unnoticed by fiction. For example, in 1999 the famous English writer Christopher Buckley published an excellent book called "My Lord is a Broker", full of sarcasm and satire on all kinds of self-development techniques. In the story, the main character, a drunken broker from Wall Street, decides to take a break from the hustle and bustle of a Catholic church. However, even there he is haunted: the temple is on the verge of ruin, and he has to use all his skill to turn the monastery into a prosperous institution. On the way, he also decides to write a book in which he talks about the "seven and a half laws of spiritual and financial growth."

By the way, here are a couple of them:

"An important conclusion that follows directly from the Second Law: IF YOU ARE GOING ON THE WRONG WAY, TURN BACK!"

“The last law, the amendment to the Seventh Law:“The only way to get rich with a book on how to get rich is to write it: “VII 1/2 … OR BUY THIS BOOK”.

Epilogue: we were tired for so long

Not everyone is ready to rush in pursuit of self-realization, and indeed not everyone wants to interfere in these disputes between coaches, training gurus and motivation specialists.

By the end of the second decade of the 21st century, people were tired: “being the best version of yourself” is, of course, great, only in the process of chasing this ideal you can turn your life into a living hell.

And this applies not only directly to self-realization: a revolt against norms and stereotypes began on all fronts: the foundations of even the fashion industry are gradually crumbling, which, it would seem, was the last to give up its positions, supported by the infusion of funds from the beauty industry. However, as one famous poet said, “nothing can be held back - not green on purple, not a triangular neckline of a T-shirt, not a broken edge of an umbrella,” and therefore today body positivity and the cult of “accepting yourself as you are” is triumphant across the planet.

Active supporters of "healthy egoism", who call to spit on the opinions of others and their ideas about success, are gradually emerging all over the world, and their fame is growing rapidly. This time, there are “prophets” in our country: at the end of 2018, a book by psychologist Pavel Labkovsky with the self-explanatory title “I Want and Will” sold around the country in a circulation of 550,000 - an almost unprecedented figure for the Russian market.

Labkovsky led a rebellion against imposed stereotypes, but the ideal that he paints to us is also frightening.

After reading his book, a feeling is created that a person simply cannot have anything more important than his own person - his own “I” rises to an unprecedented height:

Never tolerate from anyone that which is unpleasant to you. Train yourself to immediately talk about what you don't like. After all, any compromise forces you to do what you do not want and do not like. This means it makes you unhappy.

The psychologist's preaching reaches its greatest intensity at the moment when it comes to the meaning of life, which, of course, according to Labkovsky simply does not exist, and in general such thoughts do not come to mind:

Questions about the meaning of being do not arise from a great mind and maturity, but precisely because a person somehow does not live. Some attitudes, complexes, peculiarities of the psyche interfere. Healthy, mentally safe people do not set themselves such questions or rational goals. Moreover, they are not trying to implement them at any cost. They enjoy the emotional side of life! They just live.

So, with a light movement of his hand, Labkovsky sweeps away all philosophers from the table - with their centuries of disputes, searches, reflections - and, it seems, he himself does not understand well what a dubious service he is rendering to people.

It's funny, but this new picture of being, where the human ego is suspended in the middle of a completely meaningless void, is capable of scaring even more than the world of the conventional Tony Robbins and Brian Tracy, in which you want to itch from the constant fear of missing something or not being in time somewhere. The pursuit of elusive success gave life at least some, albeit illusory, fulfillment, and now what remains for all of us - just to live?.. Not so much, if you think about it.