Sham

by Steve Salerno

  All in all, the law stands as a prime lesson in what happens when sloppy demagoguery meets over-the-top application of Victimization theory.

  Demagogic overtures to SHAM-bred audiences have a natural tendency to oversimplify the message. “Political message points today aren’t overly nuanced,” one top political consultant told me. “You’ll support a war or you won’t. You favor affirmative action or you don’t. There’s none of this ‘Depending on the course of events in such-and-such . . .’ That’s nuance, and nuance doesn’t sell.” Let’s be clear here: Vulnerability to a simplistic message has little to do with intelligence per se, but rather stems from what one might call conditioned impatience. A constituency accustomed to twelve straightforward steps, or the facile bullet points inspired by SHAM in general, has no tolerance for esoteric rants or multiple shades of gray. The kind of audience that’s ripe for demagoguery expects the same monosyllabic clarity from politicians that it gets from a Dr. Phil, or finds in any of Stephen Covey’s hallowed 7 Habits. During his sometimes embarrassing late-1970s stint as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Young told an interviewer that American jails held “thousands of political prisoners.” Certainly racism figured in the incarceration of some young African Americans, especially then. But that’s not how Young—the nation’s formal emissary to the world’s best hope for mutual understanding—chose to say it. He appealed to a paranoid, simplistic view of the American social divide. Andrew Young used the bullet points. That was demagoguery at its best, or worst.

  SHAM, translated into demagoguery, puts even more pressure on all politicians to reduce the most complex topics to simpleminded sloganeering. Health care, global terrorism, and welfare reform must be distilled to the geopolitical equivalent of “Get real!” This is not helpful in a nation trying to sort through issues that defy a quick fix.

  But what the demagogue mostly stresses is “Get yours!” Demagoguery boldfaces the culture of us versus them that simmers in so many Americans after years of immersion in Victimization theory. There is your side, or there is my side. There is no middle ground that provides a safe haven in this roiling sea of disparate cliques, with its masses of helpless, angry people looking for a lifeline that canny politicos are only too happy to throw.

  And throw, and throw. The rise of the demagogue has created a self-perpetuating class of forever-victims. There was a time when almost all Americans viewed victimhood and oppression as a temporary, transitional status. American values, with their profound sympathy for the underdog, have always favored victim assistance, in part because it was assumed that affected individuals sooner or later found their way back to solid ground. But the emergence of SHAM dogma created a permanent class of victims who keep voting the demagogue, or demagogic party, that reinforces and rewards their victimhood. It’s a never-ending cycle.

  This same cycle rewards poll-based governance, with politicians making crucial decisions based less on what they think is right and more on how their actions might play to politically attractive blocs. In the end, America gets the political leadership it deserves. As Wendy Kaminer writes in I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional, “This cynicism, this willingness of people who feel victimized and out of control to believe anything or nothing, trust everyone and no one, hardly makes for responsible political leadership.”

  In light of the SHAM worldview that presupposes widespread helplessness and the necessity of remedial intervention from on high, I think again of what the esteemed historian Stephen Ambrose once told me about the way Americans used to look at government: “It wouldn’t have occurred to you to think of your station in life in the context of government policy. For better or worse, it was your life, and you owned it.” That has changed in recent decades. The blame for this cannot be pinned on SHAM alone, of course. But there’s little question that Victimization’s early notions of masses of people trapped by their deep-seated shortcomings helped solidify the view of government-as-surrogate-parent. Washington’s job was to ameliorate any gross differences between the “lucky” and “unlucky” children in the great family of man.

  It should surprise no one, then, that politicians increasingly are reaching out to the ready-made victims’ groups—alcoholics, drug addicts, ex-cons, and the like. This was explicitly the case at the Faces and Voices of Recovery Summit 2001, chaired by Senator Paul Wellstone and intended to give substance abusers a louder voice in society.

  The real question seems to be: What took so long?

  THE NEED TO BELIEVE

  Should you ever have occasion to use the master bathroom in my house, one of the first things you’ll notice is a small framed plaque that reads I DON’T JUST BELIEVE IN MIRACLES . . . I COUNT ON THEM.

  I admit to being an accomplice to the plaque’s presence. I hung it for my wife, who professes to believe in miracles and, yes, probably counts on them, no less so because she’s been married to me for three decades and still awaits my rehabilitation.

  These days, as we’ve seen, my wife has tens of millions of cobelievers in salvation via mechanisms that can’t be seen, touched, felt, or even explained in any cogent sense. Of course, I’m no longer talking about religious phenomena here—though in a way I am. Surely parallels exist between religion and today’s SHAM. Surely people expect the same transformative magic from self-help that they once would have expected only from divine intervention. Surely the self-help movement’s evangelical outreach equals, if not exceeds, that of many organized faiths. And surely there are hordes of Americans whose loyalty to Phil McGraw or Tony Robbins bespeaks the same fanaticism that a half century ago might have been found only in places of worship, or maybe at witchcraft covens. You think I overstate? Remember that Marianne Williamson calls her signature program “a course in miracles.”

  As with so many troubling trends, the Self-Help and Actualization Movement took shape around the core of a good idea. After all, what could be so wrong with showing people “how they can use the power of their bodies and minds to make their lives better,” as my former employer Rodale put it? Nothing—on the face of it. But self-help hasn’t lived up to its self-billing, or even its name. In fact, almost by definition, the most successful self-help guru will not help people, or at least will never alleviate their growing dependency on him. If his customers continue to have the problems that brought them to him—or if he can send them home with new ones—they will run to buy the next book in the series, or line up to buy tickets when the guru’s seminar comes to town, reverting to the wide-eyed children they once were, only flocking now to a different kind of circus. That would be bad enough if the problem was limited to those wide-eyed millions who file into bookstores and seminar halls. But as we’ve also seen, none of us today is immune.

  There’s a tendency to heap most of the criticism on Victimization, but in the end Empowerment is just as flawed, just as silly, and maybe even more diabolical. If Victimization teaches us to deny our faults, Empowerment teaches us to revel in them. A New Jersey group, the Overweight Association of America, proclaims in a press release that fat people are sick and tired of being harassed over their appearance and overall physical condition. That is all well and good, but the group goes on to say that its members are happy with the way they are, that they see fat as “a positive” in their lives, as well as part of their collective self-image. They have no plans to change and the world had better learn to take them as they are.5

  Maybe they shouldn’t be exploited or used as props, as was the case on Dr. Phil’s TV show. But should they be selling obesity as a merit badge? Is it a good thing to feel that empowered about a proven risk factor in so many life-threatening medical conditions? Should society really take them as they are, without complaint, when they cause so many added costs for employers and society as a whole? Should their families look the other way while they continue to self-destruct? Is that what we mean by Empowerment?

  In SHAM’s distorted view of life, each of us is his or her own special-interest group. This has contrib
uted to the splintering of society into endlessly smaller segments and subsegments, each divided from others by the “nichiest” of concerns, each pursuing its own private-label happiness.

  Ironically, it may be there—the pursuit of happiness, “reaching for the stars”—where SHAM has most led us astray, as individuals and a nation.

  For one thing, the actualization worldview rests on a logical foundation that would never pass inspection. Today’s champions of uncompromising positive thought portray their endeavor as the rising tide that lifts all boats—a society-wide metamorphosis that’s supposed to enable America en masse to reach new levels of fulfillment and prosperity. That is plainly impossible. Barring a wholesale change in the way the free market (in the broadest sense) operates, we can’t all be chiefs. In any competitive closed system, there must be a loser for every winner. By definition, then, self-help cannot work for everyone, and the more competitive the realm, the more this is so. Two wonderfully optimistic women who both desire the same man or the same job cannot both succeed. So yes, in an abstract sense, if it works—if it works—self-help could conceivably help some of us achieve our goals. But not all of us. Certainly not all the time.

  Mass-market self-help is a contradiction in terms. I have been to sales seminars where the overeager trainer implied to 250 real-estate professionals from the same company that all of them could be the firm’s number one salesperson next year. One of them will be. The other 249 will not. No matter what self-help promises, it is simply reality that in life only a certain number of people can achieve the kind of success that many more strive for. True, we have no way of knowing which of us will achieve that success, so there’s some value in saying “why not me?” But the straight-line progression that the current brand of self-help draws between effort and result—“do this, get that, be happy”—is spurious and misleading. Though we don’t know who will win, we do know that the vast majority of people will lose. (And we don’t really know if winning whatever it is we’re out to win will make us happy—do we? Not till we get there. And sometimes not till much later.)

  Today’s overly optimistic brand of self-help prevents its followers from concentrating on what’s realistically achievable for them; in fact, it teaches them to take umbrage at the very notion of realism: Who are you to tell me what I can and can’t do? What I should and shouldn’t aspire to! Legitimate mental-health experts will tell you that you have to be able to try your best while also knowing and accepting that the higher you aim, the greater the odds that you will fail. Not all such counsel or criticism is intended to “rob you of your dreams” per se, especially when that counsel comes from multiple people who know something about what it is you’re out to achieve for yourself. In most cases they’re just trying to save you from a life of frustration, humiliation, and defeat, while also encouraging you to focus your energies where they’ll likely do you the most good. “There are a lot of young people today,” jokes one expert I interviewed, “who really need somebody to rob them of their dreams.”

  Kidding aside, there’s a serious message here: Rising expectations are not always a good thing and can even backfire. In fact, that is one obvious interpretation of a small study released (mostly to a media yawn) in October 2003. The study, based on a random telephone survey of 1,015 households, concluded that 5 percent of the country’s adult population—some nine million people—feel so much daily stress that they can no longer cope. Fully half of those surveyed said they were fans of The Oprah Winfrey Show. The study therefore assumed a relationship between stress and watching Oprah. Now, even if the study is statistically valid, the mere fact that Oprah viewers may feel more stress than nonviewers does not mean that Oprah causes the stress. Perhaps her show simply attracts people with high levels of existing stress. But one can’t help wondering if Oprah’s can-do message is having an effect she did not foresee: To wit, if you make people believe they have full control over their lives, and then their lives don’t get better (or even get worse), how could that not throw their synapses into turmoil? Thinking in such terms, one begins to see the importance of realism and being shielded from false hope; one begins to see the potential downside of being uplifted.

  Imagine a world in which all of us went about our days constantly taking the pulse of our personal fulfillment. On the basis of that exercise, let us suppose that in every case we “choose happiness,” as a popular bumper sticker puts it. Sounds reasonable enough. But happiness and fulfillment are probably not what the mother of three sick toddlers is feeling as she divides her afternoon between changing foul diapers and sopping up puke laced with SpaghettiOs. Should she pass on that experience, walk out the door, and spend her afternoon dallying with Russell Crowe?

  I can hardly claim ownership of the sentiment, but it occurs to me that happiness is less a moment-to-moment condition than a long-term undertaking, a series of choices that eventually produces lasting peace of mind. Here again, it is not an orderly, straight-line progression. To put that more specifically—and this is what really rankles many young people—happiness is something you must be willing to sacrifice on a short-term basis so that you may one day have it on a long-term basis. During your younger years you may choose many times to be unhappy and unfulfilled, like that mother of the sick toddlers, knowing, or at least hoping, that in the long run you’ll come out the better for it. Surely your children will.

  The mother/child construct is just one example. There are many instances in life when the “choose happiness” mantra makes little sense and will only result in chaos, if not devastation. Sometimes, paradoxically, in order to keep yourself on the Road to Happy, you must choose Sad. Regrettably, it can be almost impossible to know, in the moment, when those transient sacrifices are needed in order to “buy” future benefits. The mother with the sick toddlers has a pretty good idea: She has to stay home and take care of her kids, no matter what she’d rather be doing.

  What about the person who’s presently stuck in a stable but less-than-exciting job? Or the newlywed whose marriage is getting him down? Those are harder calls that cannot be mediated by the simpleminded, black-and-white language of self-help in any of its forms. “Americans have this notion that if we only do certain things, we can be happy all the time; we should be happy all the time,” says David Blankenhorn. “That’s just not so. It’s not real life. We need to reach a level of acceptance of what real life is about.”

  After all the reams of data I have studied for this book, after all the interviews and years of research, when I try to encapsulate SHAM in my mind, I can’t help thinking of a woman I know who’s been buying self-help books for twenty years and has never made a meaningful change in her life. She sings the ennobling mantras from memory, she’s got the vaunted self-talk down pat—but her life remains the same. In short, she remains who she is—and who she is, I might add, is a lovely human being. Still, she has been led to believe that there’s something wrong with her, that she is failing to achieve the mission God (or at least Dr. Phil) intended for her. To my read, she is constantly asking herself if she’s “happy enough,” instead of simply kicking back and experiencing the many smaller joys along the way. She passes them by, unseeing, her eyes focused on the elusive pot of gold at the end of an always-receding rainbow.

  We all want so badly to believe in miracles.

  That’s what makes us vulnerable.

  And that’s what makes them rich.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Probing the Self-Help and Actualization Movement and its impact on American society is not unlike pressing your finger along the surface of a thawing, cracking lake: Each fissure you follow seems only to lead to more fissures.

  Like many writers embarking on a major work, I began this book with a naive sense of its scope. I soon found that everywhere I “pressed,” no matter how gently, yielded new thematic fissures that led me off in new directions. Eventually I realized that this project would compel me to take a comprehensive look at American mores, the broad landscape of hum
an aspiration, and countless related themes, each with its own complexities and ambiguities, each in turn trailing off to yet another set of subthemes. (And sometimes, to major themes I hadn’t previously considered. Alternative medicine is in this category.) Early on, when I described SHAM’s concept to a former student who now works in daily journalism, she remarked, “It sounds more like a work of anthropology.” How right she was.

  All of which is a long way of saying something simple: This book could not possibly address every question that occurred to every reader about self-help and its underpinnings. For the preternaturally curious, it may even have provoked as many questions as it answered. That’s because SHAM tackles any number of subjects and cultural factors whose underlying truths are presently unknown, if not unknowable. For starters, there is the little matter of free will, which was debated in Aristotle’s time, is debated now, and in all likelihood will be under heated debate, somewhere, in those final moments before the human race slips into oblivion. Does free will exist at all? Or does our outward behavior merely answer the call of roiling internal forces that make our “choices” for us? Are we predestined, or at least predisposed, to do what we do? If we don’t know the truth about such matters, we cannot know the absolute answers to the questions put forth in this book.

  That is, in fact, the primary complaint I would lodge against the gurus themselves: They don’t know the unknowable either, yet so many of them act as if they alone, among all of mankind, have ironclad solutions to problems that have stymied us since, well, since there was a mankind. (Another example: Just how alike are men and women, under the skin?) Your personal feelings on these subjects no doubt had a direct bearing on the way you interpreted this book. I encourage you to draw the conclusions that make sense for you and the way you live your life. If we seem to have arrived at different endpoints, so be it. That is, after all, what the pursuit of “self” is really about, or should be—isn’t it?