We've All Been Messed Up For a While
A quick history of the 'self-help' genre, book snobbery, and the Victorian Jordan Peterson
My book, Some of Our Parts: Why We Are More Than the Labels We Live By, will be published on September 19th. If you’d like to read it, it’s available below (Blackwell’s ship internationally). Thank you to every subscriber whose support has enabled me to write it!
“… human character is moulded by a thousand subtle influences; by example and percept; by life and literature; by friends and neighbours; by the world we live in as well as the spirits of our forefathers, whose legacy of good deeds and words we inherit. But great, unquestionably, though these influences are acknowledged to be, it is nevertheless equally clear that men must necessarily be the active agents of their own well-being and well-doing; and that, however much the wise and the good may owe to others, they themselves must in the very nature of things be their own best helpers.”
- Samuel Smiles, Self Help, 1859
Samuel Smiles’ Self Help was the book that launched a genre. Titles which purport to bring clarity to the chaos and confusion of our lives through self-directed change remain incredibly popular today. Many of us take it for granted when we’re dumped, down or defeated that some kind of practical guidance might be found in the ‘self-help’ section of Amazon or the local book shop. I had to buy a second copy of Self Help a few years back, having given mine to Jordan Peterson when I interviewed him for an article during his visit to Dublin in 2018. For over an hour, Peterson allowed me to ask him whatever I wanted. I was most interested in his views on philosophy and psychology, and how the two intersect to form the perspective which led him to become (for good or ill) the most recognisable public intellectual in the world.
Peterson gave me more freedom than I generally have when interviewing the standard variety of well-known person. “Do not under any circumstances ask about those recently deleted tweets” an extremely stressed and glamorous PR person in an impractical cream suit once seethed at me as I was jostled into an expensive hotel suite to conduct a hard-hitting seven-minute conversation about a beauty brand collaboration with a big female celebrity. “She’s moved on. But you can ask her about her mantra – ‘be kind’. She’s very big on that.” I blinked dryly a couple of times before girding my loins and mincing into the richly adorned room, which smelt heavily of the white roses sitting in improbably vast numbers in a barrel-sized vase on the coffee table.
The Peterson interview took place at the apotheosis of his fame and infamy, when he seemed to consent to every interview, despite almost universal media distaste toward him. I thought that he might be interested in Smiles’ work as an intellectual ancestor of his 12 Rules for Life, the controversy around which I’ve always found amusing. If you read it, you’ll find little in there that Smiles wasn’t saying in Self-Help, or that the Stoics weren’t espousing long before his translation of their ideas for the Victorian reader.
Peterson is a controversial figure and has increasingly been behaving like one since reemerging into public life over the last few months. His public persona – particularly since his recent return to Twitter – has become rather more brittle and reactive. He is an interesting product and symptom of our age and culture. I’m not all that interested in dissecting that here. That is perhaps a topic for another time (you can read an in-depth article I wrote for Areo Magazine on Peterson’s ideas after that 2018 interview with him here), but I do wonder, each time I pick up Smiles’ book, what he might have thought about the book which first sought to empower the everyday reader through agency and the concept of mutable character. After all, these are among the ideas that transformed Peterson, like Smiles in Victorian Britain, into a leading cultural commentator and darling of the everyman.
While the Stoics and other philosophers had long ago suggested that we have the power to improve ourselves (or the opposite) through the choices we make, it was Smiles who brought this concept to the ordinary person and transformed psychology from a slightly fruity academic discipline into a pragmatic form of knowledge that might be relevant to working- and middle-class British life. The book sold over a quarter of a million copies by the time its author died in 1904. He was the middle-class son of an industrious Scottish papermaker. Self-Help’s publication in 1859 rendered Smiles an instant celebrity (despite the fact that he had written books before) and helped cement the traits that remain associated (whether legitimately or not – I rather think not) with the Victorian character – independence, prudence, virtue, industriousness, and individualism.
Smiles wrote to middle- and working-class audiences with a revolutionary message – that intellectual and moral character are not heritable clusters of traits, but psychologically achievable conditions we can pursue throughout the course of a well-intended life. He encouraged ordinary men (it was 1859 – we’ll forgive his androcentrism) to seek out social and economic betterment. In a system characterised by ossified social hierarchy, Smiles encouraged individuals to find and articulate their agency even in limiting circumstances.
Like the Stoics, he suggested that you might indeed be in the mire, but that you always have some measure of control, even if it is only over your internal state. That, after all, is where our ability to tolerate and cope with struggle and pain finds its origin, in the idea that there is something essential to the self over which we never truly lose ownership. Like the Stoics (and most other self-help books), Smiles suggested that there is always something we can do to help ourselves. Believing otherwise is fundamentally disempowering; there’s nowhere to go from there. Just the self-destructive satisfaction one gets from relinquishing control and then lamenting the outcome. The thrilling sting of poking a wound and watching it anger under our touch.
Of course, this presumption underlies the therapeutic method. After all, if we were powerless to change anything, clinical therapies would be entirely useless exercises in masturbatory suffering. Interestingly, there is an increasingly popular (but still fringe, I hope) perspective which supposes that therapies focusing on what we can control in some way condones those forces which rob us of control. It suggests that by concerning their attention with the elements of our lives that we can directly influence, people are encouraged to overlook the ways in which they are oppressed to the ultimate advantage of their oppressors.
If this perspective is correct, it has the unfortunate consequence of making attempts at self-improvement based in psychology (either in a therapeutic context or outside of it - in the Self-Help section of the bookshop, for example) ultimately harmful because they encourage us to focus on what have direct control over rather than what we don’t. They all seek to empower the individual through personal responsibility rather than nurturing the suffering caused by that which has harmed us; however real, lasting, or unavoidable that harm may be. By this logic, reading Smiles (or whatever other self-help book we tug from the shelf when overwhelmed by life’s vicissitudes and the tedium of spending years in the company of our own flaws) is more a means of propping up the status quo than an attempt to find or claim your agency. A distraction tactic.
This can be the case, particularly with books which outsource your ability to change to, for example, shoving the right combination of expensive crystals into your bra, or to wishing really really super hard in the general direction of a vague but somehow sentient entity called ‘the universe’ (which interestingly seems to prioritise fulfilling the deepest wishes of wealthy, attractive and socially connected middle class women and overlooks those who don’t fit that description for not wanting hard or sincerely enough) or which locate the cure to low self-esteem in deluded extremities of entitlement broaching on solipsism, à la actor Gary Busey in the classic Simpsons restraining order clip. That is certainly a topic for another week. The online cult of ‘Self-Love’ that is, not an episode of The Simpsons from 2005.
There is also a good deal of snobbery around the self-help genre. There shouldn’t be. It mostly comprises legitimate philosophical and psychological ideas distilled for palatable consumption. Not all, obviously. A good guide to the Self-Help genre is as follows: if it’s promising change without honest self-interrogation and a good deal of volitional discomfort, it probably won’t really help. If it makes you feel better without giving you some work to do, foster scepticism. Before we can change, we have to see ourselves as we actually are and consciously break ingrained habits of thought and behaviour. There is nothing comfortable about that – it pitches us out of the familiar and robs us of our ability to respond intuitively to people and situations. From this discomfort, we might be, as Smiles put it, our “own best helpers.” That is valuable information, no matter which shelf it comes from.
The self-help genre: ugh. Yes and No, and eew. Same goes, quite honestly, for therapists. I see a parallel between the despicable orange dumpster fire running for president in the U.S. and much of the self-help market; namely, that every accusation (self-help programme) is a confession (author's disclosure of incompetence). Who are these authors anyway? By and large they appear to be people who struggle with the very subject matter for which they are peddling solutions, much as the field of psychology attracts many who have their own messes to clean up. (Note the qualifiers: there are wise, helpful well-trained individuals in clinical practice, but we all know that there are also plenty who should not be allowed to muck about in other people's lives.) How many guru-fueled failures does it take to convince a person that they have more internal wisdom than some random person who managed to wangle a pulp book deal? It's a bit of a stomach-churning, ouroboric Möbius strip. I'd like to see a title called "How Not to Prey on Your Fellow Humans Just Because You've Been Suckered Into Believing You Can Make Money by Saying You Have The Answers." This article was written by someone who went down that road. https://www.vox.com/first-person/2017/1/23/14238530/self-help-advice-bogus
Thanks, as always, for a thought-provoking piece, Laura!
One of the most fascinating things about self-help books in all their forms and varieties is, to me, their sheer number and continuing proliferation. It seems to say something Nietzschean about the human experience post Enlightenment - but then again there were plenty of advice books prior to then. Dunno.
In a lighter note I have pre-ordered your book and the audio version since I enjoy listening to your narration of this blog and was delighted to see that you narrate the book too!
Well done, I guess it can’t be easy to read your own writing without wanting to change little pieces here and there. Treat for us though.