Behind The Self-help Book Explosion
'What social theorists call "detraditionalization" - the tendency of advancing capitalism to disrupt the cultures and traditions that may stand in the way of the accumulation of profit' has been seen as underpinning behind the self-help phenomenon in two (overlapping) ways. The first is the eclipse of the informal, communitarian transmission of folkways and folk wisdom: 'the charge that when self-help writers are being simplistic and repetitious, they are also being banal and unoriginal, merely offering their readers platitudes...on behalf of the best parts of folk wisdom', may simply be because they are providing a formal conduit for the conveyance of such "home truths" in an increasingly unstructured and anomic world.
The other result of the loss of 'Weber's "traditional behavior...everyday action to which people have become habitually accustomed"' is an increased social pressure for Self-fashioning: 'while one's identity might have been formerly anchored in (and limited by) a community...the self-creating self must create a written narrative of his or her life'. self-help books 'written and read for the purpose of helping people build a personal philosophy' contribute to that end.
The danger may arise however of an overestimation of the possibilities of change, given that 'we do not in any meaningful sense intend or choose our birth, our parents, our bodies, our language, our culture, our thoughts, our dreams, our desires, our death, and so on'. The 'Twelve-step "Traditions"...have fostered a notion of individual self-mastery or self-control as limited...use of the Serenity Prayer encourages individuals to accept what they cannot change, to find courage to change what they can change, and to seek wisdom in discerning the difference'. Self-help books will indeed often acknowledge formally that 'this book does not replace the need for therapy and counselling for troubled relationships or survivors of a Dysfunctional family'. In practice however, fuelled by competitive advertising, often 'such books hold out to the reader the promise of a virtually "instantaneous" transformation'; and there ensues something of a 'built-in contradiction of the celebratory arc of the self-help book combined with the stubborn realities' of the human world.
The reader may go away disillusioned; or may seek for the answer in the next book, so that 'self-help books can become an addiction in and of themselves' - a process that will 'have fostered the belabored self' rather than relieving it. In that perspective, since all self-help books 'have at least one common message. They tell you that you have the power to change yourself....By implication all of these books are saying, if you are in pain, if you are stuck and can't seem to change, it's no one's fault but your own'.
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