Criticism
Scholars have targeted self-help claims as misleading and incorrect. In 2005, Steve Salerno portrayed the American self-help movement—he uses the acronym SHAM: the Self-Help and Actualization Movement—not only as ineffective in achieving its goals, but also as socially harmful. 'Salerno says that 80 percent of self-help and motivational customers are repeat customers and they keep coming back whether the program worked for them or not'. Others similarly point out that with self-help books 'supply increases the demand...The more people read them, the more they think they need them...more like an addiction than an alliance'. Self-help writers have been described as working 'in the area of the ideological, the imagined, the narrativized....although a veneer of scientism permeates the work, there is also an underlying armature of moralizing'.
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Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“When you overpay small people you frighten them. They know that their merits or activities entitle them to no such sums as they are receiving. As a result their boss soars out of economic into magic significance. He becomes a source of blessings rather than wages. Criticism is sacrilege, doubt is heresy.”
—Ben Hecht (1893–1964)
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—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Cubism had been an analysis of the object and an attempt to put it before us in its totality; both as analysis and as synthesis, it was a criticism of appearance. Surrealism transmuted the object, and suddenly a canvas became an apparition: a new figuration, a real transfiguration.”
—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)