Self-Help Charlatans?
• Self-Help
A look at 21st century self-help culture:
The self-help industry offers answers to two questions: ‘How should I live?’ and ‘How do I motivate myself?’ Its answers are crass and often deleterious. The fact that people drink them up merely shows the weakness of other sources of social authority. This is an industry built on desperation - why else would anybody call a stranger on prime time TV to ask whether they should leave their boyfriend? People seem not to know where to start in dealing with their problems. That is why they plead to life coaches: ‘Sort me out!’, ‘Just get me where I want to be!’.
It’s only a society that has lost its moorings that can be seized by charlatans.
Self-help gurus might be fakes - but why do so many people fall for them?