Thoughts On “Thinking For Yourself”
Critics of personal development often assert that, rather than reading self-help books, we should "think for ourselves." In fact, many critics even fear that personal growth products are actually stripping people of their ability to think independently.
"The self-help tradition has always been covertly authoritarian and conformist," writes Wendy Kaminer in I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional. "Merely buying a self-help book is an act of dependence." Similarly, literary critic Stewart Justman writes in Fool's Paradise: The Unreal World of Pop Psychology that the self-help "genre seems inherently authoritarian, implying as it does that we live and act according to sets of instructions."
These criticisms certainly make personal development sound unnervingly Orwellian. But do they make sense?
Is Advice Anti-Thinking?
It's true that many self-help books offer us advice on how to live our lives -- how to find inner peace, parent our children, and so on. But this alone can't be enough to strip us of intellectual independence. After all, books on origami, changing tires, investing in bonds, and so on also offer advice, but no one seems to be concerned that these books are "brainwashing" anyone.
Kaminer seems to recognize that the mere fact that self-help books give advice doesn't make them "totalitarian." Thus, she says she's not interested in critiquing "practical (how to do your own taxes) books." Instead, she is aiming at books with "a strong emphasis on individual, personal, or spiritual development." In other words, it's only people who give advice on personal or spiritual development who threaten the cognitive freedom of their listeners -- not those who tell you how to fix your car.
I think the trouble with this distinction is that it neglects the vast amount of advice on personal and spiritual development that writers outside the self-help genre offer. Philosophers, at least since ancient Greece and probably before, have wrestled with the question of how one ought to live. The world's religions also have pretty clear ideas about how we should develop spiritually. But I suspect Kaminer wouldn't claim that we shouldn't read books on philosophy or religion because they might control our minds.
Is Simplicity Sinister?
On some level, I think Kaminer is aware of this objection, and thus she tries to distinguish personal growth from philosophy and religion on the ground that self-help teachers' advice is overly simplistic. Personal growth books, she writes, encourage an intellectual "passivity and search for simple absolutes."
I actually agree that much personal growth advice is simplistic. I think the personal development blogosphere, for example, could stand to churn out fewer "50 Quick Happiness Tips"-style posts, and dive deeper into what really creates motivation and suffering in human beings.
However, the fact that some self-help advice may be simplistic doesn't necessarily render it sinister and manipulative, as Kaminer seems to believe. In other words, another person's mere act of offering you simple advice doesn't turn you into a mindless zombie under their command.
Suppose, for instance, you come to me with all kinds of concerns about your relationship, and I tell you that you should leave your partner. My recommendation in this example is certainly simple, and perhaps simplistic, because it doesn't address the underlying feelings and behaviors creating your relationship issues.
However, it would be absurd to claim that, merely by offering you simple advice, I've put you at risk of becoming my brainwashed slave -- just as it would be silly to argue that a book called "5 Simple Steps To Doing Your Taxes" threatens its readers' mental autonomy. You're free to accept or reject my advice -- or, at the very least, my advice won't make you any less free to do so than your current cognitive capacities allow.
Sometimes Simple Is Superior
What's more, in some cases, simplicity is a virtue. The most complicated advice or viewpoint is not always the most helpful one. I think there are great social advantages, for example, in simple moral rules like "rape is wrong" that leave no room for exceptions. A society where people accept such a rule, I think you'd agree, is better off than one where the morality of raping someone depends on a nuanced cost-benefit analysis.
In other words, I think it's entirely possible to both "think for yourself" and read a book, or listen to someone, offering simple advice -- even if it's of the self-help stripe. What's more, the simplicity of a message alone doesn't rob it of merit.
Self-Help and Selfishness, Part 4: A Postscript On Compassion
In the interest of clarity, I want to add a brief note summarizing what I'm saying in this series.
I believe there are two basic ways to think about compassion. The first is to see it as a way of acting. If you take certain actions in the world, in other words, that makes you a compassionate person.
People, of course, have vastly different ideas about which behaviors are compassionate and which aren't. Some think of compassion in terms of individual acts, such as giving to a person begging on the street. To others, compassion has more to do with a certain distribution of resources in society -- if we work toward a nation where people have roughly equal incomes, perhaps, we are compassionate people.
The second way of thinking about compassion is to see it as an emotion, or a sensation we experience in the body. For me, when I am feeling compassion, I experience a warm, open sensation in my heart area. Some might describe this in more mystical terms as a sense of "union with all that is."
Most People See It As A Behavior
It seems clear that, in Western culture at least, people usually take the first perspective -- that you are compassionate so long as you behave a certain way. It doesn't matter how you feel while you are doing the act. If you give to a charity, but only so that your name appears on the charity's website, you are being compassionate nonetheless.
I think this perspective is one reason why, in the West, we don't tend to see practices for cultivating a felt sense of compassion as particularly important. Why bother doing practices like Buddhist loving-kindness meditation, we might think, when we can go into the world and actually help people?
I think the trouble with this perspective is that it renders the concept of compassion vulnerable to abuse. It enables people who don't actually experience the felt sense of compassion to use the ideal of compassion as a weapon against others, for personal gain.
The Consequences
Look at typical political debates, for example. Each side accuses the other, in venomous and belittling terms, of lacking compassion, honesty, morality and so on. Ask yourself: would they make such accusations against each other if they actually experienced compassion as a feeling -- that sense of warmth and openness in the heart I described?
On a larger scale, many political and religious ideologies have claimed to be rooted in compassion. Christianity is said to be based on the compassionate teachings of Jesus. Marx claimed that communism was a compassionate political philosophy. And yet, of course, people have committed atrocities in the name of both worldviews.
Would these abuses have occurred if the people responsible had genuinely experienced the feeling of compassion, rather than simply believing in the abstract ideal? (I don't mean to pick on Christianity or communism per se -- I think any doctrine or philosophy, in the hands of someone who isn't actually feeling compassion, can be used to justify destructive behavior.)
In other words, when we're in touch with the felt sense of compassion -- not just the philosophical abstraction -- we become far less inclined to hurt others. This is why I think practices that help us actually experience the sensation of compassion are so important.
There are many practices aimed at this, and different approaches work better for different people. In my own case, I know that heart-opening exercises in yoga are particularly helpful. But the point is that these practices, far from being forms of "woo-woo navel gazing," are actually key to creating the kind of world many of us desire.
Other Posts In This Series: