- This video is brought to you by Keeps. (upbeat music) Hey Wisecrack, Michael here. You don't have to own an exploding candle scented like Gwyneth
Paltrow's nether regions to know that the self-
help industry is booming. Americans seem to be
fundamentally obsessed with the mission of improving ourselves. We want life hacks, four-hour work weeks, desert retreats. - And I went to the
desert to seek answers, and now, I have them. - And someone to tell us if micro-dosing at the office is okay. Is it, Alec? And in some ways, teaching people how to lift themselves up by their bootstraps has
become a celebrity-worthy job in its own right. - It's all like laddering up to one thing, which is optimization of self. Like, we're here one time, one life. Like, how can we really
milk the (beep) out of this?

- Goopiness aside, there
are plenty of people eager to help you milk the hell out of this thing called life. Whether it's Tim Ferris telling you that nine-tenths of your
work week is unnecessary, so long as you outsource most
of your administrative tasks to third-world secretaries, or any slew of productivity bloggers promising to somehow quintuple your productivity
overnight with nootropics. Now, the quest to be a better, more functional member of society isn't necessarily a bad thing. Like, I want to improve my sleep hygiene and to quiet the existential dread that hangs over me like a dark cloud, and I'm really making
progress on that first one. But what if the industry
surrounding these kinds of goals has a lot to do with why we
need help in the first place? We'll explain in this Wisecrack Edition on Self Help: What Went Wrong. But before we continue, I want to give a shout-out to
this week's sponsor, Keeps.

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get 50% off your first order. Stop stressing and keep your hair. Now, back to the show. Before we understand how self-help went from a very cool set of ideas that really meant to transform the world, into a bunch of self-proclaimed gurus promising to manifest a
better you for just $395, we need to start with the founding father of the modern American self-help movement. Believe it or not, this dude was a failed car salesman, slash failed actor, slash failed novelist turned
YMCA public speaking coach. No, really, Dale Carnegie, who was born to dirt-poor
farmers in the late 19th century, arguably created the modern
American self-help industry with the publication of his bestseller, How to Win Friends and Influence People. Now, the book is pretty
much what it sounds like. The guidance is all rooted
in the idea that success

in business and in life, is primarily the result not of smarts, not even of super hard work, but of personality. Though in Carnegie's defense, he couldn't have anticipated the rise of supremely likable Mark Zuckerberg. Anyway, Carnegie's success wasn't exactly random. It had a lot to do with the times he lived in, before and during the Great Depression. From the turn of the century onwards, community ties and religious institutions were buckling as the pressures of modernity led to vast migration into cities, leaving many people alienated and alone. Without family or community to turn to, people looked inward instead. This inward turn was also greatly facilitated by the rise of psychology, with dozens of popular books tying the emerging field, perhaps dubiously, to all aspects of life. There was, Psychology and Sex Life, Psychology and the Christian Day School, Psychology of Fasting, Psychology of Murder, Psychology of Your Name,

but my personal favorite is, Psychology of Group Insurance. Carnegie biographer Steven Watts notes the birth of what
sociologist Philip Rieff famously called the psychological man, who, bolstered by the popular craze, sought to solve their problems
by solving their minds, often with the assistance
of self-help books. It makes sense. If your mom can't give you reliable Bitcoin investment advice, why not trust this best-selling author? This burgeoning field would
serve as a springboard for Carnegie to launch his
own philosophy, and it worked. He would go on to be named
one of Life Magazine's most influential
Americans, and his writing, with all its folksy wisdom
and wholesome anecdotes, established core stylistic elements of the modern self-help book. Of course, the rise of self-improvement as a means to unlock your
wildest dreams, if anything, was a little surprising
given what came before.

Now, the idea of self-help can be spotted as far back as Ancient Greek mentors and Nigerian Hausa folktales and Ben Franklin's self-improvement-happy autobiography, but Carnegie arose in the wake of a culture where self-fulfillment was not exactly a kosher goal. That is, he came of age as Victorian America was dying. Remember, one of the guiding forces of American culture was The Protestant Work Ethic, meaning you had to work yourself to death while not enjoying anything, lest you end up in the bad place. - We're trying out the new butthole spiders. - Ah! - They're enormous. - And in general, middle and upper-class Victorian values idealized self-denial, i.e. not getting laid and not eating that extra chocolate chip cookie. This culture, however, imploded, in part due to the ever-expanding reach of mass manufacturing. America went from a producer-oriented society

where you or your neighbors made everything you needed to survive. To a consumer-oriented society, where you and your neighbors spent all your money trying to impress one another with dope consumer goods. Instead of constantly repairing and maintaining the one nice shirt your mother made you 15 years ago, you could now get cheap and disposable threads that were cranked out in a factory. Over time, mass-manufactured trinkets and toys and chocolates and hamburgers and dishwashers proliferated. Eventually, America became a place where it was very easy to blow your paycheck on an 80-piece china set your millennial grandchildren under no circumstances want to inherit and store in their one-bedroom apartment. According to historian Warren I. Susman, while this consumer-happy shift was happening, the Western world simultaneously saw another massive cultural change, from the Victorian ideals of crafting an upstanding character based on public propriety, stern morality, and a supreme work ethic.

to the modern individualistic idea of cultivating a great personality. This idealized personality
was, according to Susman, particularly characterized in
self-help books of the time as fascinating, stunning,
attractive, magnetic, glowing, masterful, creative, dominant, forceful, and various other adjectives
I've used on dating profiles, and Carnegie's book promised that cultivating such a personality was possible for anyone,
even your boring Uncle Colm. - This must have been, ach,
we're talking eight, half eight, for I was halfway through me dinner. - Carnegie also called
upon a different movement which wanted to harness your mind power to improve your lot in
life, New Thought. Basically, it was the secret, except you were supposed to
tell God what you wanted most. Within just a few decades, an opportunistic reverend
spun Mind Power into a literal think
yourself rich ethos. Carnegie merged these two
intellectual movements

in a way that was perfectly suited for a culture newly defined by mass consumption and individualism. His methods, explicitly created to help you - yes, I mean you - advance, were perfect for an increasingly self-absorbed society. His rise also luckily coincided with the rise of the corporate management class, people whose very living depended on, well, befriending and influencing people above and below them. But that still doesn't fully explain the phenomenon of How to Win Friends. Carnegie's biographer, Steven Watts, credits one more crucial force for Carnegie's massive success. It wasn't just social alienation, it was economic devastation. The Great Depression left people devastated financially and emotionally. As Watts recounts, Americans were almost universally humiliated at the sudden onset of poverty they experienced when the stock market crashed. More than blaming a lack of banking regulations or reckless speculation for their suffering, people - especially the insecurely middle class - blamed themselves.

In this time of crisis, rather than advocating for revolutionary agitation, most were in favor of the simple reinforcement of basic institutions, as Watts explains. These panicked folks doubled down on preserving a mystical American way of life, and were determined to seek out their piece of the proverbial pie. And there was Carnegie, promising that his book could help you rise above your station and succeed in this uncertain climate, so long as you really wanted to. In a time when people desperately needed the wholesale support of their communities and country, Watts goes so far as to argue that, Dale Carnegie saved the culture of individualism. You can see it from his marketing, which was rooted in ideals of personal responsibility for success, never mind that plenty of people still couldn't afford to feed their families. In one ad, he cautions prospective students that, If you have sincere desire to improve yourself, come along, but if you haven't

a real urge to improve yourself, save your time and money
for no one can help. Harsh. And again, it makes sense why people want to read a book about how to ascend to the managerial class so they can not spend
all day in food lines, but this mentality also does a great job at refocusing attention away from, say, the causes of the Great Depression, which an ordinary person
couldn't do much about anyway, towards the thing you could
do something about, yourself. But ironically, this
egocentrism was implanted into a philosophy that
just 100 years earlier had sought to do the exact opposite. One that wanted to take the logic of self-help and
revolutionize the world, and not in the corny
join an MLM kind of way, because long before Carnegie, the foundation of today's
self-help industry was created by, uh, anarchists. Well, anarchists, socialists,
and other revolutionary types.

See, despite its associations with $66 jade yoni eggs and $500 online courses, the self-help industry actually has deeply working-class roots. Once upon a time in early to mid-19th century England, self-help meant blue-collar workers collectively helping one another. This was epitomized by secularist and radicalist George Jacob Holyoake's book from 1857, Self-Help by the People, which, like some of the earlier self-help materials seen in America, urged folks to learn useful skills they could then employ to help their communities and fellow working men. Writings like these grew out of British mutual improvement associations, groups where working-class folks would gather, sometimes in dingy old garden sheds, to learn reading, writing, and arithmetic in hopes of improving their conditions. Born around the end of the Napoleonic Wars, these groups especially blossomed during the mid-19th century and continued to operate through World War I.

They were often established
by political radicals, and in their heyday, existed
in many industrial towns and villages in England. Now, these were the same decades when Britain was desperately
trying to banish illiteracy, offering adult education in the form of mechanics' institutes. However, such institutes were funded by middle class sponsors who
mainly saw the schools as vessels for imposing their own values onto the working class, and mutual improvement
societies emerged as an alternative education option, even in places where there were plenty of
mechanics' institutes. According to Harrison, this suggests that workers were dissatisfied with the institutionalized formal education, perhaps because students were often not allowed to discuss politics
or religion in class. Basically, mutual improvement societies were what Harrison calls the working man's solution
to his own educational needs. The self help legacy of cooperation
didn't vanish overnight. Even in America, scholar Beth Blum notes, up until the 70s, self help
still commonly referred to

groups of people working together to improve themselves. This was epitomized by the feminist self-help collective that compiled the book Our Bodies, Ourselves to teach women medically-taboo information about their bodies. That's a far cry from the self-centered philosophy of something like Lean In. So what does this have to do with Tony Robbins and Sheryl Sandberg and the thousands of dollars of credit card debt NXIVM classes put me in? Enter Samuel Smiles, who visited some mutual improvement associations in Leeds and was impressed by their admirable self-helping spirits. The Scottish author, and then editor of a radical newspaper, would give them inspirational lectures about successful men who had risen up from poverty. Eventually, each lecture would become a chapter in his bestselling book from 1859, called Self Help. This officially gave a name to the fledgling industry that would spawn a million Tim Ferrisses.

but from the time he first visited mutual improvement societies in 1845, to the time he published his book, Smiles's views seem to have evolved. In the book, the working-class roots of English self-improvement seem to have merged with middle-class values of individualism. Smiles, for his part, took the collective self-advancing ideology he admired and essentially boiled it down to individual work ethic, going so far as to caution that poverty could be a great motivator, and institutional support a great demotivator. It's important to note that some think Smiles' rejection of government aid is often misunderstood and conflated with laissez-faire conservatism, but either way, while his book proved inspirational for working folks all over the globe, Smiles' ideology essentially functioned as a middle-class reply to workers' demands for better social conditions. He argues that anyone could improve themselves without the help of the government.

simply if they wanted to. In that vein, it arguably implied that working-class people who
remained poor and ignorant were basically morally deficient. After all, they just needed to try harder to rise in the ranks
by studying arithmetic when they got home from work, right? While the self-improvement methods that Smiles expounded upon - hard work, hyper-diligence, and frugality - would differ drastically from Carnegie's charismatic approach
to getting ahead in life, his book furthered an
individualistic image of self-help that would prove incredibly
salient to this day, which is how the idea of self-help went from a collectivist
dream of a better world to essentially an ideology
of personal betterment spurred by individual ambition. Smiles would be a major
influence on Orison Swett Marden, author of a shocking fifty or more self-help books and booklets, including Pushing to the Front or
Success Under Difficulties.

Marden would become a central inspiration for one Dale Carnegie, cementing
the transition of self-help from collective working-class
advancement to an ethos of manipulate your coworkers, so you can get a raise
and buy more (beep). Since then, self-help has
retained this laser focus on the individual and their personality, frequently in relation to improving their worth in the labor market. It's also explicitly sought to help people adjust to sweeping social changes, like when Helen Gurley
Brown counseled women on how to succeed in a deeply
sexist 1960s workplace, or when Jane Fonda taught
nearly-middle-aged Baby Boomers how to hang on to the
physiques of their youth. - Are you ready to do the work-out? - But our favorite era of
late 20th-century self-help started in the early 70s, a time of economic contraction
and widespread anxiety. Self-help books emerged
with super-chill titles like

Looking Out For #1 and Winning Through Intimidation to urge just what it sounds like: ruthless self-interest and the gospel of greed. Some books had even bleaker titles like, You Can Profit From A Monetary Crisis, and How To Prosper During the Coming Bad Years, a kind of blatant appeal to self-interest amidst widespread suffering that makes Dale Carnegie look almost communitarian in contrast. What's more, as scholar Micki McGee notes, within self-help culture, values from the competitive world of the marketplace have been transplanted to the personal world of intimate life. Never has this been more apparent than in the 1980s relationship advice books that urged women to see their relationships as a matter of maximizing profit. Not cynical at all. And what about today? Self-help has found a lucrative niche in helping Americans cope with and survive in an increasingly unstable labor market and social climate.

While Victorian advice books were about being successfully married and employed, today's advice books are about the struggle to remain marriable and employable, forever. In keeping with the trend of previous decades, self-improvement books treat the self as your most valuable commodity, and your primary duty as maximizing its value. If I can help people feel more in control of their life, more stable, that will minimize their interest in doing those negative things. Books like You Are A Badass function as How to Win Friends and Influence People for the shitty flexible gig economy where nobody's labor is particularly valued, and everyone's goal is to become their own boss via their Etsy wooden wind chime store. Self-help has never been more profitable or more popular, constituting an 11 billion dollar industry, as underpaid workers seek out new skills and tips in hopes of making their way up the socioeconomic ladder. Many workplaces, especially MLMs,

even employ self-help vernacular
to keep people motivated in spite of their shitty paychecks. With the right mindset, you
can rise above your station, or so the saying has gone since the fateful day Carnegie
loaded up his typewriter. But, as in the Great
Depression, we're living in extraordinarily horrible
times for getting ahead, and it's understandable that
people would take advice from these finance gurus who promise them unheard-of wealth if they follow simple tips, like tape coupons together so
they're worth twice as much, put double-sided tape on your dog's paws so he picks up quarters when
he walks around the street, and join 10 churches, take some money out of the
tithe bucket each week, and a lot more where that came from. But as we all struggle to manifest new mindsets or be more badass or package our personalities
on five social media platforms, it's worth asking. Are we, like folks during
the Great Depression,

turning to self-help because we blame ourselves
for our struggles, rather than blaming blatant
institutional failures like massive student debt,
stagnating wages, and so on? And don't get us wrong,
there's nothing nefarious about wanting to improve yourself. It's admirable, even, and
most studies on the topic even show that people
do find self-help books to be, well, helpful, but
we think it's only healthy to question something that's become as institutionalized as
the self-help industry, and it's worth wondering why the message, much like Carnegie's
back in 1936, remains, if you read this inspirational book and you don't become massively successful, it's because you didn't try hard enough. But what do you guys think? Is the self-help industry just trying to make us better people, or is something a lot uglier going on? Let us know in the comments. Big thanks to our patrons
for all your support.

Hit that subscribe button with the force of a Victorian
suppressing their own libido, and be sure to ring that bell, and as always, thanks for watching. Later. (upbeat music) Start a religion! You don't have to pay taxes
if you start a religion, so just start your own. Perform a miracle to get people involved, and then just let that cash roll in. Do we have to stop now? I've got more.

Self-Help: What Went Wrong?

Self-Help: What Went Wrong?

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