America’s Obsession with Self-Help
newrepublic.com
newrepublic.com
Well, I will say one thing about the article. It summarily dismisses Stephen Covey's Seven Habits as nothing special, without engaging the content of the book in the slightest, and criticizes Covey for not talking about racism and sexism. If you want this article and its writer in a nutshell, there you go.
There are a ton of articles like this out there, even on this exact topic of ridiculing self-help from the compulsive, perfunctory woke standpoint that dominates our elite media culture. This one was very middle-of-the-fairway. The best I can say about it is that it contained a tiny bit of history, and we were spared the usual exhortations to adopt more collectivist politics. (In their prescriptions for America, the writers always talk exclusively about politics, never even thinking about what people could be doing differently in their own families, friendships, neighborhoods and communities. Slaves to individualism in their own way, they would never imagine that anything but the State can save us.)
Frankly, these dull, robotically woke articles from legacy media are a much more nauseating aspect of this cultural moment than bad self-help books. And Seven Habits is more worth your time than anything this author will ever say.
1. Grab some classic American media.
2. Look at it through a perverted lens it wasn't meant to address.
3. Decry this lack of coverage as some evil ploy to suppress an outgroup.
Seven habits is a great book that anyone would be better for having read.
Never in my life have I associated git or its default branch name with American slavery. I would be shocked if a single black programmer in the world had considered before last year that it might be offensive. I haven't discussed the issue with any black friends or family, but it's just such an odd leap to make even if the claim about its etymology is potentially correct.
Of course, if even a minority of black programmers were or are offended, it's not my place as a non-black person to tell them they're wrong. I'll happily rename all my branches, update all my code that references master, rename all "master" test environments/hostnames, and update the gitconfig on all my machines, if credible surveys come out showing that a statistically significant number of black programmers genuinely consider master branches offensive.
Until then, I'm not going to do free labor to back up what so far appears to be an ill-conceived PR stunt on GitHub/Microsoft's part. The only arguments I've seen in favor of renaming master have been from white people appealing to technicalities/etymology, as if solving a puzzle to prove whether it should be offensive according to some logic, rather than any kind of appeal to the feelings of actual humans.
"Robotic wokeness" is a nice term to describe this phenomenon. I'm all for Black Lives Matter and correcting genuine injustices, but it's harmful to everyone when private interests artificially manufacture outrage and social justice causes solely for their own benefits.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trunk_(software)
Because y'know, branches? Trunk and branches? It's the older term. I ran into it using Fossil and liked it, now all my git repos have trunks as well.
Of course there's nothing wrong with master, that was just histrionic bullying. At best it was people doing something they can do (change variable names) as a substitute for something they can't (meaningfully affect racial injustice).
But like I said. I took the opportunity. Way better name than main... or master for that matter.
Ultimately, it doesn't matter to me in and of itself. Even before last year, it wasn't that unusual to see git/GitHub repos with default branch names other than master (dev is probably the next most common one I've seen), and presumably not because of anything to do with racial justice. "Master" seems most practical to me for the moment, since it's the most standard/common term and is relatively non-overloaded, whereas "main" may be more ambiguous unless expanded to "the main branch" (depending on context).
It almost feels silly to bikeshed about something so minor, but it's not fair for anyone to demand that millions of people change their behavior and/or spend money without meeting some reasonable burden of proof. It's a slippery slope to allowing such unfalsifiable Pascal's-wager-type propositions ("foo may or may not be harmful, so better do bar instead just in case") to be used for more malicious manipulation of markets and geopolitics.
It gives a bad example for climate change.
/s
Modern systems like git don't really work this way. I don't think trunk is properly descriptive anymore because it isn't necessarily the root of all branches. In a GitFlow branching model, commits can move back and forth on feature, bugfix and release branches without ever being merged to develop. On top of that you have branches like gh-pages which should have no shared history at all with other branches.
In keeping with GitFlow, the main development branch on many of my projects is called "develop". I like the name: this is where development happens, where new features are first merged. Unlike "master" or "main" it doesn't imply that it's stable or deployable, and unlike "trunk" it doesn't imply that it's special or that it's the root of all other branches.
This criticism apply to every other branch naming, especially "master" (it's not a master copy of anything, then). Maybe "main" would be the best one since it highlights the most important branch of that git tree.
My repos are in fact trunk and branch shaped: the trunk branch is always the first commit, and I tend to just have feature branches. That won't last forever, I'll need to start having release branches and the like, but 'trunk as root' with the first commit is going to be a constant.
So 'develop' is a fine choice. I worked at a company which had a 'master' branch but really only used it for releases. It wasn't a continuous deployment model, so everything would land on 'develop', turn into a candidate branch near release time, and then land once on master when it was blessed for release.
So master was just a series of squashed deltas between point releases, which kind of matches the semantics of 'master' if you squint: like it was the gold master from which release copies (including one client who took delivery by CD-R!) was pressed.
> I haven't discussed the issue with any black friends or family
I'll just highlight these quotes there for you to consider. It was never about you or your opinion on a matter that is not about you.
Let's say it costs a total $500 - $1000 worth of resources to excise the term "master" from all the code and infrastructure under my control. You're asking me to spend that uncritically and unquestioningly. If that's what you want, send me $1000 and it'll be done by the end of the month.
As I said, I'm perfectly willing to donate to progressive causes I believe in (and do, frequently); I have no problem doing this if someone makes the minimal effort to prove that it would be a positive use of my money. I have a very big problem with donating to what amounts to Microsoft's marketing department. Convince me that this is more worthwhile than donating the same amount of cash to charity.
You're free to ignore my request and suggest (again) that I'm a racist, but that's not going to open my wallet; I'll just continue using master branches and also think you're a jerk.
Unfortunately, Heroku "fixed" this problem in completely the wrong way, by now allowing deployments from `master` or `main`, instead of making it user-configurable.
So although I'm not particularly a fan of the PC brigade researching the etymology of technical terms to find new ways to feel outraged, I do appreciate the fact that in many cases, it forces developers to create software without arbitrary assumptions.
For the record, I do think in many (most?) cases, these crusades [0] are the social justice equivalent of bike-shedding, so that companies and individuals can pat themselves on the back and say "we're fixing racism/sexism/foobarism" without actually doing any real work to solve inequality issues in the tech industry. It also allows them to squarely put the blame on others (i.e. whichever 1970's white men came up with master/slave or blacklist/whitelist), while avoiding the need for meaningful introspection and contemplation of their own role (as people in the industry, regardless of identity) in the inequality of the tech industry.
[0] Apparently, this is also a word we're not allowed to use
It's not making a point. It's just a book review.
Neither do I. Nothing in my comment says otherwise. But it is silly to criticize a book for not mentioning racism. There are plenty of books on racism. It is not the case that literally every book needs to be about racism.
I like this phrase a lot. Woke or not, we all agree that we hate the roboticality. It's just a cheap/shallow conviction, lack of depth and thoughtfulness, etc. is what I consider actually harmful.
please. Dang should be down on this word, its designed to elict bad responses. It adds nothing.
Self help has a very interesting consequence on the politics of social service delivery to people. I've had this conversation a LOT with US voters, and they resent their tax dollars funding type-2 diabetes intervention precisely because its perceived as a self-acquired voluntary disease.
Never mind the horrific health economics outcome of ignoring it, some wierd, quasi-moralistic "I shouldn't HAVE TO" enters the room.
I believe quite strongly this is a consequential corollary of the self-help movement. Which btw, has deep roots in the American political landscape, from well before the obsession with Dale Carnegie. You could argue the whole "go west" and invitation to land-pegging which fuelled the expansion of the states into the territories depended on it.
Samuel Smiles wrote histories of great men which fuelled a sense of ability to become what you wish to be, and was part of the victorian british self-help movement too.
If I looked for a word to describe the other point of view I get to "collectivist" but within seconds Its descended into name calling around socialism.
Europe and Asia have a different sense of what is, and is not worth funding and managing collectively. US Americans in particular are driven to self-reliance in all things, including things which demonstrably are counter productive.
Self-Help and Self-Advancement, and simple self-managed self-actualisation are all a part of this.
There aren't seven habits of highly effective people: There's the benefit of money, and not reading pop-sci and thats about it.
Wokists make jokes about Ayn Rand because she died poor, lonely and deprived, dependent on the state. The ultimate payback, no? Asocial is, as Asocial does.
For humour value, consider Gurdjieff. Where would you put Gurdjieff and Krishnamurti on the 'woke' agenda, given they believed strongly in ... self-help?
Wokists make jokes about Ayn Rand because it makes them feel better and they don't know or choose to ignore that this is false. She didn't die poor, lonely and deprived. She still made a lot of money by the time she died and the amount she collected from state was 2k or something like that.
you're flaming from a young account, not discussing, and you ignored matters of substance I tried to bring to the fore, chasing wokism and Ayn Rand. Why bother?
> If I looked for a word to describe the other point of view I get to "collectivist" but within seconds Its descended into name calling around socialism.
to quote myself, this is precisely what you're doing.
It's unfortunate you missed this rather relevant fact, and chose instead to write a diatribe about how "woke" is very bad and people on HN only ever comment on articles without really reading them.
Of course if you believe that public criticism of books like Seven Habits in obscure journals is somehow corrosively 'un-American' you're going to need to explain why you have that rather exotic view.
Feel free to reread the relevant section of the article and my comment if you "missed" any of this.
The rest of your comment is just sloppy, incorrect description and speculation about what I wrote and what you assume I think, so I won't bother responding to that. However, I did note that others were able to grasp that I didn't attack wokeness per se, only articles written from a mindless, robotically woke viewpoint. So you might ask yourself why you didn't grasp this and instead chose to immediately draw tribal lines by speculating about what I think is "un-American".
1. First, the style is atrocious. I am not a native speaker but the style is circumvoluted, jumping from details to details. I believe the main idea could have been summarized and exposed clearly in fewer paragraphs ("process of cultural homogenization for its own sake in/through historical American self-help literature" or something).
2. > Well, I will say one thing about the article. It summarily dismisses Stephen Covey's Seven Habits as nothing special, without engaging the content of the book in the slightest, and criticizes Covey for not talking about racism and sexism. If you want this article and its writer in a nutshell, there you go.
Isn't that a stretch ?
> Although Covey’s tract pays no more attention to the harms of racism and sexism than the other works McHugh examines, she finds its controlling agenda tempered by a soft-focus emphasis on “principles,” “proactivity,” and “interdependence.” Such qualities, she asserts, are in short supply in similar works of success literature, introducing a critical element of vulnerability into the usual morale-raising, virtue-forming proceedings: “In interdependence,” she writes, “there was a recognition of individual limitations, even fallibility, in a way that rarely happens in this type of literature.”
It's less a critic of Covey for not talking about racism and sexism than a general observation than all those work of literature are ignoring racism and sexism issues. Most probably because there were fewer outlets to express these issues than there is today.
> And Seven Habits is more worth your time than anything this author will ever say.
You make a bit point out of what is said about Covey's book in the article but seven habits and its relevance for entrepreneurs/businessmen is not the author's subject and its dismissal is more anecdote than central to the point.
In the beginning I didn't have the tools to seek it out with other human beings. I didn't speak the basic "language". I feel incredibly fortunate that there were books out there that I had access to that helped with where to start. Simple things like how to ask for help. Eventually (20 something years later) I have enough "language" in my vocabulary, thanks in great part to amazing books written by incredible writers who have devoted their lives to helping other people, to navigate a complex social life. I am incredibly grateful to these authors.
This is an issue plaguing Americans. There are threads everyday on Reddit and the like with people asking questions like "How do I make friends?" and "How do I get involved in a community?". We're an incredibly lonely society.
"What Makes Love Last" By John Gottman https://www.amazon.com/What-Makes-Love-Last-audiobook/dp/B00...: The underlying premise of this book is that love, friendship etc., are based on trust. It relates some of it to game theory in a way that really clicked with me.
"Becoming The Kind Father" by Calvin Sandborn https://www.amazon.com/Becoming-Kind-Father-Sons-Journey/dp/...: This really helped me connect with my internal voice and taught me that it's ok to create a group of people you can communicate your upset feelings with and how to manage that.
There were a bunch of books that I read to understand how important physicality is to all of this. I can't think of one particular one to call out. You need to sleep enough, eat well, get some movement, and get some meditation. There are some other physical things that are helpful. I see a somatic therapist and we do therapy while she works on my body. Of all of the therapy I've ever done, it's the best.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFqotaIc3Dw this before bedtime has been a game changer.
To quote an american catholic saying something very uncatholic, but very american: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe and the mystery of human life.”
We should not be surprised that into this psychic vacuum rushes various alternatives such as self-help, sports-worship and so forth.
Or perhaps theres a travelling sideshow element to self-help that appeals to the PT Barnum types. But I'm not so cynical.
This is very accurate. Having lived in other countries, I can say the "other" side suffers from a different extreme: Sticking to flawed social constructs that impede their progress and/or happiness, no matter how much research and/or self help you throw at them.
For that matter, less-individualistic societies such as European countries don’t seem immune to some of the symptoms the parent comment mentioned, such as sports-worship.
There is something to the notion that American individualism comes with its unique pathologies, but there’s clearly a lot more to the story of why things like self-help have exploded.
For one thing, as traditional sources of meaning have withered under the harsh lights of science and modernity, all wealthy societies have seemed to struggle with a crisis of meaning.
This leaves a vacuum that gets filled with self-help (the secret to a meaningful life is here in this book), sports-worship, celebrity-worship, video-game escapism, neo-nationalism, whatever. This can be seen all over the developed world. However, America’s extreme individualism may exacerbate this crisis of meaning, since community is often itself a source of meaning.
We cannot go back to pre-modernity, nor should we try.
What can we do to build societies, here and now, that help people feel a sense of meaning in their lives without the ghastly drawbacks of past sources of meaning such as religion and ethnic nationalism?
I think you left out the biggest thing people do to fill the void of existential dread: spend money! America is far more obsessed with that habit than any of the ones listed in my experience.
I am a very happy and fulfilled person, and I've not had to engolf myself in self-help, sports-worship, celebrity-worship, video-game escapism or whatever else you listed, neither do I engolf myself in religion and ethnic nationalism.
That leaves me that either your explanation is simply wrong, or only true for some individual.
In my opinion, there's a false projection, it's like people complaining about Java versus the number of happy Java developers who don't care to participate either in the complaint or the praises of it online or at every occasion they find. If all you knew about it was the article and comments you'd read online, you'd think everyone dreads Java and become depressed from its prolonged use. Well I feel it similar with America and people's complaints about it.
And the closest data I can find is the world surveys on self perceived happiness where people rate themselves on 0 to 10, with 10 being the happiest they can imagine themselves, and on those surveys, individualistic western countries tend to rank better.
Edit: Not that I disagree with your conclusion, to help people find meaning and wellbeing in their life is great, and should be a goal of society, as long as is not forced on people, but simply provided as options that are made accessible to them to choose from if they so want.
"western countries" is a broad category that includes Europe and the UK. I think the parent was suggesting that these countries' cultures are distinct from the U.S. w/r/t finding meaning.
>...to help people find meaning and wellbeing in their life is great, and should be a goal of society, as long as is not forced on people...
What an odd response. Was anyone suggesting forcing anything on anyone?
Science has virtually nothing to say about the meaning of life. Science cannot contradict most traditional sources of meaning because they do not make many if any scientific assertions. To my way of thinking, the erosion of traditional sources of meaning and morality is caused solely by human hubris : we see all our scientific acconolishments and think "bah : how could we trust opinions held by ancient humans?! They didn't even have the internet"
This seems to be a cycle thats repeated itself throughout history. Excess results in a rejection of traditional morals and meaning, which leads to a harsh reconciliation wherein civilization is struck with the rude reality of why those traditional morals where there in the first place. Which leads to an embrace of these traditional values, which then eventually creates more excess.
Fascinating stuff.
Of course it is always an option for religion to try to explain the old claims away as allegorical or misunderstood, but that leaves one with a very different kind of faith than someone who believed all of the claims fully and literally, with no reasonable doubt in their mind. Everything from the spread of disease to the fortunes of war to the success and failure of crops was once earnestly believed to be caused by the will of god or gods. Even the most ardent fundamentalist today cannot really get away without accepting—at least implicitly—materialist explanations for why many things happen. Even fanatics check the weather forecast.
Modernity has also worn down the appeal of the old sources of meaning in other ways than through science.
Affluence, health, and security have taken a lot of the appeal out of religion. Getting on the good side of an all-powerful god was a lot more appealing when famine, disease, and violence could strike at any time. We all still feel like we’re at the mercy of the world sometimes, but many of us are fortunate enough to avoid the kind of physical insecurity that our ancestors faced, and religion has declined over a few generations in every place where these fears have receded.
Tribalism too has been sapped of its potency by the decline of endemic violence. Fear of the out-group is a lot more powerful when a violent death at their hands is a common fate of the people you know. In addition, the rise of fast, cheap travel has made it harder to believe that your home and your people are “the greatest on Earth” while all others are inferior. Among the classes with the disposable income to travel internationally, nationalism has grown very weak indeed.
Ideally we would find something better than consumerism and celebrity-worship with which to replace these crumbled idols. We certainly cannot go back: the damage is real and it is done. Each new wave of religious or tribalist revival crests lower than the last. Not to mention, the traditional sources of meaning had awful drawbacks and excesses, as you alluded to. I hope we can do better than a choice between nihilism and the miserable past.
The answer i think is already being played out around us and involves Nihilism, Hedonism and Fanaticism. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World also hints about it. On the individual level we all need means to access "varying altered levels of consciousness" and on the societal level we need to be made more interdependent as a collective. The former is an experience to justify our individual existence while the latter keeps us bound to "society".
There are definitely counterexamples within the US, but in my opinion they are much milder, and often in pockets. Generally speaking, if I take and practice advice in a self-help book that goes counter to the American norm, I don't get social rejection, and I often get more encouragement than negative vibes.
Oh, and sports-worship is everywhere - wealthy and poor :-)
This is the root of the problem. Bertrand Russel in his The Conquest of Happiness says; My purpose is to suggest a cure for the ordinary day-to-day unhappiness from which most people in civilised countries suffer, and which is all the more unbearable because, having no obvious external cause, it appears inescapable.
This has now become true of almost all societies in varying degrees. All beliefs are questionable, nothing has any "inherent" meaning and there is always the tension of opposing viewpoints that need to be weighed and reconciled/accepted. It is all quite exhausting. Hence our need for "escapism" via Consumerism/Sports-worship/Celebrity-worship etc.
https://www.ozon.ru/highlight/top-200-knig-po-mneniyu-chitat...
Of the Top-12, 6 to 8 are some form of a self-help book:
* 1st: The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fck.
2nd: Say Yes To Life, a self-help book from an Austrian Holocaust surviver.
* 4th: Ben Graham's Intelligent Investor.
* 5th: A Russian-author book on the art of "convincing" & "influencing" people (sound familiar?).
* 6th: Another American book, "Radical Forgiveness: A Guide to Spiritual Healing"
* 8th: Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.
* 11th: Women Who Love Too Much: If Love is Causing Suffering. Also a US book.
* 12th: Atlas Shrugged. I suppose it's not a self-help book, but it's very much in line with the spirit of "open-your-eyes" literature.
* If you go down the list, there is a bunch of other titles like Rich Dad Poor Dad, the full set of Nassim Taleb's quasi self-improvement books, etc.
We can sort of argue whether some of these books are self-help adjacent or not (like Ben Graham or Nassim Taleb), but the trend is clear: self-improvement literature is very popular in Russia.
This shows that the self-help cottage industry is not limited to the US. I think people just like the idea of self-improvement.
edit: formatting
The more general truth is that: it is very human to have a myth about several attributes which are supposedly unique to your culture and less applicable to a shallow stereotype of the other countries your culture leads you to be most faniliar with. For the Chinese, the Japanese, Koreans, and Americans. For the Thais, the Laoatians and Americans. Etc. on and on. With these pairings there is always an accompanying list of the things that make US not be THEM, regardless of whether or not they're factual.
It comes across as incredibly insular.
If anything I would expect self-help to be more popular in less well-off countries, where there is perhaps more incentive to be hyper-competitive to try get ahead.
[0] https://www.economist.com/china/2020/11/12/why-self-help-boo...
The latter definition has taken hold over the last few decades because it is seen as offensive to reinforce good choices. Suggesting that people maintain a good diet and exercise is seen as offensive to obese people. Suggesting that people marry a good, stable partner before having children is seen as offensive to single mothers. Suggesting that people focus on jobs and careers that provide stable income is seen as crushing someone's self-actualized aspirations. And suggesting that any of these groups be responsible for the outcomes of their choices is unthinkable.
When such basic advice is off-limits, what cultural infrastructure could we possibly have?
Edit: removed distracting example.
By who?
I'm pretty sure they still teach the difference between passive and active voice in school. Passive voice is great if you want to paint in broad strokes without naming names so people can't actually discuss your points. This is choir-preaching. Or argument by implication if you want a secular term.
I don't agree with the current trends either ("it's completely ok to do bad thing X!"). However, in addition to good advice for individuals, we need to keep trying to create cultural infrastructure that really does work.
The loss came from self-acceptance. I stopped beating myself up when I slipped up, and I stopped letting other people shame me for it. That was good for 50 pounds, and I'm headed back down now that I'm vaccinated and getting as much back on track as I can. I don't have data handy, but I suspect shaming has killed more people and ruined more lives than acceptance.
if the shaming is the stick, but where is the carrot?
they should be provided alternatives and policies that prod towards the better options.
That’s a bad example. Family stability plummeted after the sexual revolution, even as access to birth control and abortion made family planning easier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_parents_in_the_United_S...
Always happy for the opportunity to say that, so thanks!
My siblings in law come from one of those middle/lower middle class primarily white towns you sometimes read about, where two-parent families have declined tremendously. The devastation to the kids is real. Comfortable finances dissolve into financial strain. Lack of stability affects kids’ performance in school. Boys, in particular, suffer growing up without fathers to keep them in line. (It wasn’t until I had boys of my own that I realized how differently they often relate to their mothers versus their fathers. And trust me, we’re not modeling traditional gender roles at my house—my wife’s a scary trial lawyer who pays our mortgage.)
… celebrity worship, corporation worship, politician worship, money worship, conspiracy theories …
Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.
There are very few people not raised in religion or similar belief systems, the few I do know though simply don't worship anything in particular.
It was strange for me to accept at first, like... Ok but like what are you? What do you believe in? And having someone answer: "I'm just me and I don't believe in anything, I don't even ask myself that question, I just live." was perspective changing for me.
Some people actually don't worship anything, and don't care about it.
They could've chosen to not disclose it to you or don't know the true answer for themselves. In that anecdote, they must believe that something is worth just living for, even if it is just themselves.
From later on in the speech transcript linked:
"Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings. They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing."
I don’t think this person has a lot of insight into the minds of non-religious people.
The part of your post reading “ agnosticism is more diametrically opposed to belief than atheism; the latter is belief in one's own disbelief.” is a misrepresentation of what atheism is. Atheism is the conviction that there is most likely not any higher being. Agnosticism is ”I’m not sure if there is a higher being or not”.
Atheism: the doctrine or belief that there is no God [dictionary.com]; the belief that God does not exist [Cambridge Dictionary].
Also, "this person's" father was an atheist, he studied philosophy, and was in-and-out of addiction recovery programs throughout adulthood. He likely had more insight into the minds of non-religious, religious, and whatever people than you're giving him credit for.
What defines and motivates the observed behaviors of folks who are "basically decent people?"
How can that answer be distinguished from that of folks who are not "basically decent people?"
Edit: Obviously decentness is a subjective measure. I’m not sure if you’re trolling me or not but I’m pretty sure you’re at least being intentionally provocative.
I certainly don't disagree. Wallace's proposition is still provocative, uses a broader than religious definition of worship and lays a marker that when one examines one's own viewpoints there are belief structures to be found.
That said, from only the quote, I find that it's a bad leap to go from saying that everyone has some beliefs, to saying that everyone worships something.
I think at this point some clear definitions of how Wallace uses the words is needed to even make sure we discuss the same thing.
Using standard definitions, off course, anyone still capable of thought (so ignore people that are brain dead and other edge cases), will need to make decisions based on partial information all the time. So someone might come to accept that the sky is blue or the earth is round, and won't continue digging deeper into it. Do they know without a doubt that it is true, probably not, but they can "believe" it to be true for practical purposes.
But that belief need not be firmly held, it can simply be based on whatever data they currently know and freely change as more data is revealed to them.
Now to jump to worshipping, you need an externality and the belief in that externality as something to trust in and follow, revere and adore. You need something that you can listen too in order to predict what actions will lead to the future you desire, and to listen too as what future you were meant to arrive at or other such things.
And that's where I'm saying no, some people don't need any externality for that. Some people don't need to believe in a higher meaning or purpose, some people are happy not knowing what the purpose of life if any is, or that there is one to begin with. Some people are happy just living life and being guided by their innate desires and their own thoughts and ideas. They don't need answers to "why do we do what we do, why do we exist, what happens after we die".
Similarly, some people don't worship anything. There is no externality they adore and revere in, that they delegate their life too, and their full trust in.
"Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings. They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing."
The type of worship and belief discussed goes beyond the spiritual or existential or external.
So I'd consider that quote was effectively pulled out of context.
Yeah, not everybody. I love some of the things that money can buy, buy I genuinely hate money. Love of money brings out the absolute worst in humanity far too often, and lack of enough money causes entirely too much misery. The old phrase "money is the root of all evil" isn't all that far off from true. Greed and love of money are the cause of more problems on this planet than I can count (and I'm pretty damned good at counting).
What causes problems is inequality, not money per se.
Very true. I went to a public school in Eastern Europe and everyone had to go through the same curriculum no matter what you wanted to focus on after graduation. The basic principle here is to expose students to all subjects and let them decide what they want to focus on in places of higher education.
However, in American schools it seemed that you could pretty much weave your way through public schools only taking courses you think you need after you cover some of the basic subjects. There are several problems with this approach. First of all, you're never exposed to subjects that you didn't originally have interest in, but could potentially have appreciation for had you invested some time learning about them. Secondly, your scope of knowledge ends up being pretty narrowly limited to things that you're interested in while having little to no idea about everything else. Lastly, I think colleges and universities end up picking up the slack here when they start teaching coursework that should've otherwise been part of public school curriculum.
All-in-all, it is my belief that having at least surface-level understanding in various subjects does make a difference as you get older because it gives you just enough knowledge to be able to look at life in a different light and, at the very least, have a general idea how to start making adjustments. Not to say that you won't need help. In fact, you still might but you're in a much better place than where you would be blindly following someone's advice in a gimmicky self-help book.
In my final year of High School education I had some freedom, but it was along the lines of, "You have access to advanced Biology, Physics, and English. Choose two." (It was more complicated than this, simplified for example's sake)
For the rest of high school I had one elective course and the rest was more rigid. I was able to choose which foreign language I would like to study and I could choose a particular artistic pursuit. Everything else was thoroughly constructed and regimented. Arts, Humanities, Sciences, Mathematics, Language were required each year.
Even when I went to college, the first two semesters required the same mix of curriculum before I was able to specialize.
It already did --- it's called politics.
"The problem for politics of the rise of individualism is that it can't deal with it. Politics requires you to say to people as a political party, come with me, join with us together and we will use that collective power to change the world. But to do that you have to accept that you are part of something, you have to surrender yourself to something. And for the radical movements, that was a disaster. But more than that, it was a disaster for politics generally. Because political parties fell away. So what then politicians they were then faced by is the fact that they didn't have mass support so they couldn't do the main thing that mass democratic politics rose up to do which is to be your representative, your bridgehead into power."
Later on in the video:
"I do think that one thing that's going to come back onto the table is religion. Because I think the real weakness of the modern systems of managing us as individuals is that it cannot deal with our own mortality... The sense that when they die something will go on and they will be part of something that's going on... In the modern rational, efficient, utilitarian, technocratic world of managing the individual - [the world] cannot give you any consolation."
I don't see how politics could answer that.
To be fair with the US, they have formed a pretty neat legend around the founding fathers and the constitution. I would consider that cultural infrastructure.
Two concrete examples. Families have strong involvement in marriage. This isn’t just “here’s your spouse take it or leave it.” It’s a process by which people who have been married a long time and coach a young person about what qualities to look for in a marriage partner. (I remember my wife remarking 8 years into our American-style marriage that she was surprised by how inconsequential her dating preferences at 25 turned out to be. “Who cares what kind of music your husband likes at 2 am when the baby is crying?”)
There’s also a lot of active coaching in marriage. I remember my dad being dispatched by the aunties to fly to another state to coach a young couple going through a rough patch.
First and foremost, there's the pure frequency in which that term is used. Good luck spending a day in Europe and not being exposed to one tradition or another. It's kind of cute in a superficial way (the way that people dress up for balls in Vienna), and very counter-progressive in others (the way that doctors are more respected than programmers).
I would also wage to say that the pure interpretation of the term is a bit different. In the US, using the term "traditionally" in a sentence could have a positive connotation (eg: "traditionally, we celebrate new launches with some drinks") or a negative connotation ("those traditional companies are usually lacking in technology"). In contrast, invoking the term "tradition" in a sentence in, let's say Germany, would be to describe a near-religious ritual that cannot and must not be changed or even questioned (eg: "for Oktoberfest, people dress in traditional outfits that include lederhosen and dirndls.") I struggle to think of a frequent context in Germany in which the term traditional would have a negative connotation.
All this is to say that tradition is a wonderful thing if your circumstances lead you to invoke as little change as possible. But for those seeking social mobility and other types of change in their lives, I would argue that traditions can be very negative.
It's really not though.
By Western standards, America is a very conformist country. You can see this in how schoolchildren are required to pledge allegiance to the flag, to the slow acceptance of gay rights, to controversy over saying over "Happy Holidays."
I deeply wish America was a country that supported individualism in the sense of supporting and even celebrating the right to live your life as you see fit.
All too often, however, it seems that this love of "individualism" only surfaces when someone needs help or asks for cooperation.
That's not individualism. This simply selfishness.
However, for the purpose of this discussion, we are talking about a society's relative tolerance of individuals choosing to live their life the way they wish and a relatively weak emphasis on social conformity.
I'm sure someone has done proper quantitative research on this, but offhand, I think the Netherlands would score pretty high.
P.S. I used "Western standards" to differentiate from developed Asian nations like Japan, Korea, and Singapore which are more conformist.
Huh? Many US states legalized same-sex marriage before other Western democracies like France, New Zealand, Germany, etc. What exactly was slow?
France: 2013
New Zealand: 2013
United States: 2015
Germany: 2017
Other European nations began legalization as early as 2001.
Individual states, provinces, and cities might have acted sooner, but lets compare apples to apples.
An inordinate number of laws in the US are de facto “national” only because all States recognize similar laws, not because there is actually a national law. The Federal government doesn’t have the authority to enact most laws. It is the same reason the US does not have a national ID, why corporations are solely creatures of individual States, and why public health policy is decided by States (see: COVID).
New York (Population: 8.49 million): 2011
With populations like that, I think that is comparing apples to apples.
Essentially, a lot of these books are about executive functioning skills, the meta-level planning and goal-setting and failure-analysis efforts that are necessary to make progress in whatever field. I think it is also true, as other commenters note, that to some extent they fill an ethical or existential void left by the decline of religion.
Maybe they hoped this way you'd get to learn the science technology? :-)
Maybe I'd come out of all that just by time passing / aging... but I decided to read about the things I was failing to accomplish. Having a self-identity and the integrity to maintain my identity when faced with challenges. Understanding boundaries in relationships. Learning how to accomplish tasks at work and succeed in projects.
I suspect a combination of the bad experiences, surviving them, learning from mistakes and the things I learned from books all contributed to an overall more capable person. I gained confidence, stability in relationships, greater diligence and sense of responsibility at work. Not everything is sunshine and roses. There's still a long list of projects I dreamed of or started, but failed or abandoned. But the list of people that seem to trust me and seek me out for "adult" advice has grown.
In many ways, I am not the picture of American success, but I am happy with what I've done with myself, with the potential I've tapped, the relationships I've built, and so on. I think of myself as leaning towards the side of being discontent with unpleasant circumstances that I'm capable of changing. There's plenty that's bigger that I might not be happy about, but by having a clear picture of your locus of control, the gist of the Serenity Prayer applies. And improving your self is top of the list of things you can change.
Every experience I've had with a doctor that was less severe than "I am actively dying" has just been "Take pain killers for a couple weeks and come back if it isn't fixed by then, also here is a $200 bill."
The one time I hired someone to fix something on my house (to fix some water damage), I had a literal stream of water coming in to my house above the repair the next time it rained.
In most cases, it seems you need to know the answer to the problem yourself before you can trust someone else to diagnose and fix the problem correctly.
I don't know what I don't know, but I also don't know where to get that knowledge, so a reasonable first step is to investigate the people pushing "self-help" methods.
From there you can often learn the right keywords to get a foot in the door with someone knowledgeable and have them actually tell you something useful rather than just taking your money and sending you on your way.
How many people have died because we keep letting physicians tell us this?
I'm pro Evidence Based Medicine, but physicians can't buy mansions if the medicine can be discussed by scientists.
- Journal clubs are in all fields of medicine. Yes the scientific rigor is definitely lacking, but it's more from poor understanding of statistics and the sci method than maliciousness
- if you want to deregulate the medical industry, many more people will die. For instance, the easiest way to make money in the ER is to refuse the uninsured dying patient without due course
I'm with parent, unless you have a lot of time and money to spend, or an obvious problem like a broken leg, doctors aren't worth very much.
anecdote time... went to the doctor once about an issue. She started typing into the computer. I caught a glimpse and she was literally scrolling through a Google image search, looking for a match.
That's the catch-22 with professional help. You need to hire a lawyer to help keep you out of trouble or solve your business problems. But since you're not a lawyer yourself, you can't judge the quality of the work. You're at the mercy of Yelp-like reputation systems or, possibly worse, recommendations from friends and people you know.
What is a normal weight for a house cat? 150lbs
<expand>
"Is it normal for my house cat to weigh 150lbs?
No, says every vet ever."
Cards on the table, I’ve had shingles twice. If you want to get technical about it, I will always have the virus that causes it, but it will not always be able to break through.
First outbreak, didn’t know what it was, it was in a part of my neck and shoulder I couldn’t see and based off feel and texture, I figured “eh, Hives”, and treated it as such. So the shingles progressed, and you definitely don’t want that, until I felt physically compelled to go see a doctor ASAP.
One look, with no reference material, no image searches, no charts, the Doctor instantly knew what it was and didn’t bullshit me about my age. Wrote me an antiviral prescription and I was out the door.
Second time, shingles being one of the circles of hell, I figure it out before it progresses, and this time I go to a an urgent care clinic because I don’t need a diagnoses, I need a prescription vending machine. Young guy walks in, quite a bit less experienced, I all but tell him exactly what I’m there for, and he’s a bit unsure because of my age, but he walks into another room, looks at a chart, and vends me my prescription. If not for a chart on the wall and my prior and convincing experience, he would have wanted a blood test.
Now I’m sure the latter is a fine doctor with a few more years under his belt now, and can reference this event in his own mind the next time he’s feeling skeptical, but sometimes being a doctor is just having the experience to know what’s up, and knowing that maybe it’s been too long since med school and maybe you should cross reference it from somewhere, or ask a colleague. And some doctors don’t need to look at anything at all, and can pronounce a diagnoses on the spot.
I looked at the chart, it just showed the different patterns of different skin conditions, and these weren’t photos but illustrations. Couldn’t tell you if that’s better or worse than Google Images, but I wished I didn’t have to go to a Doctor in the first place to ask permission to buy the same antivirals I used before.
It's not the typing or the Google search anyone is paying for they are paying for the usage of the highly trained brain that can evaluate what they are reading in the context of the hard earned skills and information possesses by the reader.
On the topic of the doctors I wonder how it would work out if we combined anonymous analysis of doctors work by other doctors with patients.
The availability of reference material doesn't give you expertise, context, trained judgement, etc. The value that an expert provides is not in their ability to memorize facts and regurgitate them.
This is definitely not:
> expertise, context, trained judgement,
There are a lot of smart people who just want to make their salary and go home with minimal fuss. They have wisdom if you’re willing to listen but they’re not about to argue with anyone.
Someone being an expert is not necessarily the same as being good at their job.
If you aren't receiving an annual check up AND don't have a problem more complicated than you can google indeed you shouldn't waste your money and both of your time. What is within the individuals ability to understand is going to vary widely.
Your health insurance wont pay for expensive tests or treatments based on your say so because if they did people less intelligent and more paranoid than yourselves would order the moon based on what they found on webmd.
I've been using "concierge" medicine ever since.
Hiring a person for a home repair often takes just as long as learning how to do it myself, given how often they make mistakes or do poor quality work. Same for doctors; I can't remember the last time I was told something by a doctor I didn't already know from researching it myself. They mostly just gatekeep medicine, IME.
This isn't at all meant to say that I'm particularly good at research, mostly I'm talking about knowledge that's a quick DDG search or youtube video away.
Motivation and happiness are vague words or concepts.
Existentialism and existential nihilism explain this.
Those books are not based on science, and if they were, they would talk about it.
Apart from saving the world from climate change and tax justice I cannot find any meaning I could find in those books.
Self Help is either a How To book or Philosophy?
Both have quite a bit of value to the individual. Even as the author describes this as feeding the business machine, both self help and philosophy can make you aware when this is happening.
I read these genres and can see clearly why my boss was told to repeat company statements. I sit back and witness corporate propaganda/marketing and am aware they are coming for my brain.
Without self help and philosophy, would I be hacked into mindless compliance?
It's not a myth. It's the truth about early America. Big businesses really didn't arrive in force until after the Civil War.
Maybe don't know how to get it, don't have money, feel ashamed...
Society needs help and reform
It seems more popular recently to talk about external problems that you realistically can't impact ("why should anyone be a billionaire") rather than focus on what you can actually change ("how do I grow valuable skill sets and market myself better to increase my compensation.")
Obviously, not every self-help book is going to be good, or right for you, and you may not absorb and implement it, but I'd much rather bet on someone who at least tries to steer their own ship.
This is merely arguing from extremes, and is responding to a position your parent did not take (i.e. strawman): He didn't say "never" or "always", he said "more popular"
Also, I could make the equally correct/problematic statement:
If we only talk about external problems such as systems that make it impossible to meaningfully increase one's compensation, then no amount of social reform will improve your condition.
You need external things to change, but you also need to change yourself internally. The dispute is on how much of each.
According to that report, the US is a half standard deviation above the median of social mobility. It isn't charitable to characterize that as doing "poorly."
Obsession?
Hardly.
My career is fine, I'm fine, I know enough about tech and engineering management to be at least mediocre.
There is a 50 book 40k series out there I think I'd rather spend more time with.
[1] - https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Side-Light-Chasers-Reclaiming/dp...
My French grandparents lived until they were 100, were perfectly content, had 8 kids, ate great food during long meals and drank lots of wine. I don't think they jogged a day in their lives.
i don't think they were sitting all day eating highly processed food either.
Obviously something gets lost in the macro nutrients/vitamin content - but I don't think I've seen a formal study of why they are different.
I'm also very curious how much better US health would be if we could wave a magic wand and replace all sugary drinks with water. 64oz of sugar-water with a meal is a lot, but not uncommon thanks to free refills and helpful waiters always topping everyone off. Lots of people have way more than that on an average day, too. I'm sure it wouldn't fix (anywhere near) everything, but I bet that single factor is an awful lot of the cause of dietary-related illness rate differences between the US and other countries. The others have soda too, but it doesn't flow as freely and cheaply as here[0], and enormous cups/bottles of the stuff multiple times a day isn't common most places.
[0] With some exceptions—I understand Mexico, for example, consumes lots of sugary soda.
Why do consumers often think that the smaller portion is more filling when eating a properly proportioned french meal than the equivalent calories from McDonalds?
Food pricing, especially at chain restaurants and fast-food joints, tends to support this. It's not uncommon to pay 20% more for double the food, either because larger sizes aren't much more expensive than smaller ones, or thanks to "combo" meals. Restaurants seem to be optimizing for total sales, not margin on individual items, based on how they price—in many cases their entire menu seems to exist only to make the "combo meal" look like a good deal, but of course it may be more food than you really wanted.
To say nothing of the phenomenon of all-you-can-eat buffets...
Some of it's food culture. Giant portions are normal so you don't think twice about piling your plate high. Norms (and, yes, judgement/shaming) about consumption affect patterns of same. Snacking, even heavy snacking, between meals, is common. This may be suppressed elsewhere by stronger "you eat at meal times—if not exclusively, then nearly so" norms, and snack-availability that's about what you'd expect, given those norms.
Some people think our commonly-accessible "good" food (fruits, veggies, not from specialty stores, just the main produce section of normal grocery stores) are a lot worse than what's normal in some other, healthier countries. I don't have enough experience to claim anything definitive on this, but what experience I do have does support it. If "good" food doesn't taste as good as elsewhere, or if getting something as good as others' normal produce requires special shopping and much higher prices, maybe one tends to reach for umami-bomb fat+starch garbage, which is both kinda-addictive and not very filling.
A lot of our standard cooking is tied up heavily with giant portions. We even seem to do this with imported cuisines, for whatever reason. Not-especially-good food in giant portions. Heaping plates of mediocre pasta+sauce as our image of Italian food, Mexican food with bottomless chips & salsa (and huge, cheese-slathered plates for the entrees), that kind of thing. I guess that's more of the food-culture thing.
I doubt any of these are all of the reason, and maybe none of them are correct at all.
On the other hand, foods like rice, potatoes, etc do.
[1] https://www.webmd.com/diet/features/satiety-new-diet-weapon (soft ref, appropriate grain of salt)
Way, way more stores having very late or even 24/7 hours than before has probably further disrupted any norms and culture we had about when & where to eat—not just for the shoppers who have those wares available more hours of the day, but I'm thinking especially of the workers—believe it or not, young'uns, but as recently as the early 2000s almost everything in the US but certain districts of major cities were shut down and dead by a reasonable hour.
Another, possibly minor factor: I have a suspicion we have more waking hours per day, on average, than Americans did 50 years ago. You can't eat (snack) when you're sleeping, even if food's available.
There’s various other confounding factors such as how and when you eat, and ultimately your relationship with food.
There is plenty of research linking processed food with health risks.
You don't make food cheaper by reducing the quality of ingrediants since decent ingredients are still really cheap. You make food cheaper by making it more preserved.
A lot of food cost is in waste and spoilage. Cheap foods are typically things that handle well and don't perish easily.
You accomplish this by adding more fat, more salt, and heavily processing food. You strip all the bacteria and cultures from it and you can get a tv dinner to last a decade if it's packaged well.
On the other hand, gourmet food is all prone to spoilage. Squeaky cheese curds, fresh pasta, homemade tortillas, etc.
I think America really has figured out the difference and that information is pretty easily accessible - but if you're working twelve hours then you'll grab the five dollar TV dinner and just ignore the downsides.
Opportunity knocking, are you listening?
That might describe some parts of America, but it's definitely not universal. The German immigrants that formed the generation before me were drinking more and exercising less. They were also farmers, so they didn't need to exercise.
I would argue that it's the heavy influence of immigrants from all over the world that caused the self-help obsession. Those who came here weren't a random sample from their home countries. Immigration was itself a form of self-help.
Sometimes this is seen by policy-makers as indicative of a problem with the native population. Sometimes this is cast as immigrants taking over.
The reality is rather straightforward, imo. The type of person willing and able to uproot themselves from their parent culture and set their sails for new opportunity is a huge selection event, in and of itself. It's no wonder that the most driven percentage of humanity turns out to be the most successful.
(This is also why I think the US would only benefit from much less restrictive immigration policy, but that is a discussion for another thread.)
If I may hazard a guess: Quebecois?
I lived in Toronto for a few years, with the occasional trip to Montreal. I definitely noticed a cultural difference between the provinces—Quebec was rather less stressed out, whereas Ontario is just as tight-assed Protestant as the Midwest. (Maybe more so. Can’t buy wine at a grocery store? Raw uncut Calvinism.)
By the time mergers and acquisitions left it to be owned completely by foreign interests, all while Ontario's emerging craft beer scene were prohibited from inclusion, there was absolutely no excuse for it anymore. How the 2015 Master Framework Agreement got signed continues to boggle the mind.
Rural Ontario has allowed the sale of alcohol (all kinds) in grocery and corner stores since the 1960s. It is amazing how slow the rest of the province is to catch up. It took until the year 2000 for Toronto to fully let go of being dry.
While I love my kids, I don't consider it an achievement.
And hedonism seems great until you climb the hedonic treadmill. Your claim of the "content" life leaves lots to disect.
My (100% American) grandpa also lived to 100...he also never exercised and even smoked for 20 years or so. He ate whatever he wanted but didn't over-eat candy and snacks, which I think is the main issue lots of people have.
It’s more about motivational-life-coach-metaphysical-wealth-manifestation-secrets.
Furthermore some of us exercise not just for the sake of it, we do it to enable us to become better at activities that we enjoy. I enjoy being able to track my measurable improvement at sports such as tennis and badminton as a result of my going to the gym and work on high intensity interval training, anaerobics, etc.
I think this is part of the reason the US has been so successful and innovative. Hard work and improvement are seen as virtues here. A life of sloth and mediocrity, avoiding work and relying on the government to provide for you was not seen as something good until recently. I hope the essence of America isn't lost forever: industry, innovation, and individualism.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-under-pressu...
> America is built mostly on immigrant work ethic
Isn't it interesting how many believe the US was solely built by immigrants, slaves, and natives. I wonder what American citizens did during this time?
> the collapse of the european powers
The US was already inventing and building in the 1800s, no collapse needed.
> Not sure america is that special, just lucky - right place, right time.
It's easy to ascribe luck to anything successful. You could say Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc were nothing special, just lucky - right place, right time, but I don't think that's true.
And? What's your point?