Apr 11, 2008 Posted by Nancy Williams on Apr 11, 2008 in 888 Challenge, Skepticism | 0 comments

SHAM: How the Gurus of the Self-Help Movement Make Us Helpless – Steve Salerno

I spent much of this book in a state of some confusion. I wasn’t confused because I didn’t understand the subject matter – rather my confusion came from my feelings towards it. Much of the book I agreed with strongly, but other parts I didn’t agree with at all. To be fair, this paradox lends the book its interest and ensures it is a success because it really drove my to think about why I was reacting towards it the way I was.

Steve Salerno is a journalist who discovered that the acronym of the Self-Help and Actualisation Movement was SHAM. This serves well to outline what his expose is all about. His basic thesis is that with the growth of the ’self-help’ industry in America, the result has been a nationwide helplessness, selfishness and imprisonment in a vicious cycle of feeling awful, being given hope and then feeling awful again. He deals with the self-help movement in general and with Dr Phil, Tony Robbins and Alcoholics Anonymous in particular. Salerno identifies that all of the movements are either based on the premise that everyone is a victim (in other words, everything that happens to you in life is someone else’s fault – you are completely blameless) or that everyone is empowered (in other words, no matter what your actual talents, skills and capacity you have a right to be the best and no-one has any right to stop you). Perhaps these might have been valuable premises to start with, but Salerno argues that the result is a society which is litigious to the point of stupidity, the destruction of families due to artificial blame and the complete exoneration of any responsibility for one’s own life on the one hand, and the destruction of any kind of competition (to the point that competitive games can no longer be played in some schools), the false building up of people’s hopes and the cotton wool mentality that nothing bad can ever happen to you if you just believe on the other.

I found myself agreeing with much of this. Perhaps it is an indication of my age, but I cannot see how a total elimination of any form of competition or grading in schools can be a good thing. I also found myself growing angry as Salerno outlined the result of this mentality of “it’s not my fault, it is the fault of my family/upbringing/illness/society/the banks/my boss/my dog…”

And yet, I don’t see ’self-help’ as all bad. What I see is bad is when it is taken to the extreme that it has been. Self-awareness and honesty is a valuable trait. Of course, I don’t see blaming the whole world for your misfortunes as being particularly honest, but I do think the understanding yourself and how you think is vital to get along in life. Salerno seemed to switch, sometimes even mid-sentence, from exposing the extremes of self-help to exposing simple self awareness as a bad thing. Unfortunately, despite the value of much of his argument, I found this weakened it somewhat and I came away not being as convinced as I could be.

The other fault I found was that this book was devoted to exposing how bad things had become, but spent very little time on suggesting some possible solutions. Granted, it may be almost impossible now to reverse the damage that the self-help movement may have caused. And more so, with the amount of money that the movement makes each year, I doubt it is going to change in a hurry. But, I have always thought “If it worked, then why would you ever need to buy more than one book?”. Fortunately for the movement, it doesn’t work, and so people will continue to spend seeking the holy grail of happiness while all the time steering themselves away from it.

It makes for disturbing reading and it definitely makes you think but a little more consistency wouldn’t have gone astray.

Rating: 5/10
ISBN: 1-85788-380-2
Publisher: Nicholas Brealey Publishing
Year: 2005
Date Finished: 4th April 2008
Pages: 263
Challenges: 2/8 of category 6 – Science and Skepticism (I relent – I’ll use the American spelling) of the 888 Challenge.