"If you're reading a book, folks, it ain't self-help. It's help." This is George Carlin on self-help and self-actualization.
Steve Salerno, in this book about the hoax that is self-help, suggests people should stop fooling themselves and avoid ". . . the rose-colored prism through which society tends to view self-help. By definition, it's a good thing. At worst, it's innocuous." This is not so, says Salerno. In fact, many of the America's problems these days stem from the widespread acceptance of the ideas behind what he calls SHAM.
In SHAM: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless, Salerno shows the widespread and destructive effects of the decades-long growth of the sale of books and lectures and other programs that purport to solve but have rather made worse the problems of individuals and businesses, education and politics. He points out with almost countless scientific studies the dangers of the mind games of victimization, of recovery programs like AA that have been shown in studies to be worse than going it on one's own, of self-esteem based on no achievement whatever, and of an exaggerated sense of entitlement. Everything today has to be shown to be the evil fault of someone - someone else.
One of the most dangerous of these SHAM fads is alternative medicine.
An old joke:
Q: What do you call alternative medicine that works?
A: Medicine
"There is no alternative medicine" was how Dr Arnold Redman, onetime editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, puts it in a landmark 1998 article for the New Republic. "There is only scientifically proven, evidence-based medicine supported by solid data, or [there is] unproven medicine, for which scientific evidence is lacking." The claims made for alt-med are anchored in a stew of pseudoscience, questionable testimonials, invented jargon ("geopathic stress"), and seductive buzz-words borrowed from self-help ("personal empowerment")
"They claim that science does not have all the answers, and that's true. . . . But quackery has no answers."
One of the most destructive effects of self-help's sweep through our society is the "alternative household." This is the root of discipline problems in school and the increase in drop-outs, soaring crime rates, and many other social pathologies.
Now that we have removed God from the lives of our youth and blurred or removed the distinction between right and wrong, and self-help has taught us that we are not to blame for our problems, unwed mothers, men abandoning their families, inner city drug use and violence have been moving out into the rest of the US. "According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 72 percent of incarcerated juveniles [most of them male] come from single-parent households. That is, they are living with - I won't say are being raised by - unwed mothers and they are controlled by no male authority.
The reader is welcome to view all this as he chooses, but Salerno makes a reasoned case that self-help has done a good deal of this damage.