If you
Helen Dale explains why so many people need self-help books: because they weren’t taught or didn’t learn enough growing up. The piece as a whole isn’t among her best work, because there’s way too much self-conscious meta, too many clauses commenting on previous clauses, too much performance, but the final full paragraph is unclotted and So True.
If you are emotionally devastated by the leftward lean of science fiction to the point of launching a campaign to “take back” the genre; if the moral struggle that gets you out of bed each morning is purging racism from young adult fantasy novels; if you feel besieged by the political predilections of self-declared gamers (or betrayed by the politics of game reviewers); if you use films about comic-book characters to form your worldview; if you cast about for a metaphor to describe your deepest beliefs and find only Harry Potter . . . you are still a child. You need to step back and work out why your identity is so invested in escapist fancies designed to appeal to confused children halfway through puberty.
Exactly so.
I remember a conversation I had with our school librarian about self-help books (she feels obliged to stock them because of demand). We both decided we didn’t need self-help books because we were already perfect. (Of course, if we truly believed that, we would be as childish as the author describes those who need them.)
The only self-help book I ever read was recommended by my therapist. I hated it. It seems the answer to childhood trauma is to become a lesbian, at least if that book is to be believed. I didn’t follow the advice.
“Self-help books.”
To rely on a book is not to rely on the “self.”
Oh, the irony.
The whole world of self-help is founded on the idea that we can change ourselves by an act of will (The Power of Positive Thinking!) There’s a huge range here. At one end is cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). CBT does work–it is one of the few success stories of modern psychiatry. At the other end is stuff like The Secret (the Law of Attraction) which is outright magical thinking.
In the middle is a big squishy area where it seems plausible that we can improve our lives by an exercise of will, and yet…it doesn’t work in practice. A shining example of this is dieting. It is true that we decide, from moment to moment, whether to eat each bite of food. Surely if we decide to eat less, we will lose weight. But we have done the studies; we have the data: diets don’t work. People don’t lose weight. There is something else going on.
My perception is that the best I can do is try to manage the body and mind that I have. And as I make my way through the years, I find the things that I have control over to be an ever-shrinking domain. Not because I am actually losing control of things, but because I realize that I never had that control in the first place, and my belief that I did was an illusion.
I think the same of Motivational Speakers and business success books. I’ve had several recoemmended to me, and had managers who go to see Zig Ziglar. One boss lent me some tapes to listen to while I did a lot of traveling. And, I didn’t really learn anything from them, other than be positive and watch for pitfalls.
There, my summary.
Of course, there is research that a workplace that emphasizes the positive is a dishonest workplace.
I do think that science fiction and fantasy well-written can be an effective teacher, if we understand how to separate theme from plot, but to envelope ourselves in the worlds created in fiction so deeply as she describes can be as dangerous as any obsession.
#4:
Education just loves motivational speakers. Every motivational speaker I have heard is all about positive thinking. If you don’t let someone hurt you, they can’t. That’s actually BS; there are a lot of ways to hurt someone. If my boss cuts my pay and my hours, this is not because I let him, it’s because he did it. There are few ways to stop bosses in our modern world.
But the speakers are loved by bosses because it tells us if we are working in a toxic environment, it is not the environment or the boss that’s the problem, it’s the employee. What these speakers are basically telling us is to embrace masochism. Also, not to try to change anything but ourselves. If we truly believe nothing is wrong but us, then we don’t work to change the environment to a better, more productive, and healthier environment. We just learn to take it, sort of like the abused wife who continues to take the abuse because she believes she is being punished for badness…or in some cases, because she has nowhere else to go.
I agree about fantasy/sci fi. The real key is not in refusing to read or engage, it’s in refusing to accept that it is real. I was always good at that, which might be why it was so easy for me to consider the Bible as fiction. It was too impossible to believe.
The quoted paragraph reminds me of a few points Freddie deBoer has made in various essays, most pointedly you aren’t the shit you like [sic]. Tinged with his preferred lens of Marxism, I find it nevertheless worth noting how vast swathes of mostly-younger people have keyed in so much of their self-worth with the work product of the richest entertainment corporation in the history of the world.
I recall a Twitter thread of someone supposedly “schooling” J. K. Rowling on trans issues by quoting Harry Potter back to her, specifically a scene in the final book when seven of Harry’s friends (including at least two females) drink a potion that transforms their physical bodies into his in order to raise the chances that the Death Eaters won’t find and kill him. For his argument to work, you must acknowledge that there is no material difference between a trans person’s existence (qua trans-hood) and a scene in a fictional novel written by someone he considered a transphobe.
Which, for an adult, should have been the whole ballgame; to be clear, this was not an analogy predicated upon empathy with a fictional but nevertheless important cast of characters, but rather an attempted dunking on Rowling because she had written a scene in which Hermione and Tonks magically transmute their bodies into identical copies of Harry’s body but nevertheless remain women. I believe one of the points of contention was how Rowling kept referring to the women by their female names and female pronouns even as they assumed the body of a man.
But the thing is…these specific points do not matter. The scene is fictional, the characters operating under a set of rules that do not obtain in our own world. And while the effect of stories and characters can be all too real for us, these effects play out in the playground of our thoughts, in the space of our imaginations. And, while we can realise the best results of our imaginations if we work hard enough, this realisation will always be wrought with atoms, with all the rules that atoms have to follow.
Collapsing the distinction between fantasy and reality might actually go a fair distance to explain many phenomena we observe. And there are many antecedent causes to this collapse in our culture, some of which Helen Dale and Freddie deBoer touch upon, but I think many of them boil down to the conundrum the human race finds itself in, inhabiting a world that we made rather than the world that made us.
Interesting title. In a way I think we are the shit we like, in part, and in some sense…and also the shit we don’t like, and the shit we learn from without exactly either liking or disliking it, and so on. What we pay attention to helps to shape us. That’s one reason it’s a really good idea to go beyond the poppest of pop culture.
Thanks for the link – excellent read!
I’ve always felt that self-help books and motivational speakers are either futile or redundant; that is, they can’t give people attributes and personal resources or motivation that they don’t already have, and serve only to frustrate those without such things, while those devotees who really can claim success would have done just as well without them.
And yeah, I could do without the knee-jerk bashing of sci-fi/fantasy and comic book films. I know what Dale is getting at here — I am a little bewildered by the people who constantly try to use (e.g., but especially) Harry Potter as a lens through which to interpret morally complex real-life situations. But Dale pretty much disclaims any attempt at a nuanced view:
Re: Motivational speakers
https://xkcd.com/1827/
Taking the opportunity to plug one of my favourite books:
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/W/bo18221315.html
Boring title, important arguments. Briefly, in pre-industrial America most people believed things about capitalism that were more or less true. If you worked harder and better you would accumulate wealth and status. Everyone in the community needed to contribute their labour or the community would not survive. Your work was a part of who you were, and part of your identity in the community. Your work changed the world, in however small a way. These ideas became unmoored from any semblance of reality during the industrialisation of the United States, which left confused and bewildered people wondering why, and what, if not work, actually did lead to wealth and success. Enter the first wave of ‘self-help’ teachers, offering that special ‘extra something’ which people who worked harder and better but somehow never achieved success needed but didn’t know they needed.
Der Durchwanderer, I guess I better watch out. I wrote a book in which an entire team of witches, numbered around 30, all changed their appearance to one teenage male to confuse the witch that wanted to capture one of the females in the team. It sort of worked; they kidnapped the young male who actually belonged to the face all of them were wearing, assuming because he was wearing a pink sweater he was female.
Durchwanderer@6
I just noticed the link to your blog. Added to my RSS reader.
I had never heard of Freddie deBoer until a few days ago, when I came across an interesting article about his book, “The Cult of Smart”. Very different points of view from what I’m used to.
Or as George Carlin put it, “That’s not self-help, that’s help! Please use the rules of language we’ve already established.” (I may not remember the 2nd sentence exactly but it’s close enough)
Re: the sneering attitude towards sci fi not only shows a serious lack of understanding of the better stuff out there. It also is a typical example of in tuh lek shuahl snobbery. “How dare you read a fantasy novel. You should be reading a deep sophisticated and enervating description of upper middle class urbanites’ love lives or lack thereof. Written in confusing paragraph long sentences. Or at least a deep review of the latest games in the Victimhood Olympics!”
No, I don’t think so. It’s not “how dare you read a fantasy novel,” it’s if fantasy is all you read then your horizons are too narrow. If fiction is all you read then your horizons are too narrow.
Brian M- While I do agree that there is an attitude of dismissal towards science fiction and fantasy, and there were many essays in sci-fi mags in the seventies and eighties regarding the “sci-fi” ghetto, there was also a resistance among some writers such as Asimov towards addressing the criticism. He wrote an essay entitled “The Little Tin God of Characterization,” blasting his critics for focusing on his lack of character development. He had a story to tell, by gum, and the people didn’t matter as much as the events! So, while there are and have been fantastic novelists out there for SF & F such as Tolkien, CJ Cherryj, LeGuin, and others; many of the most popular hard science fiction writers such as Asimov and Heinlein painted their people in monochrome. Heinlein, in particular, was not quite as bad as Ayn Rand at “libertarian good, all else are socialists,” but he tended to be quite narrow in his casting even in “Time Enough For Love.” I devoured a lot of science fiction even though much of it was barely elevated about the literary level of romance novels, horror, and pulp fiction detective stories.
So, some of the side-eye towards science fiction is an own-goal.
MH @17,
Sure, there’s a lot of sci-fi with weak characters, contrived plotlines, etc. But you could say the same about any genre. Or, as sci-fi writer Theodore Sturgeon put it when he coined Sturgeon’s Law: