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Whether you are an efficient worker looking for answers, or a person trying to improve yourself, you have heard about the self-help movement. With 11 billion $ on revenue and thousands of books, coaches, seminars and courses, its a given that at some point or another, you have read or heard of something trying to allegedly improve your life.

What a beautiful summary, right? The self-help movements is trying to make us better, happier humans. Or is it?

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The Self-Help industry is selling air

With ideas from science, the world of bussiness and sports, the self-help industry is selling us an ideal vision and a set of steps that supposedly can make our dreams come true. The dark side of this is that first and foremost, the self-help industry is a bussiness, and is worried with making money. Moreover, the self-help industry secret weapon is that it situated the whole resposibility of systemic problems on the individual.

The self-help industry disregards the bigger picture. It doesn’t speak about the systemic problems that make it difficult for a lot of people to thrive. Moreover, its message of individual resposnibility makes islands out of us, and makes it easier for the state to justify privatization in favour of the allegedly individual responsibility.

The self help-industry is not a separate entity in the state of affairs. It is both a movement influenced and working in favour of the free flow and accumulation of capital and a body of knowledge influencing hugely in politics, society and the economy. Its main points transcend books and go to be a part of usual knowledge and mantras in politics and government, leading the psychologization of society.

Individual responsibility

Free from the opinions of politics, the state and the market are left to its own devices and to continue its purpose of capital accumulation. The self-help books have an internal and external modus operandi. In the one hand, it exploits the feelings of inadequacy of the population, who, in hopes of achieving success and stop its feelings of inadequacy, goes on to buy more books and consume more self-help material.

On the other hand, it affects society, and makes islands out of individuals, increasing individualism. Problems such as a poor labour market are no longer a fight for rights from big sectors of the population. Rather, each individual is left believing that they are both the problem and the solution. With the world open to act on its own, the self-help industry draws a world in which responsibility is no longer for the state to take care of its citizens. rather, it is now the problem of the individual to adapt, change, evolve or improve. The political arena is substituted for individuals that work and think alone, that believe that its their own resposibility when there aren’t jobs that can provide labour for the long-term, or when the state implements yet another austerity measure.

The freedom of capital is proritized over the wellbeing of citizens

The government should safeguard the job security and labour from exploitative practices. Prioritizing the wellbeing of citizens is against the states’ rethoric of individual autonomy.

This appeal to personal responsibility hides privatization practices. The narrative of personal responsibility encourages austerity, and is the language of neoliberal capitalism.

This frees capitalism from responsibility to us, but it does not free us from our responsibility to be efficient workers for capital accumulation.

The resulting demonization of the notion of dependency is nothing more than an attempt to privatize risk.

Our failure to adapt to the many demands of the capitalist life is framed as being our own failure.

Designing imperative ways of being

Being happy is transformed into an ideal way of being. One that helps enterprises to be more productive given the ‘wellbeing’ of its workers. Emotions tranform into the currency in which workers are paid and it is expected of them to increase productivity.

The great amount of courses, masters and studies around happines and wellbeing have constructed its own ‘regime of truth’, in which happiness and self-improvement is no longer argued and is taken as the ‘truth’.

Escaping the rabbit hole of self-help

The self-help industry puts the responsibility of systemic problems in the individual, absolving the state from its responsibility towards its citizens. In doing so, it absolves certain citizens of that responsbility (those in the financial sector)

The demonization of the notion of dependency is nothing more than an attempt to privatize risk, and making the individual the actor of its destiny, while the state is left to open the door to he market and the accumulation of capital, disowning its typical role of warrant of safety and health for the population.

In a world influenced by the self-help industry, in which it helps to shape policies, the freedom of capital is prioritized over the wellbeing of citizens.

Moreover, the contents of the self-help books are based on suppositions and the idea of the individual being the only responsible of its destiny, without taking into account the world in which policies and measures hugely impact the possibilities of the whole population. Instead of finding ourselves alone, like capital and the self-help industry wants, we should realize that we are in this together, and that the changing of the world is more than the sum of our individual lives.