Self-Help, Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life

As in evangelical religions, where the emotional force of the conversion experience, along with impassioned public testimony about one’s conversion, are the factors that authenticate and legitimize “salvation,” the emotional enthusiasm of the entrepreneur legitimates his or her activity without the considerable inconvenience of an ethical stance.

In Chopra’s universe, where distinctions between self and other, matter and energy, past and present are blurred, the self at work on the self isn’t really at work on the self: everything is effortless, everything is as it should be, and everything can be just what you want it to be, too. While it is difficult to engage such a worldview in a ration

the ideal of life as a work of art turns out to be not an alternative but rather a trap: a model perfectly suited to the conditions of advanced capitalism, where the intimate sphere becomes a site of ongoing and tireless production, a design studio for reinventing one’s most marketable self.

The historian Richard Weiss notes the increasing equation of wealth with success: he observes that the first definition of success in terms of wealth occurs in the 1891 New Century Dictionary, while the first mention of wealth in terms of success occurs in the 1885 Oxford English Dictionary.

The idea that one ought to work without any assurances of compensation—that one should wait hopefully “for the money to follow”—is consistent with an economy that is moving toward the artist as one of two models of the ideal worker.

The quest for occupational satisfaction is an understandable, individual attempt to solve the problems of alienation, boredom, and rage in hierarchical work settings. But because the problem is framed as an individual problem, any solution is necessarily partial, contingent, and temporary.

This idea of life as a work of art found its corollary in the emergence of the figure of the artist as the ideal, self-motivating, self-monitoring, and even self-employing worker.35

Why have people embraced self-help groups—what do they get there that they don’t get in political organizations?

Life, though a game, is emphatically not a team sport. The successful self is the Winner; the chief criterion for evaluating success is the acquisition of power and wealth.

For the women who were managing households, raising children, and holding down jobs, the appeal of having it all had led most unexpectedly to the reality of having less and less.