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

The rise of a self-improvement culture that is focused on subjective, internal criteria for success and that is spiritual without necessarily embracing traditional theistic or moral values has contributed to the emergence of the idea that one ought to consider one’s life as a work of art.

The pursuit of self-fulfillment could only lead to progressive social change if the self were to be imagined as relational and embedded: individuals would have to be understood as members of a society comprising more than just voluntary, self-selected groups.

Conwell summarized the links between wealth and godliness: “To make money honestly is to preach the gospel.”34 Wealth was no longer a means of liberating oneself from labor (or from the necessity for instrumental or market-based reasoning). Instead of allowing one the leisure to cultivate one’s self and serve one’s community, wealth became, in and

The less predictable and controllable the life course has become, the more individuals have been urged to chart their own courses, to “master” their destinies, and to make themselves over. In addition to actual hours spent on the job—which have increased dramatically—Americans are compelled to constantly work on themselves to remain competitive in

In the context of late-twentieth-century America, mind-power offered magical explanations for the source of wealth when hard work was clearly no longer a reliable means of securing prosperity.

What finer characteristics could a system like capitalism seek in a worker?

The work of avoiding politics is hard work.105 In the context of self-help television, this labor of displacement is accomplished by adopting the notion of revolution to the most depoliticized possibilities: revolution is alive and well just as long as it’s a revolution from within that stays within: as long as it’s a revolution of the spirit, or a

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 consolidation of vast wealth in the hands of a few industrialists, and a burgeoning population of new millionaires, required moral justification.

In Orman’s calculus, all prior economistic metaphors are collapsed: life is not just a business. Rather, money is alive—a life force in itself.