The Self-Help Industry Thrives as Social Institutions Rot
It is only when one feels uncertain over their prospects, as their perceived sense of the world can no longer hold (as if it is being uprooted in the storm), that they turn to whatever available self-help guides or gurus in the market. The reason seems obvious, as it is said that a person with strong personal ethics and will to power can prevail over whatever unfavourable circumstances. Remember when Joe Biden believed ex-Miners could teach themselves coding or Scott Bessent proclaimed that laid-off federal workers and NIH employees could turn themselves into entrepreneurs by starting their manufacturing business, with the help of possibly vibe coding and Chinese-made robotics to save hefty labour costs? That's the spirit.
The current self-help industry offers more than simply confirming the old wisdom; it offers methods and tools to lock this growth mindset in your ordinary life so that you can become a productive, consistent and congruent person who can navigate your personal goals between self-actualisation, financial independence, and recognition in communities. I mean, who doesn't want to have them all? I certainly learn a lot from things like effective learning, time blocks, deep work sessions, and habit formation. There is always room for improvement if you don't feel satisfied about the current state you are in. But you don't want to abruptly switch from a self-orientated worldview to see what you can do to make yourself less shit, to the broad big picture, i.e., the social/political/economic circumstances you are embedded in, that force you to triple your life effort in the hope to catch up with the living standards of your previous generations. An individual has supposedly freedom of choice and knows full well their preferences, motivations and goals according to the liberal and libertarian imagination. Many are optimistic if they can optimise their personal ethics enough, they can beat the average Joe to win the rat race, given luck and the different initial positions one is starting with.
I believe many already have the intuition, as Guess rightfully puts it, that you can hardly come up with a coherent worldview to simultaneously answer what the world is, how things should be, who you are and what you should do 10 out of 10 times. You may expect these worldviews, expressed in some general statements or commandments, can guide you through whatever circumstances. But there are always exceptions, and it is up to you to arbitrarily tweak your view/stance depending on what you really want to achieve at that particular moment. Individual ethics, like a particular type of philosophy, has the ultimate ambition that the sum of individuals optimised in individual ethics according to a common set of principles, habits, and practices, can influence back, from the bottom up, how the social institutions and norms are constructed. Given this understanding, the self-help industry is merely old-wine-in-old-bottle, just like Western men need a Ryan Holliday to reiterate what the Stoics advocated thousands of years ago in the hope that individuals can free themselves from material and social constraints. Many need reassurance of the validity of the social contract, that it is not yet broken, and that it is still up to grasp. If you optimise your daily routine and practice well enough, you can still be the chosen one who can beat the average and achieve upward social mobility. You beat the system; at least, this is what you can proclaim in front of thousands of those falling behind.
One thing I find interesting is the similarities of the social and political sentiment for the revival of stoicism in both the ancient Rome and 21st-century America. I remember in one podcast Ryan Holiday said, that he believed his books attract struggling young men today because they want guidance that no one offers them in their social circle. That is where I think Guess's critique on individual ethics (in general) kicks in and becomes relevant:
"Individual āethicsā comes to be presented as a purportedly separate subject area and topic for a freestanding treatment under certain po litical and social circumstances; particularly when the world of politics seems to have moved completely out of the control of individualsā this is an archetypical Hegelian point (which he makes about the connection between the advent of the Roman Empire and the rise of stoicism). So one can see it not as progress in the division of labour, but as an indirect indictment of a society that individual āethicsā comes in it to have special prominence as a purportedly separate discipline." (xvi-xvii)
"No amount of heroic courage, strength of will, or moral fibre is going to be able to compensate for having rotten social institutions. As Brecht once put it (in his Galileo): āUnhappy is the society that needs heroes.ā It is perhaps ānot my faultā if the institutions within which I find myself, and which I cannot change, do not permit anyone to lead a good or full life, but so what? Is my own personal purity always what is at issue? What does this very focus on what is or is not āthe faultā of some individual tell us about the society in question? Or, for that matter, about an individual who is keen to make this claim? Is the attempt to avoid being at fault a good project for a whole human life? Is a society of people trying to develop and exercise their āmoral fibreā actually all that attractive? To say grandly ādixi veritatem et salvavi animam meamā [āIāve spoken the truth and saved my soulā] may be an impressive gesture, but why isnāt a focus exclusively on the salvation of my soul also a sign of self- centredness? Maybe it is legitimate for me to be more concerned, within limits and in certain contexts, about my own intentions, motives, and actions than about yours, or his, or theirs, but this is certainly not obviously something for me to glory in. One might think that the historical movement in which theology and politics are gradually pushed aside by ethics and ācultureā is simply part of a story of progressive ratio-nalisation and human pro gress, but I am suggesting that the real story is much more complex than that, and that, although it is a story in which something is gained, it is also a tale of much that is lost." (xvii)
"here is the issue of the sheer coherence of the idea that we could attain a single (axiomatised) system of all knowledge, and of the idea that our life as a whole could, or should, be seen through the lens of a technician who puts every decision of ours through a universalisation machine and files it according to the result. More importantly, though, traditional philosophers are motivated, Nietzsche believes, by commitment to a certain tacit moral ideal, one expressed perhaps most forcefully in ancient stoicism. Th is is the ideal of a human with an unchanging and invariable character, exhibiting great self- control and extreme fixity of purpose in the face of all the variable accidents of human life. The counterpart of this is the idea of a single, coherent, unchanging philosophical doctrine about the world as a whole and our place in it. This is turn means that the ideal form of philosophical writing should be the discursively monolinear mono-graph, developing a unitary world view, presenting arguments for it, refuting objections in a kind of timeless pre sent (the illusion of which is easily attained in written texts). The sage has a unified personality because he subscribes to a unitary world view which he can express in a unitary monographic account of āthe system of the world.ā Nietzsche thinks this complex has become problematic partly because we have come to see, more clearly than others before us did, the high cost imposed on self and others by the commitment to this ideal of the human personality. Once we have seen through the sources of the obsession with unity, completeness, consistency, and invariability, we may become capable of seeing other possibly valuable ways of thinking and living. Th is collection of essays is informed, as mentioned above, by the general view that it is inadvisable to try to discuss and decide what is best to be done (including what it is best for an individual to do) while restricting oneself to the subject matter and method of the purported discipline of āethicsā and abstracting from what we know about society, history, politics, religion, and art." (xviii-xix)
Reference
Geuss, R. (2020). Who needs a world view? Harvard University Press.