Johann Hari

A spectre is haunting London. The spectre of – I wince as I type these terrible words – self-help. Go to this accursed section in your local bookshop, and you will see London’s lost and vulnerable flicking through books that promise to “change YOUR life in just two months!” Hang around the conference centres of Earls Court any weekend and you will hear the cries of freshly imported American self-help gurus – the Oswald Mosleys of the Id and Ego – leading air-punching crowds in a chant of “I love me! I value me! I am good!”

Yes, even you, dear un-neurotic reader, probably have two or three of these “motivational” books blocking up your shelves, telling you how to have a Successful Marriage or outlining Three Steps to a Great Career. Your boss is – excuse me while I vomit a little – probably planning an inspirational seminar with Tony Robbins right now.

Self-help is not only invading this city from across the Atlantic. It is invading my life. My friends have begun to offer me inspirational, upbeat psychobabble in a strange rote-learned script, only to say afterwards, “Oh, John Gray says that” or “It’s from the Rules.” One of my dearest, darkest friends has actually started attending the conferences. Ah, but you whisper – what’s wrong with looking for a little help every now and then? Well, the journalist Steve Salerno investigated the self-help industry for two years, and concluded: “Self-help is an enterprise wherein people holding the thinnest of credentials diagnose in basically normal people symptoms of inflated or invented maladies, so that they may then implement remedies that have never been shown to work… It is the Emperor’s new life plan.” This business is a sham and a scam. It is time to stop it now.

Let’s look at the King of self-help, the lumbering 6’7 giant Tony Robbins – now a regular visitor to London. His books claim to offer “a new science of self-fulfilment”, and they are clotted with psuedo-scientific terms. But Robbins has no scientific qualification at all. None. His reputation is built on absurd trickery. During his stage inspiration-athons, he calls a member of the audience on stage and lifts him up with casual ease. He then tells the man to “feel centred and grounded. Imagine you are connected firmly to the earth.” He tries to lift him up again and… he can’t! He’s too connected to the earth! This is so hammy that an Orthodox Jew could not witness it without enraging his God – and it gets worse. Robbins sells something called a “Qlink pendant” that claims to ward off “harmful ambient energy” – a snip at only £500. Although he claims there is “science” behind it, I could not find a single scientist who thought it was anything other than an expensive joke.

Robbins gets participants in his seminars to run over hot coals, claiming this is a triumph for their “positive mental energy.” There’s only one problem - running over hot coals without burning your feet has nothing to do with mental preparation, or a positive state of mind. It has to do with the principles of heat conduction. You could be suicidal and self-harming and you would run over those coals in exactly that same way as good ol’ Tony. Even on their own terms, his advice is nonsense. “If you trust in the cycle of the seasons, you know that in the long run you will reap the harvest you have sown,” he says. Hello? What if you reaped the wrong harvest? What if a flood comes along and washes away your seeds?

Flicking through self-help guides is a tour through the outer depths of inanity. “Be who you are,” they counsel ad nausem. As opposed to… what, exactly? And then I syumbled across ‘Gandhi CEO: The Mahatma’s Tips for Business Success.’ This is a man who thought the spinning wheel was an evil capitalist invention – and now he’s being used to puff up corporate hacks.

Self-help guides invariably reduce complex emotions to glib, hysterical soundbites. Ordinary parents with ordinary flaws become ABUSERS. Love becomes CO-DEPENDENCY. Romance is reduced to THE RULES. (They like their capital letters). And life becomes pasteurised, reduced to creepy sub-Nietzschean claims that your WILLPOWER and SELF-ESTEEM can overcome any problem. “Think yourself rich,” they bark. But I already think I’m rich – it’s just that the baillifs beg to differ.

Last week, I stumbled across an object that perfectly captures the inane nonsense of this self-help culture. In the Selfridges furniture department, I saw a mirror that had two messages written on it: “You are beautiful” and “You are worth more than you think.” How could the mirror possibly know this? What if somebody sent one to a real minger – or to Ian Huntley? When people have been reduced to taking compliments from inanimate objects, you know the cult of self-esteem has gone too far. (The last person to do this was Snow White’s stepmother, and as I recall she ended up as a hag peddling poisoned fruit).

And self-help guides are cursed in still another way. If misogynists had banded together in the 1970s to figure out how best to reverse the advances of feminism, they would have invented two things: women’s magazines, and the self-help book. ‘Dr’ John Gray (who bought his PhD from a correspondence course) and his ilk peddle a picture of women as feeble emotional wrecks, while men are tough and solid. If he announced they were being driven mad by their wombs, it wouldn’t surprise me. Women are encouraged to follow bizarre 1950s rules: “Don’t phone him, or you will look desperate,” they say. Honey, you bought a dating guide. You are desperate.

So here’s my three-step guide to Recovery from Self-Help: Step one: Burn your self-help books. Step two: Steal self-help books from shops and burn them too. Step three: Go to the self-help section of your local Waterstones. Talk to the bruised, battered people you find there. Warn them. Befriend them. Have a life together. Help each other. Self-helpers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your neuroses. You have a life to win.