Post by HardCap on May 13, 2005 8:58:33 GMT -5
Overdosing on Oprah
The side effects of empowerment.
By Steve Salerno
Ever since America began to wean itself off the sociological junk-food of victimization and the much-maligned Culture of Blame, the landscape has been steadily overspread by an antithetical conceit — loosely bracketed as "empowerment" — whose preachments can be summarized as follows: Don't let anyone take away your dreams. Everything you need to succeed is right there inside you. Believe it, achieve it.
Today, Fortune 500 conglomerates draft optimistic business models in bullet points drawn from Stephen Covey's seven (highly effective) habits; families settle disputes using ameliorative diagnostics straight out of Dr. Phil; millions of everyday Americans owe their feelings of "personal power" to prow-jawed fire-walker Tony Robbins, the arguable father of today's mainstream brand of empowerment. And, of course, there is that daily dose of spiritual adrenaline from Oprah Winfrey, who is seldom categorized as a guru in her own right, but whose role as the movement's éminence grise cannot be discounted: The road to self-help's promised land — and a bite of its $8.56 billion-dollar fruit, as per the latest figures from Marketdata Enterprises — goes right through the vast king-making machine that is Harpo Productions. The guiding nostrums delivered via sundry channels by these and other self-help celebrities form a cultural given, an uncontested (and, one is led to believe, incontestable) foundation for the present starry-eyed Zeitgeist.
Lost in all the adulation is the downside of this tireless effort to uplift. The overselling of personal empowerment — the hyping of hope — may in fact be the great unsung irony of latter-day American culture, destined to disappoint as surely as the pity party it was supposed to replace. And in a far more insidious fashion.
Though many of the consequences here are easily missed or confound measurement, the literal and figurative poster children can be found in America's schools, whose crusade to imbue kids with that most slippery of notions, self-esteem, has been plainly disastrous. It was once theorized that a rose-colored self-image would itself help students achieve greatness, even if the mechanisms required to instill self-worth undercut traditional notions of scholarship. In the intervening years, declining SAT scores and the generally dismal performance of American students in global rankings of competency in math and the hard sciences have shown that academic greatness is not what self-esteem promotes. (In 1998, the Amsterdam-based International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement released its Third International Mathematics and Science Study, involving twelfth graders from 23 nations. In overall scientific literacy, the U.S. placed fourth from the bottom, besting only such historic hotbeds of scientific innovation as Lithuania, Cyprus, and South Africa. In advanced math, the U.S. outpaced only Austria. In physics, American kids finished dead last.)
No matter. America keeps filling its children with this faux self-esteem, passing them on to the next set of empowering standards, and the next after that. If you teach college, as I do, you are certain at some point to be confronted by a student who's upset over the grade you gave him and seeks redress because, he will say, as though his point were self-evident, "I'm pre-med!" Only if and when that student actually reaches med school does he encounter less elastic standards: a comeuppance for him, but a reprieve for the rest of us, who otherwise might find ourselves anesthetized beneath his second-rate scalpel.
The larger point is that, with the gods of empowerment cheering in the background, society has embraced concepts like confidence and self-esteem despite scant evidence that they're reliably correlated with positive outcomes. The work of legitimate psychology notables Roy Baumeister and Martin Seligman indicates that often, high self-worth is a marker for negative behavior, as diagnosed in sociopaths and drug kingpins. Furthermore, self-esteem may be expressed in the kind of braggadocio — "I'm fine just the way I am, thank you" — that actually inhibits personal growth.
Unfazed by pesky questions about whether happy thoughts can even guarantee results for any one individual, today's champions of positive thought unflinchingly portray their quest as the folkloric rising tide that lifts all boats, supposedly enabling America en masse to reach new levels of happiness and prosperity. A nice thought — but impossible barring a wholesale change in the way the free market operates. Many pursuits are zero-sum affairs. For each winner, there usually must be a fair number of losers. Nonetheless, I have been to sales seminars where the motivational speaker implied to 250 real-estate professionals from the same company that all of them could be the firm's No. 1 salesperson next year. One of them will be. The other 249 will not. Consider, then, the psychic costs of coming up short in a philosophical system that disclaims the role of luck, timing, or competition, and admits no obstacles that cannot be conquered by the sheer application of will. If winning is a straight-line function of "character," then what does that say about those who lose? Of course, one never really loses in this brave new world of hopeful euphemisms. "There is no such thing as failure," posits a core maxim of the neurolinguistic programming regimen from which Tony Robbins drew much of his patter. "There is only feedback."
But why settle for redefining mere words when you can redefine the very world in which you move? Hence, the solipsistic outlook that fuels today's empowered thinking: Reality becomes an arbitrary affair wherein each individual decides his personal truth. One is hard pressed to find a setting where such reasoning is deemed inappropriate. At a presentation to the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, Dale Walsh, vice president of Riverbend Community Mental Health, hailed the new resolve that mentally ill "clients" feel about playing "a significant role in the shaping of the services, policies, and research" that affect them — this, as part of "taking power back from the system." A second mental-health activist, Selina Glater, writes that "empowerment," in a treatment setting, is about "clearly stating what it is you need in order to feel whole again." Inmates running the asylum indeed.
Empowerment has left its fingerprints on other areas of health care, too. It's at least a contributing factor in America's startling exodus from traditional medicine. One omnibus study reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association put the total number of patient visits to all types of alternative-medicine practitioners at 629 million per year, easily eclipsing the 386 million visits to conventional MDs. In theory, these defections from the mainstream represent a quest for "self-empowerment healing" that will "put people in charge of their health-care destiny," to quote the popular holistic-health portal, Oughten House. (Oughten's slogan: "Change your DNA, change your life!" Uh-huh.) In practice, the trend puts increasing numbers of Americans at the mercy of opportunistic charlatans who position themselves at the nexus of mind and body.
We will not know the ultimate impact of all this for some time; it's been barely a generation since the surreal optimism described herein first began to make the logic of victimization sound ugly and old. But common sense suggests that this relentless emphasis on personal satisfaction betokens grim news for marriage, workplace camaraderie, or unity of any kind. One wonders how a nation comprising 295 million individuals, each vowing not to let anyone take away his dreams, could arrive at a true sense of collective purpose, especially with humility now in such short supply. Pop-psychology once taught us to wallow in our faults and limitations. It now teaches us to deny them, if not revel in them (as anyone who watches early-season episodes of American Idol can attest). As a culture, we went from impotence to omnipotence, sneering at the more realistic middle ground we sped past en route.
If empowerment is a quasi-religion — which is how Oprah and some of its other champions seem to frame it — perhaps it could use an updated version of the serenity prayer made popular by the twelve-step regimens it disdains: Something like, "Lord give me the enthusiasm to pursue what I excel at, the modesty to admit what I stink at, and the wisdom to know that there is a difference."
— Steve Salerno's book, SHAM: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless, will be published by Crown in June.
The side effects of empowerment.
By Steve Salerno
Ever since America began to wean itself off the sociological junk-food of victimization and the much-maligned Culture of Blame, the landscape has been steadily overspread by an antithetical conceit — loosely bracketed as "empowerment" — whose preachments can be summarized as follows: Don't let anyone take away your dreams. Everything you need to succeed is right there inside you. Believe it, achieve it.
Today, Fortune 500 conglomerates draft optimistic business models in bullet points drawn from Stephen Covey's seven (highly effective) habits; families settle disputes using ameliorative diagnostics straight out of Dr. Phil; millions of everyday Americans owe their feelings of "personal power" to prow-jawed fire-walker Tony Robbins, the arguable father of today's mainstream brand of empowerment. And, of course, there is that daily dose of spiritual adrenaline from Oprah Winfrey, who is seldom categorized as a guru in her own right, but whose role as the movement's éminence grise cannot be discounted: The road to self-help's promised land — and a bite of its $8.56 billion-dollar fruit, as per the latest figures from Marketdata Enterprises — goes right through the vast king-making machine that is Harpo Productions. The guiding nostrums delivered via sundry channels by these and other self-help celebrities form a cultural given, an uncontested (and, one is led to believe, incontestable) foundation for the present starry-eyed Zeitgeist.
Lost in all the adulation is the downside of this tireless effort to uplift. The overselling of personal empowerment — the hyping of hope — may in fact be the great unsung irony of latter-day American culture, destined to disappoint as surely as the pity party it was supposed to replace. And in a far more insidious fashion.
Though many of the consequences here are easily missed or confound measurement, the literal and figurative poster children can be found in America's schools, whose crusade to imbue kids with that most slippery of notions, self-esteem, has been plainly disastrous. It was once theorized that a rose-colored self-image would itself help students achieve greatness, even if the mechanisms required to instill self-worth undercut traditional notions of scholarship. In the intervening years, declining SAT scores and the generally dismal performance of American students in global rankings of competency in math and the hard sciences have shown that academic greatness is not what self-esteem promotes. (In 1998, the Amsterdam-based International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement released its Third International Mathematics and Science Study, involving twelfth graders from 23 nations. In overall scientific literacy, the U.S. placed fourth from the bottom, besting only such historic hotbeds of scientific innovation as Lithuania, Cyprus, and South Africa. In advanced math, the U.S. outpaced only Austria. In physics, American kids finished dead last.)
No matter. America keeps filling its children with this faux self-esteem, passing them on to the next set of empowering standards, and the next after that. If you teach college, as I do, you are certain at some point to be confronted by a student who's upset over the grade you gave him and seeks redress because, he will say, as though his point were self-evident, "I'm pre-med!" Only if and when that student actually reaches med school does he encounter less elastic standards: a comeuppance for him, but a reprieve for the rest of us, who otherwise might find ourselves anesthetized beneath his second-rate scalpel.
The larger point is that, with the gods of empowerment cheering in the background, society has embraced concepts like confidence and self-esteem despite scant evidence that they're reliably correlated with positive outcomes. The work of legitimate psychology notables Roy Baumeister and Martin Seligman indicates that often, high self-worth is a marker for negative behavior, as diagnosed in sociopaths and drug kingpins. Furthermore, self-esteem may be expressed in the kind of braggadocio — "I'm fine just the way I am, thank you" — that actually inhibits personal growth.
Unfazed by pesky questions about whether happy thoughts can even guarantee results for any one individual, today's champions of positive thought unflinchingly portray their quest as the folkloric rising tide that lifts all boats, supposedly enabling America en masse to reach new levels of happiness and prosperity. A nice thought — but impossible barring a wholesale change in the way the free market operates. Many pursuits are zero-sum affairs. For each winner, there usually must be a fair number of losers. Nonetheless, I have been to sales seminars where the motivational speaker implied to 250 real-estate professionals from the same company that all of them could be the firm's No. 1 salesperson next year. One of them will be. The other 249 will not. Consider, then, the psychic costs of coming up short in a philosophical system that disclaims the role of luck, timing, or competition, and admits no obstacles that cannot be conquered by the sheer application of will. If winning is a straight-line function of "character," then what does that say about those who lose? Of course, one never really loses in this brave new world of hopeful euphemisms. "There is no such thing as failure," posits a core maxim of the neurolinguistic programming regimen from which Tony Robbins drew much of his patter. "There is only feedback."
But why settle for redefining mere words when you can redefine the very world in which you move? Hence, the solipsistic outlook that fuels today's empowered thinking: Reality becomes an arbitrary affair wherein each individual decides his personal truth. One is hard pressed to find a setting where such reasoning is deemed inappropriate. At a presentation to the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, Dale Walsh, vice president of Riverbend Community Mental Health, hailed the new resolve that mentally ill "clients" feel about playing "a significant role in the shaping of the services, policies, and research" that affect them — this, as part of "taking power back from the system." A second mental-health activist, Selina Glater, writes that "empowerment," in a treatment setting, is about "clearly stating what it is you need in order to feel whole again." Inmates running the asylum indeed.
Empowerment has left its fingerprints on other areas of health care, too. It's at least a contributing factor in America's startling exodus from traditional medicine. One omnibus study reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association put the total number of patient visits to all types of alternative-medicine practitioners at 629 million per year, easily eclipsing the 386 million visits to conventional MDs. In theory, these defections from the mainstream represent a quest for "self-empowerment healing" that will "put people in charge of their health-care destiny," to quote the popular holistic-health portal, Oughten House. (Oughten's slogan: "Change your DNA, change your life!" Uh-huh.) In practice, the trend puts increasing numbers of Americans at the mercy of opportunistic charlatans who position themselves at the nexus of mind and body.
We will not know the ultimate impact of all this for some time; it's been barely a generation since the surreal optimism described herein first began to make the logic of victimization sound ugly and old. But common sense suggests that this relentless emphasis on personal satisfaction betokens grim news for marriage, workplace camaraderie, or unity of any kind. One wonders how a nation comprising 295 million individuals, each vowing not to let anyone take away his dreams, could arrive at a true sense of collective purpose, especially with humility now in such short supply. Pop-psychology once taught us to wallow in our faults and limitations. It now teaches us to deny them, if not revel in them (as anyone who watches early-season episodes of American Idol can attest). As a culture, we went from impotence to omnipotence, sneering at the more realistic middle ground we sped past en route.
If empowerment is a quasi-religion — which is how Oprah and some of its other champions seem to frame it — perhaps it could use an updated version of the serenity prayer made popular by the twelve-step regimens it disdains: Something like, "Lord give me the enthusiasm to pursue what I excel at, the modesty to admit what I stink at, and the wisdom to know that there is a difference."
— Steve Salerno's book, SHAM: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless, will be published by Crown in June.
