The self help industry may be older than the world'sother oldest profession. And the gurus of this industry provide an infinitely LESS valuable service than your local reasonably skilled hooker, because with the latter, it is reasonably clear what you aregetting and what the outcome will be.
Being the very astute business people that they are, the self-help, I-will-improve-YOUR-life industry banks on this:
They KNOW that 99.9% of the people in America cannot change, in virtually any sense of the word, much less in a profound sense. We can do things like switch to a bank with a better interest rate and lower fees, but that is about it. Most of us find it difficult to follow the guidelines of Consumer's Report in buying a reliable car, which is why there are so many junk, notoriously unreliable cars on the road. But they sure do look good.
But we, as a species, are blessed with this capacity where we really do have aspirations, but often without the wherewithall to realize them! In a sense, we are addicted to the way we are, regardless of how disgruntled we are with our existence. It is the remarkable person who slugs away at night school for a better career. But more importantly, 999 out of 1,000 of these people are going to night school because THEY decided to go, or because of a wife's urging, not because some guru told them it was good for them.
I believe that most of us are pre-programmed for most of our existence, and that we will "seek our own level". The responsible thing to do, then, is to find out what that level or program is, and make the most of it. Trying to turn every person in America into an entrepreneur, real estate maggot, with their own business so they don't have to ever work again is beyond moral redemption. All this personal power stuff conveniently omits a number of basic facts about human motivation and nature: We need to have gotten to a certain "critical mass", psychologically speaking, through proper parenting, that 99 out of 100 people simply have not gotten. Having not achieved that critical level of development, we cannot go forward without supervision and support. Tapes don't do it; weekly visits to the therapist don't do it; Your therapist moving in with you and living your life with you might do it!
Weekly therapy visits are useful, in the sense that verbalizing thoughts to another person can activate different neural pathways; that is, new pathways in your brain are "created", generating new insights, realizations, and therefore possibilities for improvement.
So, the people in the self-improvement world know all this, which means YOU will be continually seeking answers, from different "experts" offering hope, never knowing what is not working. One discipline essentially generates all the business for the other discipline, as people try, and try, and try, too often based on false promises.
They sort of remind me of my cat's fleas, who, when brushed out into a glass with a little fur on the bottom, roam from strand to strand to strand, never finding warm flesh, and never realizing that there simply is none around. So they never jump out of the glass!
If we realized that in a sense we are condemned to being who we are, we could make much better choices about being much better at who we are, instead of being dilletantes at trying to perhaps be someone else. Deepak Chopra talks about Quantum Mechanics and healing. Deepak Chopra doesn't know a goddamed thing about Quantum Mechanics, and couldn't care less. He is getting rich selling you words that are not going to make one whit of difference in your life! But you may feel good for a while....
Now, this sort of begs the question: If we do in fact change, as did Malcom X and others, was it already destined, blah, blah, blah? Without really knowing this, what changed Malcolm X, me, and others who were in serious need of change was not some slickster making false promises, but an individual who said the right words, did the right thing, luckily at the right time. Ditto disaster in one's life!
By the way, does this have anything to do with the HoloBarre? I am so glad you asked. Indeed it does. In a nutshell, we are not preaching exercise, health, or anything else, per se. The weight of the evidence clearly says you should, and IF YOU DECIDE YOU SHALL EXERCISE, we at Physical Concepts would simply like to offer you the most elegant, versatile and permanent way to do it, and in the process teach you a lot of very usable information, if you are interested.
Given our Perhaps our obsession with justice, injustice, and revenge has been perverted and twisted into a sort of impotent, arm-flailing paralysis: Confronted with a planet-ful of probably un-rectifiable horrors, we shut ourselves, our consciousness and consciences in such a way that cops-and-robbers and a few charities make everything alright. In the meantime, we turn ourselves into hypocritical idiots, suffering at the hands of a seeming infinity of ripoff entrpepreneurs.
What keeps people from getting the message behind the hustles? What fuels this self-improvement craze, besides aspirations?
How has Information been used as a fuel additive in the multi-billion dollar self-help industry?