Why the pursuit of perfection can be the road to hell - Alberta Venture

On October 8, 2009, after a 36-hour ?vision quest? through an Arizona desert, a nationally known self-help guru named James Arthur Ray led approximately 50 of his students, most of whom were dangerously dehydrated and all of whom had paid as much as $10,000 to participate in the so-called Spirit Warrior event, into a six-metre-by-six-metre makeshift sweat lodge. Two hours later, after an intense session in which Ray alternated between pouring water on the rocks to intensify the heat and encouraging his suffering students to push past their ?self-imposed and conditioned borders,? three of them were dead and more than a dozen were seriously injured. As journalist Christine Whelan recounted weeks later in the Atlanta Journal-Chronicle, ?at the conclusion, seemingly unaware of the bodies of the unconscious lying around him, Ray emerged triumphantly, witnesses said, because he had passed his own endurance test.?

Not every encounter with the self-help industry ends quite so tragically, of course. If they did, the self-help industry in North America and its collection of neo-spiritual gurus, five-minute workout programs and fad diet plans wouldn?t pull in over $11 billion each year. And, to be fair, the bulk of those revenues come from books that advise contemplative reflection rather than the fatal combination of forced starvation and bogus spirituality.

But then again, maybe disasters like James Arthur Ray?s idiotic trip into the desert don?t matter that much when it comes to the momentum of the self-help movement. Demand for self-help products appears to be as inelastic (that is, disconnected from broader trends in the economy) as cigarettes and alcohol, and the industry actually grew during the recent recession. It seems that no matter how bad things get or how paltry the return on their investment might be, people are still willing to shell out $24.95 for the latest serving of Chicken Soup for the Soul. The self-help movement is so popular, in fact, that in a deliciously ironic twist, it has spawned a subcategory specifically dedicated to helping people overcome their addiction to self-help literature.

The biggest problem with this growing industry for its critics is that it doesn?t actually seem to, you know, help anyone. Those billions of dollars spent each year don?t seem to be having much effect on the lives of the people doing the spending, if the volume and frequency of repeat customers is any indication. As American journalist Steve Salerno wrote in his 2005 book Sham: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless, ?Never have I covered a phenomenon where consumers invested so much capital in every sense of the word ? financial, intellectual, spiritual, temporal ? based on so little proof of efficacy. And where they got such spotty, if not nonexistent, returns.?

Why, then, do people continue to spend billions of dollars a year on books, videos, seminars and other self-help products? Perhaps it?s because critics like Salerno misunderstand the role they play in people?s lives. Maybe self-help enthusiasts don?t see self-help as a product that?s supposed to deliver a solution but instead as an ongoing conversation, a secularized version of organized religion that offers the same potent blend of judgment and salvation. In a world where religion is increasingly being marshalled into the shadows, self-help represents an altar at which everyone is welcome to worship.

This relationship between faith and self-improvement is actually a longstanding one. Its importance was first expressed by the New Thought movement of the early 20th century, whose proponents argued that ?positive thinking,? a kind of alliance between the power of God and the skills of man, could actually improve one?s outcomes in life. Those ideas were the foundation of Norman Vincent Peale?s 1952 book, The Power of Positive Thinking, a first-generation self-improvement treatise that sold more than five million copies. Its ideas echo prominently in The Secret, the most popular self-help book of the 21st century.

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Whether religion is a positive or negative influence on its practitioners is a topic of discussion as old as religion itself, but the impact of the self-help movement ought to be less controversial. After all, as Salerno documents at length in his book ? and as many others have done in books of their own ? the self-help movement has almost nothing in the way of objective evidence to support its many and varied claims.
At best, they say, it?s a waste of time and money.

But there are those who argue that self-help?s influence is, in fact, much more dangerous than that. British author and academic Neel Burton argues in The Art of Failure: An Anti Self-Help Guide that these well-meaning efforts at self-improvement might actually amount to the psychological equivalent of self-inflicted wounds. ?These books prevent us from knowing ourselves, and what we get in the end is basically a nervous breakdown,? Burton says. ?We know that in the United States, for example, 10 per cent of the population is on anti-depressants and a significantly higher proportion of the population is on other psychotropic medication. Why is that??

The answer, Burton believes, lies in the fact that the average self-improvement treatise encourages the belief that personal happiness is the product of sculpted abs, nicer clothes, or more personal wealth. Those are dangerous distractions, he argues, from the true source of human happiness: our relationships with others. ?We don?t pay enough attention to our human relationships, and we don?t treat our human relationships with the respect and consideration they deserve. We?d be much happier if we focused more on them, on our relationships with our friends, our family, and our partners.?

Ultimately, Burton says, the true path to happiness doesn?t lie in thinking positively or mimicking the seven habits of highly effective people but instead in cultivating a greater self-awareness. He believes our estrangement from self-awareness and our increasingly manic obsession with all things ?us? represent a departure from our natural instincts as human beings. ?In traditional cultures, people lived in very close-knit communities. They knew each other, and they didn?t really focus on themselves so much. The focus on life was on the survival of the community and not on their own individuality. Modern society is very different from that. There?s a huge emphasis on me: my goals, my life, my death. That puts a lot of pressure on people, and it?s not the kind of pressure that we?re evolved to cope with. That?s the source of many of our problems.?

This is a critical point, and it?s one that is almost never mentioned by any of the self-styled gurus and advice peddlers whose numbers have exploded on the Internet at a rate exceeded only by pornographic websites and disarmingly generous Nigerian bankers. We are advised to do everything from improve our table manners to shave our nether regions in the circular quest for self-improvement, but we are rarely encouraged to embrace our flaws or to indulge our imperfections.

This cultural mania for self-improvement, as though we?re perpetual projects on the way to becoming perfectible beings, is most graphically ? and hideously ? represented by reality starlet Heidi Montag?s transformation into the human equivalent of a blow-up doll. The truth, of course, is that Montag is the furthest thing from human, and the more she chases supposed perfection, the further away she takes herself from it. In the end, it is our imperfections that make us human. Perhaps we?d all be best served by learning to embrace them rather than trying to bench-press them out of existence.

Source: http://albertaventure.com/2012/08/why-the-pursuit-of-perfection-can-be-the-road-to-hell/

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