Self-Help as Romantic Realism

Yesterday Duff McDuffee commented on one of my earlier posts and alerted me to his overlapping work criticizing the self-help industry. He and I (and many others) agree that it’s time to mount a robust campaign in opposition to the peddlers of extravagant promises of self-perfection. There’s much to comment on in his thought-provoking post, but I’ll try and control myself.

One thing McDuffee doesn’t cover (and this isn’t a criticism but rather a friendly addition) is the important role of entertainment culture in promoting the conviction that personal perfection is an actual possibility. In fact, I would go so far as to classify self help as a sub-category of what I have called (in Caught in Play) “romantic realism,” the splashy images of perfection that confront us at every turn. One of the most important examples of romantic realism is much advertising, in which we observe a world which looks a lot like our own world but is somehow better.

For example, we are familiar with the concept of friends gathering to eat at a restaurant, but a TV ad depicting such an event is likely to feature spectacular looking people eating spectacular looking food and having more fun than we mortals ever get to have. Of course, the idea is to plant the notion that you too would have a wonderful experience if you would gather a group of friends and head for the restaurant. But the overall effect of observing perhaps hundreds of such images every day is to cultivate the conviction that there really is a much more satisfying life out there if you could just go to the right restaurants, drive the right car, get the right stuff.

I classify romantic realism as a form of entertainment because it follows the same basic pattern as, say, a television drama: We are presented with a fantasy that is similar to everyday life, but with all the boredom edited out and everything that stimulates us (attractive people, suspense, violence, music…) turned way up. Once you start looking for it, romantic realism is everywhere. I just put up a post on romantically realistic people (we call them celebrities) at my blog on Psychology Today. Even our food has the volume turned up (salt, sugar, fat). As Ellen Goodman pointed out in an excellent opinion piece on this in the Boston Globe yesterday, two thirds of the population is now overweight. I wonder if that’s just a coincidence?

In this broader context, self help, the idea that if you purchase this book or DVD or whatever you can find your way to perfection, is just one more example of the point. And of course, all of the different domains of romantic realism reinforce one another, so that the notion that perfection is really a possibility becomes difficult to resist. I wonder if any population in the history of humankind has ever been as convinced that heaven is so close and attainable.

Tagged as: advertising, Advice, celebrity, consumption, fame, Romantic Realism, self-help