Right-wing ideology is thriving in the swamps of self-help and gym-bro culture

It is 1964 and my father is up a ladder in a second-hand bookshop on Charing Cross Road. This is how we'd spend our Saturdays, hunting for old stuff: philosophy, psychology, fiction and politics. My father, an Indian, was also looking for something in Buddhist and Taoist texts that would give him, as he put it, “direction in life”, which his parents had failed to engender in him.

- BY HANIF KUREISHI

Years later, without knowing it, I found myself following him. I too would scour bookshops, searching for works of literature, or for books on psychology, where I might find the key to some kind of liberation.

After I left home, I was aware there was something lacking in me. I wasn't who I wanted to be. I knew I had to become a different kind of person. My life became consumed by this quest for “self-improvement”.

We boomers always wanted to be new people, free from the constraints of our conservative parents: we would open our minds with drugs, experiment with our sexuality, make new kinds of families, and be innovative with our work.

Today, self-improvement means redesigning yourself for an already existing system; smoothing off your rough edges so you can find employment and then rent a flat. Self-help gurus and influencers prey on people's insecurities. They have the answers for how to live, what to buy, and how to master your neuroses and become a super-capitalist.

In our world of inestimable choice, who doesn’t want guidance? In Woody Allen’s wonderful Play it Again, Sam (1972), the protagonist, played by Allen, is in constant conversation with an imagined Humphrey Bogart. A cross between a mentor and therapist, the Bogart character consoles and advises Allen on how to deal with the women in his life.