Is Today's Self-Help Industry Teaching Everyone to Be a Jerk?

The bestseller list as a mirror offers a disturbing image.

- Emma Goldberg

There's a certain flavor of advice that is dominating the self-help bestseller list. These books have titles like The Courage To Be Disliked and Set Boundaries, Find Peace. They tell readers not to worry so much about letting people down, not to answer those calls from aggravating friends, not to be afraid of being the villain.

This all becomes more alarming when you think of the bestseller list as a mirror of the social moment, which some historians say it may be.

Take Dale Carnegie's perma-popular How To Win Friends And Influence People, which came out in 1936, meeting readers haunted by memories of bread lines and the slow, dirge-like notes of Brother, Can You Spare A Dime. The unemployment rate was at 16.9 percent. Jobs were scarce and financial security was elusive; Carnegie's rules for life fell into readers' hands like manna.

Carnegie promised that some of history's great men, say Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln, had achieved success with a formula so simple that it was within anybody's reach. Placate people. Dole out compliments.

"Don't feel like smiling?" wrote Carnegie, who had changed his last name's spelling to match the steel magnate's, to whom he had no relation. "Force yourself to smile. If you are alone, force yourself to whistle or hum a tune."

The book was an instant success, reaching an audience that felt hard on its luck and appreciated a formula for riches that seemed both secret and utterly replicable. It has gone on to sell more than 30 million copies.

Thirty years later, it was the social fabric that seemed in tatters when the country looked towards a new type of self-help manifesto. This time, Americans were preoccupied with images of high school dropouts in the streets of Haight-Ashbury, children running off from their parents and the divorce rate rising. Feverishly, people read Dear Abby and Ann Landers.