The PANANOLE News: FSU-Panama Student E-Zine

     Let me tell you how to be happy. How to be efficient, perfect, liked, nicer or calmer. What do you need? I have seven rules, steps or concoctions to solve any problem this side of the sun. I am the wise man of the modern age. Without any of the age-old wisdom.

     This, albeit less direct and more variedly, is essentially what self-help books promise. To solve problems or issues that run deep in an instant. Happiness out of the microwave. I do not like self-help books. They irritate me on all sorts of different levels and I would not mind seeing the world rid of them. I would have been content to leave my hatred well enough alone, if people hadn´t started asking me questions concerning it. So now I will try to the best of my capacity to explain what I consider to be the main problems with the self help book industry.

     People are lonely in modern society. It is a fact. There is no getting around it. They are sad, stressed, anxious, riddled with financial problems and debt. Nobody seems to be able to find a steady partner, a soul mate. In fact, it seems to me that in most developed countries, people are just ambling along trying to survive. Now, this to me is admirable, as our ancestors survived in the stone age, so we survive in the sterile age. I do not think problems are necessarily to be eliminated, rather they should be moved along like pieces in a chess game; let us stay one play ahead of doom. But people who are bothered by many problems are generally gullible. They are looking for something better. They are all Jacks waiting to trade in their nice cows for a couple of magic beans.

     In this market, arrived the self-help book. Like food for the starving. The reception has been quite strong. But this is not surprising. Some smart individuals have decided to create a product for a market that is proliferating. This in essence is not bad. But the conundrum is that the market is in problems and they are preying on peoples’ weaknesses. Not only are they charging money to help people who really want solutions to their problems, but also they are actually doing so in an effort to make them help themselves, not giving them a hand. Its as if I saw somebody drowning and charged them for a verbal explanation of the breast stroke!

     Not only do I think that marketing these books is morally objectionable, but I believe the buyers are to blame as well. Because they accept the fluff, that is the content of the generality of those books, as readable material. Some even pretend to categorize it along with other great works of fiction and non-fiction, or worse, literature. My friends, self-help books, are not literature. Literature is Shakespeare, Austen, Cervantes and Homer. What would they think of finding themselves categorized with books named after chicken soup? I believe the appreciation for these books comes from the need of modern people for speed. Speedy reading, speedy solutions, no need for tiresome thinking. Reading dense works of literature, however, requires a great amount of thinking, of imagining, it requires stops for enjoyment. You must search for meaning through lines, in words. The Little Prince, for example, offers us so many truths and guides, yet one cannot simply run through it in half an hour. Time is apparently not a commodity of the modern human, so the self help book offers quick answers. Obvious stories with obvious meanings that can be zapped through and quickly forgotten.

     Those who think that these books are saving literature as a whole and making people greater readers, are, to put it lightly, deluded. If we are to read this we may as well read sales brochures and subtitles to soap operas. I think the industry of self-help books does more damage than help to other books in general, either by taking space on the bookstore shelves or by becoming the reading de jour for beginning readers. A child who starts out reading “7 steps to a successful grammar school “is forever lost. What happened to the Little House... books to Robinson Crusoe and Little Lord Fauntleroy? These are the books that we must impress in the memory and the custom of our youths. Not more pop culture. They have MTV, Playstation and the movies for that.

     To me, reading is one of the greatest pleasures life has to offer. That is why I resent self-help books deeply. It is like playing a horrendous and low quality piece of music on somebody’s favorite instrument over and over again, until the sound of the instrument itself is repugnant for them.

     However I refuse to go quietly under this torrent of low quality writing and will continue vocalizing my feelings about this as long as I can. So I will read only that which I find to my liking. These are by no means the only problems that self help books present and I invite everyone to now think of some of their own. Come on now, in seven steps. It’s healthy and makes you more efficient.