What is ideology?

Rimke’s view

Self-help is a genre of late modernity and neoliberalism; part of the “psy complex” and therapeutic culture; a type of entertainment, and predicated on individualism whereby self-transformation toward “normal” occurs by way of internal insight and ignoring social concerns (Rimke 2017)

Unpacking Rimke

modernity

we our confronted with overwhelming choice about what to do, how to be, what to believe, etc.

neo-liberalism

individuals make choices using the model of the market

normal

is accepted without scrutiny or judgment

therapeutic culture

seeks to serve and correct the abnormal self

Individual vs social

psycho-centrism: “all problems reside in the individual mind and/or body dominates and characterizes the therapeutic culture of Western society” (Rimke 2017, p. 2)

Social problems are translated into individual disorders and are taken to be an indication or symptom of personal weakness, all the while negating the socially structured context of difficult life experiences. (Rimke 2017, p. 6)

What problems could be cast as individual or social??

Efficacy?

What ideologies do we see here?

Self-help values

Strains of self-help culture—entrepreneurship, pragmatism, fierce self-­reliance, gauzy spirituality—have been embedded in the national DNA since Poor Richard’s Almanack.

Self-help history

• 50s: “how to win friends and think positively from Dale Carnegie and Norman Vincent Peale”
• 60s: “Children of the postwar middle class were weaned on the mass paperbacks of Dr. Spock”
• 70s: “gray-flannel-suit howtoism gave way to the reemergence of an older, more mystical strain, part bootstrapping and part magical thinking. The New Age was really a revival of what had once been called New Thought”
• 80s: “Recovery-inspired self-help replaced doctors, priests, and therapists (and maybe even parents, senators, and teachers) with public personalities who gave names to the problems of millions.”

• 90s: “In the insecure nineties, these Martin Luthers translated elite (and expensive) knowledge into news Americans could use. Suze Orman had worked at Merrill Lynch before ending up a financial counselor to the recently laid off.”
• 00s: “The self-made Ferriss notwithstanding, the peddlers of the new efficiency don’t much resemble the gurus of old. More ­often, they present themselves humbly as journalists or social scientists exploring new research frontiers for our benefit.” (Kachka 2013)

Kachka’s complaint

self-help has infiltrated and commandeered other fields in its drive to reproduce. This plague of usefulness has burrowed its way into the types of books that were traditionally meant to enlighten, or entertain, or influence policy, but not exactly to build better selves. It’s generally led to better self-help, more grounded in the facts and narratives that drive the other genres, but also to a nonfiction landscape in which every goal is subjugated to the self-­improvement imperative. (Kachka 2013)

What is NLP?

Does NLP sound like science?

What did you think of Richard Bandler?

• Is he a scientist?
• Is he a guru?

• Ideologies are the values and beliefs governing a social system.
• Each moment in recent history has a self-help that shapes and is shaped by the extant ideologies.

Wrap up

• Think of a self-help regime you are familiar with, what ideology does it reflect?

What self-help regimes and ideology did you conclude with?