The Tribe of the Helpless
In H.G. Well’s famous short story, “The Country of the Blind,” an explorer is caught in an avalanche and descends violently into a chasm where he encounters a long-lost tribe of self-sufficient people who take him into their fold. Much to the explorer’s wonder, these people live in a sort of utopia. There is no crime. There are no squabbles. Chores are delegated peacefully and are completed with fortitude and good cheer. But there’s a catch. The tribe is blind, and not your run-of-the-mill blindness, mind you, but blindness borne from a “disease” to be willfully ignorant about new scientific technologies and all that is dark and evil in the world. The explorer comes to realize that this utopia can only exist in blindness, superstition, and ignorance. Skeptical of such a paradise, the explorer is torn by his impulse to escape the community and his desire for the tribe’s most beautiful woman, who is also blind and who wants him to marry her and spend his dying days in her untarnished Eden. Of course there’s a catch. The tribal elders stipulate that he cannot marry the goddess and join their fold unless he undergoes a surgery that will result in his own blindness. Unwilling to sacrifice his vision, he ascends the chasm and returns to the real world.
His decision is the right one. He has chosen to keep his critical faculties intact and will not surrender to an easy and false paradise. He will not compromise his intellect and self-reliance and become a helpless peon subject to the interests of the tribal elders. But tragically, that is what most of us do. We feel so overwhelmed by all the decisions that have to be made and the deluge of information that crosses our path that we shrug in despair and throw ourselves on the mercy seat of self-proclaimed experts—modern-day tribal elders—to tell us what to do. These bogus authorities call themselves “consultants.” They consist of so-called educators, tutors, therapists, financial planners, nutritionists, personal trainers, life coaches, romance mentors, spiritual guides, pharmaceutical pushers, fashion experts. These consultants count on us to feel discouraged and helpless. They count on us to be too lazy to research for ourselves what is in our best interests. They count on us to be too confused by the glut of conflicting information to believe we can make an intelligent application of that data to our lives. They count on us to lack the self-confidence to arrive at our own decisions and to test our own critical faculties. They count on us to lack the courage to be accountable for our own choices. They count on us to not spend the time to sufficiently inform ourselves to take appropriate actions. And most importantly, they count on us to blindly spend money on a quick-fix that promises to solve our immediate concerns. As a result of our shortcomings, we hire people from a burgeoning service industry to do our bidding.
But of course there’s a catch. Ninety-nine percent of all the consultants’ “expertise” is worthless or outright dangerous because it is rooted in one or more of the following: common sense we’re too confused or cowardly to implement on our own, the self-evident dressed up in unnecessarily complicated language, advice from grossly flawed or fabricated “studies” that we we’re too lazy to scrutinize, the fantasy that we can and should live in a stress-free world, and instruction that addresses the symptoms, not the causes, of our problems.
Most of the phony experts’ “advice” is self-evident and based on common sense and simple logic. For example, a financial planner might instruct a client to keep a six-month savings reserve, to save X amount of money a month, and to reduce credit card debt as soon as possible. None of these instructions requires expertise. Rather, they are elementary principles that the client, presumably a compulsive shopper, needs to abide by. He could have arrived at these conclusions by himself but he needed the admonishment of a financial planner to chasten him into responsible money management.
Because so much of the expert’s information is obvious, these gurus must make their remedial information look important by packaging their advice in complex, pretentious jargon so that we’ll feel awed by their “knowledge” and even a bit intimidated. A marriage counselor might begin a session by telling the couple she’s going to help them “validate” and “heal” each other as they find “sacredness” and “self-discovery” during their “counseling journey.” In fact, the therapist is using buzz words that, when looked at closely, mean absolutely nothing and which in many cases elude the therapist’s grasp. Or a nutritionist will say that he will “jump-start” his client’s metabolism and kick it into “fat burn mode.” In fact, though it sounds appealing that one can transform one’s metabolism into a consuming furnace, there is no scientific data that suggests that any diet can do such a thing.
When experts aren’t using phony jargon to prop up their advice, they will simply make stuff up with flawed or dubious “research.” This is easy to do since they know the majority of us won’t test their claims with scientific evidence. Dr. Dean Edell, who has a radio show about health and medicine, points out that recent studies prove that there is no benefit promised by marketers of St. John’s Wort, Saw Palmetto, B-Complex, and vitamin C, but that in spite of these findings, sales of these products are actually on the rise. He concludes that people choose to believe false claims over science, a condition that benefits the peddlers of herbs and vitamins.
Much of the appeal of the service industry is its ability to indulge our fantasy that we can live in a world without stress. As pointed out by Christina Hoff Sommers in her book One Nation Under Therapy: The Girl Scout Research Institute has gone on an anti-stress campaign whereby girls aged eight to eleven compete for a “Stress Less Badge” which entails burning scented candles, listening to the sounds of the rain forest, and squeezing anti-stress balls. Not surprisingly, the fatuous plan backfired and many of the girls got stressed when the anti-stress balls got gooey residue on their fingers. Sommers also looks with scorn at several public schools that have banned dodge ball since some students can’t play as well as others and may be perceived as being weak, which will damage their self-esteem (11-14). Sommers argues convincingly that such protections actually make us weak and helpless, a condition that the experts need to keep us beholden to their crackpot ideas.
These impostors of the service industry are additionally deficient in that they rarely address the real cause of our problems but target short-term superficial symptoms. For example, a woman will pay a personal trainer thousands of dollars so that during the next six months she can lose thirty pounds and look good in her best friend’s wedding at which time she’ll resort back to her old habits of compulsive eating and nonexercise and blow up to her previous bloated self. She will only look “fit” when there is some grand gala—another wedding, her high school reunion, a Club Med vacation—that will entail her being photographed or wearing a bikini and that will require, once again, the services of a personal trainer.
Like many of us, this erratic dieter and exerciser is dependent on the services of someone who has become her crutch. Too many of us are like this compulsive dieter, relying on the flawed and superfluous services of others at the expense of our own self-reliance. We have, in other words, become members of The Tribe of the Helpless.
Works Cited
Edell, Dean. Dr. Dean Edell. KFI. 640 AM, Los Angeles. 8 April 2006.
Sommers, Christina Hoff. One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture Is Eroding Self-Reliance. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005.
Wells, H.G. The Country of the Blind And Other Science-Fiction Stories. Ed. Martin Gardner. New York: Dover, 1997.
