Dear Herculodge,
What’s the difference between a real self-help book and a phony one?
Dear Reader,
The phony self-help book, which often tops the best-seller
lists (and Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose comes to mind), must encourage our most infantile fantasy: That life is easy, a
delectable paradise that is ours for the taking, if we will only stop being our
own worst enemy by imposing “limitations,” “the Ego,” the expectations of
others, etc. The fraudulent self-help book’s banal cocktail of false promises, dumbed-down Eastern philosophy, clichés, and truisms serve to not challenge the reader while at the same time
sustain the fantasy of quick and easy transformation.
A real self-help book is not even categorized as such. In
other words, you won’t find a real self-help book in the psychology section of
the book store. This helpful book could be found in philosophy, nutrition,
history, biography, or just about any category with one exception—the self-help
section.
A real self-help book has one thing in common with the phony
one: Both offer a prescription for change. But while the phony self-help book offers
a quick, miraculous one based on knowing some enchanting mystery or secret, and
is built on the wishful thinking of a child, the real self-help book offers
common sense, insight, and provides a road map to a change that is arduous and
gradual, built upon a mature human being.
A couple of examples of real self-help books deal with
nutrition: Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food in which he shows you how to
not get punk-fed by the Processed Food Industry and to make real food that you
like, which will result in gradual health benefits.
Another helpful book is Brian Wansink’s Mindless Eating in
which he shows you how to manipulate your eating environment so that you can
cut your daily calories by just a small amount—yet significant enough to result
in gradual weight loss.
Neither book promises quick transformation or blows smoke up
your ass about how your “ego” or “society” gets in the way of your
heaven-on-earth and both are the more valuable for it.
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