- I
have
everything that I need to face
any obstacles that come.
I wake up every morning ready
for a new day of exciting possibilities.
Confidence is my second nature.
Today, I abandon my old habits and take up
new, more positive ones.
- [Mom] Who are you talking to in there?
- No one, Mom, I'm doing affirmations.
- [Mom] Job applications?
You mean like you're
going to try to be better
than part time at GameStop?
Do you even get 10 hours a week?
- Sometimes.
- [Mom] You need to do better than this,
you're in your early to mid 30s,
you have a teenager's job,
you have no prospects,
you live with your mom, you completely
blockade the sun in there
and you are going nowhere.
You are a loser.
(upbeat music)
- What is self help?
To keep this short, self
help or personal development
or leadership development
or personal transformation
or communications improvement
or social improvement
or motivational messages
or dream realization
or success management or time
management or inspiration
or pick-up artistry or the
lyrics to Rachel Platten's
2014 hit, Fight Song,
(sighs), is information.
A program of physical
product or a social movement
designed to assist people
in achieving things for themselves.
Now even the best of us
might be tempted right off
to point out a major
contradiction in terms here.
If we're really doing
something for ourselves,
then why would we need
a thing to assist us?
To that extent though, when
a person in a wheelchair
accomplishes something, should we credit
the chair over the person?
Probably not.
So when we just dismiss
the concept of self help
as wholesale BS, we're saying more
than we probably think we are.
For instance, no,
wheelchairs are not marketed
as self help for disabled
people, it's for a good reason.
That could probably pretty
easily come off patronizing
coming from most people.
But that doesn't mean that
wheelchairs aren't a thing
assisting someone in achieving
things for themselves.
When we talk about self
help, we're usually referring
to the self help industry,
which involves books,
videos, consultations, seminars, and gurus
like Tony Robbins, Deepak
Chopra, Jordan Peterson,
Mike Cernovich, Roosh V.,
yikes this gets dark fast.
These folks have followings,
like serious ones.
People who need their self help.
Here is where I think it's
a little more appropriate
to point out that the term self help
starts to get a bit ironic.
And if you spend time
sampling their milkshake,
you'll find that it brings a very specific
type of person to the yard.
Straight, white, cis, women.
Those of us who fetishize competition
between demographics might
be a little bit surprised
to hear that, but while I
loaded the authors with men,
something the industry does as well,
according to market research,
women buy more self help books.
Also, that same market
research doesn't mention
non binary people, and therefore
non binary folks are perfect
and do not need to improve.
Market research doesn't not say that.
Anyway, without knowing the
primary buying demographic
is women, one might be tempted
to talk about self help
as a straight, white, cisman thing.
In fact, if you stick with
Jordan Peterson's following,
that might make you feel
extremely validated.
When Peterson blames
everyone who isn't a cisman
for creating a contemporary world
where his advice doesn't necessarily work,
and it's kind of obvious what is following
is just guys being dudes.
I was told I could be whatever I want.
And yet, I'm working a job that I hate,
and I live with my parents.
I am ambitious, I work long hours,
but I don't get anywhere.
I was told that I'd find a soulmate,
but societal standards describe
someone who doesn't exist.
I'm nice to people who use me.
And I use people who are nice to me.
Why can't I do anything right?
Peterson has recognized
young man are alienated
and entices them with some
pretty common sense advice
which he attaches his dominance hierarchy
brand of individualism to.
He then comes up with a bunch of boogeymen
to justify why the
world doesn't just work.
However, the rest of
the self help industry
recognizes that pretty much everyone
is alienated and that's
a much bigger market
with more profit potential.
Although they do a lot
of that same hierarchy,
individualism, blah blah blah.
- The most decision in
your life is deciding
you will live in a beautiful
state every single day
no matter what because that's
the only thing you can control.
- You are responsible for your life.
And if you're sitting around waiting
on somebody to save you, to fix you,
to even help you, you
are wasting your time,
because only you have the power to take
responsibility to move your life forward.
- As I said in my very
important documentary
about Peterson's following, young men
are alienated because
young men are people.
This is a system built to alienate people.
Why would someone need self help?
A lot of people do not
have the best relationship
with the outside world, whether that means
talking about labor, human essence
or the unified separation
of the connected world,
a lot of us are left wondering
what is wrong with us.
Is there no meaning?
Is there nothing?
Nothing for me, nothing out there?
That must be it.
What's this?
It's, it's a bag of books.
Gorilla Mindset,
The Secret,
12 Rules for Life,
And one by Steve Harvey, yeah okay.
These, these could help me.
I once was lost, but now I'm found.
I once was blind, but now I see.
♪ Oh oh, may ye who sin grieves ♪
♪ Oh how's we ♪
When you start reading these books,
listening to these people, and embracing
what they have to say, you may start to--
- Optimize!
- Um, optimize yourself.
Optimization means the act process
or methodology of making a thing
such as a design, system, or decision
as fully perfect, functional,
or effective as possible.
In the world of video game development,
optimization generally means finding ways
to make a game work smoothly on a variety
of different hardware,
including low end machines.
The criteria set forth is generally a base
level of visual fidelity and
a consistent high frame rate,
though yeah, that doesn't always happen.
To achieve these goals, parts of a game
are switched out, downgraded,
or thrown out all together
to make the experience consistent
across various machines, whether they be
different configurations
of a PC or consoles.
It's not really that
different with people.
There's criteria set forth
and a lot of different folks
are asked to switch out, downplay,
or totally throw parts of
themselves out to fulfill it.
- It's like you're a bad
employee and a worse boss,
and both of those work, you know, for you.
You don't know what you wanna do
and when you tell yourself what to do,
you don't do it anyway.
You should fire yourself
and find someone else to be.
- The sheer amount of
articles, videos, books,
and any kind of content you can think of
that exist to tell us
how to optimize ourselves
and our actions is staggering.
And they all tell us what we need to be
and show us how to be just that.
Improving your posture will
improve your state of mind.
Practicing such body language and mindset
can result in them being
chronically activated.
The added benefit of these exercises
may come from the fact that
they help relax the body,
promote good behavioral habits,
and or improve mindset and emotions,
which better regulate testosterone
levels in the long term.
I'd been wearing reading
glasses for about three years
before I discovered the secret.
I'd listened to society's message
that eyesight diminishes with age.
I'd watched people stretch their arms out
so that they could read something.
I'd given my thought to
eyesight diminishing with age,
and I had brought it to me.
I hadn't done it deliberately,
but I had done it.
I said, over and over, I can
see clearly, I can see clearly.
In three days, my eyesight
had been restored,
and I now do not own reading glasses.
There was a famous advertisement
in the form of a comic strip
issued a few decades ago.
It was titled An Insult
That Made a Man Out of Mac.
Mac, the protagonist, is
sitting on a beach blanket
with an attractive young woman.
A bully runs by and kicks
sand in both their faces.
The bully departs.
Mac says to the girl,
"I'll get even someday."
She adopts a provocative pose and says,
"Oh, don't let it bother you, little boy."
Mac goes home, considers
his pathetic physique
and buys the Atlas program.
The next time he goes to the beach,
he punches the bully in the nose.
The now admiring girl clings to his arm.
"Oh Mac," she says, "you're
a real man, after all."
Statistics are for losers.
This is all really good advice.
Self help power!
(dramatic music)
When we think of how people
are alienated from themselves,
their labor and other people,
we have to acknowledge
that part of alienation itself
is not knowing what alienation is.
Knowing the problem is the
first step in solving it.
And if we were talking about
giving people the tools
to help themselves, we would start talking
about one's agency in all aspects of life.
This means in everything
from one's production choices
in physical labor to emotional
labor one has performed
to be accepted by those around them
to the labor of perception
and interpretation
of the world around us.
How much choice do we have
that is not limited or coerced?
Providing tools for
people to help themselves,
would, in my eyes, mean
having a critical dialectic,
that is to say a point, counter, point,
understanding, repeat, about
the social and economic
dynamics at play in our everyday lives.
Karl Marx and those who
have followed his general
line of thinking have
extensively covered alienation.
But there's something
people who work to demonize
the collectivization of
power among the people
seldom allow into their conversations.
And that's that Marxist
theories on alienation
specifically are about
society preventing individuals
from their own self realization.
An individual alienated from their labor
lacks the agency to make
real choices about it.
An individual alienated
from their own essence
isn't allowed to serve their own will
obtained by their own choices,
instead serving external demands
imposed by other people and entities.
Marx wanted to combat and end alienation,
ultimately empowering the individual
rather than creating subordinates
as he is often branded as having wanted.
But instead of heeding his words
of creating our own
tools and conversations
to combat these obstacles between us
and our empowerment as people, industries
created products and services
that necessitate more
products and services.
For a structure that, to sustain itself,
continually defines what is merit worthy
for those living inside
it, self help can assist
in canonizing an official culture
in both our work and our leisure.
Which, a more appropriate
description for this dynamic
might be work and less obvious work.
Now, that isn't to say all
these self help authors
are a part of the illuminati
conspiring to force
the norms of society on those of us
who don't fit in to them.
Well, self help can be deconstructed
down to how to conform.
I'd wager plenty of self help authors
don't approach it this way.
A lot of people in this
world actually do want
to help others and I don't
assume all this advice
is just in bad faith, but that
doesn't mean it's gonna work.
(sighs)
I'm better.
Look at me, I am so much better.
Only a matter of time now.
Yep, soon.
Any minute now.
The age of me.
Self help authors are
looking at the system,
in today's case capitalism,
and giving advice
for how they think people
might survive and thrive in it.
Now, while this is what we
might call a descriptive act,
as they are venerated as experts,
their advice is contextualize
as prescriptive.
The reason why it's not
cool when your mom says
stand up straight with
your shoulders back,
but when Jordan Peterson
does it he's a rock God,
is that Peterson is telling
people it's one of the keys
to unlocking our wildest dreams.
So if a gunter should happen
to find all three keys
and solve the puzzle, they'll no longer
be a temporarily inconvenienced
millionaire that loan everything.
The self help industry
in its steps and rules
is reactive despite seeming proactive.
They explain the rules of the game
rather than changing
it, and this also goes
for the ones that really
think they're changing it.
They rely on and therefore
purport essentialist ideas
about how things are and suggestions
about how to--
- Optimize!
- Your behavior so these conditions
benefit you rather than marginalize you.
But that's not how a
hierarchy works, is it?
One issue here is that in
a world where competition
and dominance is fetishized, this town
is often not big enough
for the both of us.
If both of us know how the norms work
and we both work really
hard, there's still
no guarantee we get anywhere.
There's even less a chance
both of us get anywhere
and if only one of us does,
it's understandable when resentments form.
The issue is that there actually is room
in this town for the both of us.
If we cooperate, the
work we do would benefit
from both of our bodies of experience
and we would also have to
spend less time working.
On top of that, we'd no longer
have to play the PR game
where we have to convince the town to keep
coming back to us over the other guy.
But even asserting something as simple as,
instead of competing for a chance to win,
we should cooperate for the
best possible situation,
is fundamentally questioning the system.
Also, a lot of work has
been done to stake claims
for a position in the system's hierarchy.
If we change that
system, maybe some gurus,
body of work, might no longer be valid,
ending their position's validity as well.
But it's not just that
individuals who derive
wealth from relevance don't
want to become outdated,
a report from January 2018 shows
that what we currently call
self help is a $9.9 billion industry.
We have to remember there is an ecosystem
that involves multinational
corporations here.
Capital interest commodify the
idea of personal development,
creating a dynamic word
appears as if spending money
equals helping yourself, a
sort of theatrical transaction.
Now, this is not to say there is no value
in knowing how to survive
in the current system.
Frankly, this system is
bigger than any of us,
and although there are numerous reasons
why we should all work together to end it,
right now, we currently live in it.
Obviously, not all of us are equipped
for life in this unfair heap
of crap we call capitalism
and frankly no one deserves
to live a second class life
because they didn't get
that information before.
The issue is there's a good
chance that with capitalism,
that's how it's always gonna go.
What I'm saying is that maybe it's time
to consider the idea
that visualizing success,
ordering ourselves to succeed
in the mirror every morning,
and simply believing might not
actually make us successful.
Do you believe, oh please, please believe.
If you believe, clap.
Clap, clap, (claps), don't
let the dream die, clap.
You do believe.
Ah, me too.
Things are happening for me.
I believe, whoa!
To cope and to work on one's
one situation is important.
Our feelings, our subjective needs,
and our alienated essence are important.
I want to make it really
clear that I'm not saying,
don't clean your room,
don't stand up straight
with your shoulders back and
don't even think positively
or try to make your own life better.
Because I kinda think that
would be awful on my part.
I just think it's important to acknowledge
that these things are intertwined
with systemic conditions.
And if it does work, and you become
a middle manager, I mean, good.
That doesn't make me
hate you automatically.
I'm actually happy that
you're safe and accounted for.
But the likelihood of
becoming the next Bill Gates,
Steve Jobs, or even Elon
Musk is extraordinarily low,
even if you have lots of
drive and amazing ideas.
And either way, middle
manager or Bill Gates,
it's still a concentration
of some amount of power
around one successful
person incentivizing them
to not want to change the system,
the thing we all have to deal with--
I don't get it.
I read the books, I took them to heart.
I'm dressed up in business casual.
I ascended, or whatever
the white background is.
I cleaned my room.
I stood up straight
with my shoulders back.
I know the secret.
I perceived.
I believed.
I jumped, Steve Harvey.
I clapped.
Yet, the dream died.
The issue is that much
of what we call self help
isn't really tools to enable individuals
to survive and thrive, it's
not just the kind of product
but also a kind of
advertising that's designed
to be appealing by association
with a desirable lifestyle.
It's also not just advertising
self help products.
It's advertising to persuade us
to believe how things are is
how things will always be.
We're prompted to think
of what we supposedly
could attain in the current hierarchy,
how high we can climb, and
about how the information
the self industry sells us
could help us attain it.
But the issue is that if
a book that's marketed
as the only one you will
every need finds success,
it'll get a follow up,
which will get a follow up,
and another follow up, and so on.
Because that's the author's job now.
It's how the pay for
food and a place to live.
For you to buy more advice,
the only book you'll ever need
can't be the only book you'll ever need.
The self help industry
ironically must seek to create
dependence and find repeat customers.
To have an industry
based around self help,
consumers have to think
that no one in their lives
has any interest in their
development and progress.
We must think it is us, as
individuals, versus the world.
We must see ourselves as alone
and broken, in need of fixing.
But we're not alone.
And no matter how broken we might be,
it's the world that needs fixing.
Contemporary conditions have created
an advanced stage of capitalism.
One where a mass separation
is built as unification
for the sake of creating
a false consciousness.
We view self help through
this very specific lens.
This self help might have movements
where many show up, but it's
only about us individually.
It is an image, a
bubble, a custom reality,
an abstract intermediate between ourselves
and the material conditions of power.
As it is today, the
image of innocuous advice
that could improve
someone's quality of life
is one of many things
that's used to normalize
and mediate our
relationship with the world
and its power structure.
Mike Cernovich was one of the prominent
propagators of Pizzagate,
a conspiracy theory
about how a pizza place with no basement
was trafficking children in its basement,
which culminated in a true believer
going in and firing several
rounds off with an AR-15.
In his book, Gorilla
Mindset, Mike Cernovich
advocates for getting enough sleep
and that powering through
sleep deprivation isn't cool.
And he's not wrong.
But he also ascribes biologically
essentialist ideas to our roles in life
numerous times elsewhere and that's wrong.
At least I think so.
Peterson's book is actually worse
than Mike Cernovich's in that respect.
In 12 Rules, being a man means being born
with a dick and that abusing
people at work is good.
No, really, it says that.
Well, not in those exact words,
but there's a section
called stop being a weasel
on page 327 of the paperback that takes
a positive stance on being good natured
about people throwing rocks of
increasing size at one's head
while working at a construction site.
Because that is what men do at work.
The implication is that one
shouldn't just accept it,
but to be a man, one should
be throwing rocks at anyone
who isn't good natured
about throwing rocks?
What?
Like, literally throwing
rocks at each other's heads?
It would not fly at GameStop.
This is the power structure
reasserting itself
and paying its champions handsomely.
It works too, because you
don't have to be a leftist
to see that this system
isn't working for us.
There's a reason it's not just leftist
that are trying to change things.
We all understand something is wrong.
"When a defeated lobster
regains its courage
"and dares to fight
again, it's more likely
"to lose again than you would predict,
"statistically, from a tally
of its previous fights.
"Its victorious opponent,
on the other hand,
"is more likely to win.
"It's winner take all
in the lobster world,
"just as it is in human societies,
"where the top 1% have just as much loot
"as the bottom 50%, and
where the richest 85 people
"have as much as the bottom
three and a half billion."
I mean, that stuff is in
Bernie Sanders's stump speech,
not the lobster stuff of
course, but the other stuff.
The difference is, the
reactionaries and fascists
all think things used to be better.
And maybe they were at
least for certain people,
but that is because those
people exploited everyone else.
The issue is that things they've
justified their positions
in the hierarchy with over
the years are nonsense.
It's important that we as individuals
make distinctions about information
that self help programs
and personalities suggest
that actually helps us
individually without taking
anything from us or trying to guide us
towards ideology and further consumption.
Working on yourself isn't bad.
It's never been bad.
We shouldn't think it's
bad, because although
we all need to find some way to cooperate
and work together, we're
also all individuals.
We are all intersections
of material conditions.
Our subjective wants and needs do matter.
Where self help and personal development
as an industry is concerned
primarily with individuals
optimizing themselves for compatibility
with capitalist society
promising the situation
they probably cannot achieve, instead,
we need to take steps to
understand the world around us.
We need to connect with the inner needs
we're alienated from,
like the need for agency
in our life's struggles and in our labor.
And we need to begin to understand
those needs are connected
with others' needs.
Our connected needs are at the mercy
of a structure that
directs us to disconnect.
And uses that separation to surround us
with a customized reality
which serves to mediate
our relationships with the material world
and the people living in it.
At some point, helping ourselves became
uncritically doing what we're told.
This is probably because
whether it's self help
or direct physical action
against the power structure,
the powerful and their worshipers
are always working to
co-opt anything positive.
You can see this in self
help as easily as you can
in criticism against
the elite of the world.
Hell, you can even see it in history.
The national socialists
movement in the Weimar Republic,
the Nazis, came into
power by calling attention
to the problems of capitalism.
Never mind that when they got into power,
they didn't just implement
a state cartel system
that they claimed was socialism,
but they killed every
actual socialist they could
and associated socialism
with Jewish people.
You know, the people
they did a genocide to?
Well, one of the people
they did a genocide to.
The right, or capitalists,
or people with power,
whatever you want to call them,
happily repeat leftist's talking points
to try to redirect
people to their nonsense.
They happily show up to participate
for the exact same reason,
as well as give the media
an excuse to taint certain
movements publicly.
But I think that in a world
that is increasingly hostile
towards the working class,
marginalized groups,
and indeed the human species in general,
I think it's time to say
fuck it, and do shit anyways.
You wanna see some self help?
("Semi-Charmed Life" by Third Eye Blind)
♪ I want something else ♪
♪ To get me through this ♪
♪ Semi-charmed kind of life, baby, baby ♪
♪ I want something else ♪
♪ I'm not listening when you say ♪
♪ Goodbye ♪
♪ I want something else ♪
♪ To get me through this ♪
♪ Life, baby ♪
♪ I want something else ♪
♪ Not listening when you say ♪
♪ Goodbye ♪
♪ Goodbye ♪
♪ Goodbye ♪
- [Man] Seeing the kind
of blast gas of folks
who know there's a serious problem,
who've avoided facing that,
it lies right in the core
of the economic system
and they're trying to
find some other way out.
Having said all of
that, I think the French
yellow jacket movement
is in fact the antidote.
It is a movement that is
not focused on immigrants,
is not focused on the notion that somehow
being part of the EU is
the root of their problem.
Mostly what the yellow jackets are about
is demanding economic
change to no longer suffer
the declining job security,
the loss of benefits,
the reduced public services,
the scarcity of good jobs.
The very thing that everybody is suffering
for the last 10 years
that those are the issues,
they have to be addressed directly,
and if the political
party system can't do it,
well then the people
will go into the streets
with their yellow jackets
and make the changes happen.
