Self-Help Nation

Tom Tiede

Back in 1988, one of America's greatest men released a book that should have changed the face of the book industry as we know it. It was simple, straightforward, and easy to follow. Its mission was to call for the self-help industry to stop making money from the gullibility of the American public by inventing new "diseases" for which, of course, the author of the self-help tome in question had the cure.

The author was Stanton Peele; the book, The Diseasing of America. It's been through two editions and a number of printings, but it hasn't sold nearly as well as many of the cornerstones of the self-help industry, e.g. Melody Beattie's Codependent No More, John Bradshaw's Healing the Shame that Binds You, or worst of all M. Scott Peck's nauseating The Road Less Travelled. Thus publishers, while respectful enough to keep Peele's book in print, never actually listened to him, and of course self-help authors were too busy making money to read anyone else's books. Thus Peele, a noted author in the science of addiction, has had his most important book condemned to a life of obscurity. For the past thirteen years, I've despaired that a worthy follow-up in its vein would ever appear on my deak. Now I have Tom Tiede, and a more pleasant surprise I haven't come across in quite a while.

Tiede's latest offering continues in the tradition of many of his earlier works. Despite his retirement from the journalism industry, Self-Help Nation is structured rather like a series of newspaper columns. (Old habits are hard to break, I guess.) Tiede devotes each chapter to a specific branch of the self-help industry, digging into a representative selection of the offerings therein and exposing the fallacies of invented diseases and commonsensical "secrets of the ancients" for which the American public shells out billions of dollars per year. It's nothing the average Joe probably couldn't do upon reading the same books. After all, common sense is common sense, and no matter how hard Tony Robbins tries to call an apple a lime, a select few will be able to say "it's still an apple." Do you really want to spend the money it would take to compile a list of self-help manuals as large as the one Tiede throws at us? Most of us don't have that kind of money, and all of us have far better things on which to spend it. Better to shell out for Tiede's book and laugh at the self-helpmeisters.

Yes, laughs do appear here, though the reader is likely to be chuckling and wincing at the same time. The chief attraction of Tiede's book, and a good part of why it works as well as it does, is a no-nonsense approach to the subject matter that often borders on, and more than once steps over the line of, the vulgar. It's an entry in the school of plain-thought-requires-plain-speech, and the more easily-offended in one's circle may wrinkle their collective nose at Tiede's penchant for calling a spade not just a spade but a black pointy thing on a playing card determined to steal your money and tell you you're a dysfunctional chump with toxic parents (feel free to sprinkle the above with the spicier words of your choice). More than once it has the feeling of juvenilia for the sake of juvenilia. Shock value works in small doses, and it's overdone here. That doesn't make Tiede's points any less valid.

The book's other problem is that Tiede, by his own admissions early on, is a dyed-in-the-wool Rooseveltian democrat, and because of this he makes a couple of errors in judgment; he is unwilling to recognize the lengths to which people will go to deceive themselves, and he overestimates the amount of common sense to which John Q. Public is willing to admit (and use). Thus he tends to lay much more of the blame on manipulative self-help authors and much less on the sheep who fork over the dough. Interestingly, this same tendency is one of the same mechanisms that allows us to continue fighting the War on (Some) Drugs, which Tiede is quite emphatically against.

Still, it's never been said except in jest that one cannot end up at the correct destination by taking the wrong path. Tiede's heart is constantly in the right place, even when his head strays a tad. Dear Reader, if you're someone to whom I normally give Christmas presents, your 2001 gift will not be a surprise. I feel an overhwelming urge to give a copy of this book to everyone I know. Unfortunately, it's one of those books to which those who need it most will react most strongly and adversely. This is because it does something that no one really wants. It tells the truth. And thus Tiede's book, like Peele's, is most likely destined for the same kudos from the supposed lunatic fringe and a deafening apathy from the hundred million or so Americans who just wore out their seventh copy of The Road Less Travelled. Would that they picked up Self-Help Nation by accident when at the bookstore to pick up their eighth.