The Secret: Self-Help Books and Nietzsche

Walking to the elevators to head down to the cafeteria for lunch I saw my friend Sarah sitting on a bench near the windows reading a book.

“Hey, what’s up?”

I asked her what she was reading. She looked a little self-conscience. I read the title “Life is Now” or something like that. Oh… a self-help book.

“Hey, don’t laugh at me. I know I know. But it’s really good”

“Hey hey” I tried to console her. “As long as you are not reading THE SECRET”

“uh…Brandon…I have something to tell you”

“No, no don’t. I like you too much. I don’t wanna know”

“Somebody gave it to me…so yeah I read it” She said with an embarrassed smile on her face. “But it sucked…it’s so selfish, its all about money and success, not about making the world a better place”

We discussed about why The Secret sucked, and basically anything that puts financial success as its central value. We came to a broad consensus: Whatever you buy into, compassion for others has to be the main idea. We parted and I went down to grab some food.

I reflected on her embarrassment at me seeing her read that book. I thought about the reputation self-help books have among the cynical over-educated and over caffeinated. Then I realized as a member of this illustrious group I too was an avid reader of these types of books. However my self-help books are not written by Dr. Phil but by Karl Marx and Frederic Nietzsche. I am sure a few bodies are rolling in a few graves at making a connection between the soft-headed dribble of self-help books and the works of these preeminent thinkers. But I think for me at least, in the role they play in my life, there is a connection. We go to self-help books for help; For clarification when we are confused, for consolation when we are in pain.

I turn to Nietzsche for the same reasons. When I feel weak and lost, when I feel nihilistic, I turn to Nietzsche for not just answers, but for consolation. For consolation that there are, in fact, answers. Maybe even these pages and this author may not have the answer to whatever questions I have but reading the genius of his words gives me hope that humans can find answers. For much of his life Nietzsche, by all accounts was a miserable fuck. In constant pain and ill health but he wrote some of the most noble and beautiful words ever written and saw farther into the human condition then anyone ever had. But my hope does not come from his specific words or ideas, I am no worshiper of false idols, Nietzsche is no saint for me, but my hope comes from the recognition that Nietzsche, or Marx or any other great thinker was just a man- a bag of bones and chemicals. And look what they could achieve!

But there is another connection I failed to mention that is more flattering to the so called “soft-headed dribble” of self-help books. The basic premise of any self-help book is to provide instructions on how to live. How, as humans, do we live, how should we live. This is one of most fundamental questions of philosophy and a question underlying all studies of humanity, even those areas which deny any premise of seeking normative values. (talk about dribble, this is the academic sort). The very act of studying humanity weather it is through psychology or art or any other field is normative in its self. Through the very act of studying we are implicitly saying we should study psychology. The very act of study is a way we ought to live. But back to the point, a fundamental question of philosophy is “how do we live?”. That is the same question that self-help books try to answer, and it could be argued that they often times are more effective then even the most brilliant words of Plato. They key for self-help books, I suspect, is that they communicate something that can be understood by a more general audience. Sure when you really put the ideas under a microscope they disintegrate like wet toilet paper, but whose to say they have less pragmatic value then some of Freud’s incomprehensible theories? Does my supposed latent desire to fuck my own mother really tell me how to live my day to day life? Not really.

Like theory, I am sure there are self-help books that are more fundamentally sound then others. Consensus between Sarah and I was that The Secret, with its sole focus on personal self-interest, was not fundamentally sound, where as a devout Muslim, who reads from one of the grand-daddy of all self-help books, who tries to reach across boundaries of faith and form inter-faith communities, is operating on some fundamentally sound soft-headed dribble.

Updated: 15 minutes later...

So my friend Sarah read this post and came over with the book that started this discussion "The Power of Now". She pointed out a passage which address Nietzsche proclamation that "God is Dead" and then flipped to another page and had me read a passage she found especially interesting. I read and then flipped through a book I happen to have of Nietzsche's "On the Genealogy of of Morals" and tried to find a relevant passage. I found and aphorism which ended with a quote from some guy named Master Eckhart "I ask God that he rid me of God". Sarah came back over and ask me what I thought. I thought it was pretty interesting- that I agreed generally with it. Then I looked at the spine of the book a noticed the guys name- Eckartt Tolle.

Wait a sec. I flipped back to that random passage I had found with the quote from Master Eckhartt. I read the footnote "Master Eckhartt (1260-1327) was the greatest German mystic of the Middle Ages" I pointed it out to Sarah. "Weird, yeah, i just sent you a wikipedia link about the guy, I don't think its his real name" What a weird coincidence.

So I checked out the wiki page and turns out the guy is from Germany and of course took the name of the famous mystic that Nietzsche quoted, who in turn quoted Nietzsche and wrote a book that my friend read that started this whole conversation. I thought that was pretty weird and one hell of coincident.