Now that I’ve caught you with the clickbait title,
Basically every post has included some form of toxic self-hate, minus one or two mentioning exercise. While I do like being able to confront these in the first place, the purported goals and name of this community gives people who are giving the exact wrong advice far too much credibility, and the last thing these people need is a comment with the most upbears regurgitating individualistic self-help concepts at them.
If we’re going to keep this sort of community around, I suggest doing some serious research and basing it off of DBT, and integrating serious critiques of CBT style mental healthcare and improvement.
I am just some random nerd who is terrible at self-improvement at general, so I understand taking this with some serious doubt. But I just had to get this off my chest.
Thank you, WithoutFurtherBelay
Agree. The California Self-Help paradigm tends to be individualist, lacking or opposed to materialism, and focused on concepts like "willpower" and "discipline" that modern studies in to human behavior suggest are questionable at best.
Historically, the concept of "Self Help" that we're most familiar grew out of New Age movements centered in California after the hippie orientalism of the 60s and early 70s collapsed. There were many ealier, both modern and ancient, ideas about improving the self. Many of these, like the old rennaisance Italian concept of Virtue, or the modern Pashtun concept of Pashtunwali, have strong social and community components as well as individual aspects. The point isn't just self-actualization, but rather becoming what is expected of you in community (which, depending on the culture, might involve some pretty toxic stuff).
But, point is, the American self-help concept is often very individualistic and anti-materialist and should be approached with great caution. It also infiltrates western concepts of psychological therapy to some degree, with many therapists focusing far too much on the individual and not being able to really place the individual in a community.
Stuff like, idk, bell hooks, steps outside that paradigm with a much more community oriented analysis of life in the modern west. For men, men-ish, and amab people, for instance, bell really digs in to how western masculinity is a whole process men+ are forced to learn under threat of violence, and how un-making that harmful masculinity is a process that requires a community. She's real smart and worth reading.
There's a lot of other stuff you can look to; Old world manuals on how to be a warrior and a good citizen, which are often very different from the Prussian militarism and 20th century Fascism we're familiar with. Lots of old manuals on civic duty and shit. You have to discard a lot of bad stuff about violent, reactive honor, but there's some good stuff to find too. Likewise, there's real value in breaking down why and how we're alienated and oppressed in society. I find it extremely helpful to be able to recognize when my problems and limitations are the result of social and economic violence, or the result of biomedical problems like ADHD, so I can separate those issues over which I have limited control from notions of "poor character" or "laziness".
Edit: Also, ROWING! Hexbear trireme club when?
Wait, the whuh-huh? There's a specific term for this stuff?
Idk if that's what academics call it, but there's a whole history to this in the us that starts more or less with hippies doing "eastern philosophy" for individualistic self help purposes, ties in to cults in the seventies, morphed in to self help books, late night tv ads selling supplements and fitness videos, all kinds of fad diets, more weird cults. And in the last few years it's been sigma dorks, insta influencers selling supplmenets, all that. Self help and adjacent stuff like protein supplements and weight loss and all kinds of mystical toxin cleansing bs are a pretty big industry in the us, i think a few billion. I don't have any specific reading for it, i've kind of pieced it together from a bunch of articles over the years, and also living through a lot of it since the 90s.
Oh yeah, the ideology that ranges from “Self-Actualization Magic” at its most obviously fake to “Go To Therapy” At it’s most insidious
Yeah. And since therapy is barely regulated in the us there are tons of quakcs there, too. It's kind of a mess to negotiate.
Death to America
What's insidious about suggesting people go to therapy if they have the means?
Reading this again I think it’s interesting there doesn’t seem to be any active effort besides someone like bell hooks in making a conception of self improvement that moves beyond both a conformist perspective and an individualistic perspective. I swear bell hooks is the only person I’ve ever heard of who’s even somewhat attempted to meld the revolutionary mindset with “improving oneself”.
I do think there is also something to be said about how old manuals like those on honor or virtue are toxic in their own way. They presumably would also have their own simplistic explanations for why people don’t act “optimally”, and therefore their own toxic regimens to “fix that”: Think Stoics suggesting people basically just change their mind about something being bad whenever they dislike a situation (contrasted, of course, with Epicureans that just assume people enjoy horrific things because why wouldn’t they 4head?). I haven’t read any of those old manuals, and I’ve already been burnt today already despite how early it is for me on not reading into subjects, so I could be completely wrong.
I’m tempted to think the main issue with most self-help or improvement is that it assumes a significant amount of agency on the reader, that they have immense power over themselves , even though their behavior is also heavily influenced by their environment. Or to put it in way more blatant terms, there doesn’t seem to have been a seriously materialistic approach to achieving one’s goals made yet, besides the abstract, wide ranging goal of Communism.
I believe unironically that any example of laziness or poor character implies an unexamined systemic or medical issue. Granted, it could be an issue we are physically incapable of even identifying with our current level of understanding, but saying that it’s just a case of Poor Character implies it comes from literally nowhere which makes no sense
Strong agree. You have to wade in with an established set of beliefs and at least some kind of understanding of the bs of the time to sort through all the horrible stuff and find the good bits.
Nah, you're right on. A lot of ancient self help stuff is written for aristocratic men who were often expected to be total bastards. So like, advice on how to be resilient and steadfast in the face of hardship can be good sometimes, depending on what they're actually suggesting (I'm a big fan of what I see as a sort of positive, you can't choose your fate but you can choose how to meet i fatalism in Norse mythology), but a lot of it was trying to train men in to do awful things.
Again, strong agree, and it's rare to find ones that get away from that. There's a bunch of sayings I like in, like, the Havamal for instance that are shit like "Look, you need to treat your friends well because without friends someone's going to stab you in the back during a sword fight" or "Take some time to watch what's going on before you give an opinion bc that way you'll have a better grasp of the situation" but they make it sound cool.
Yeah, again, strong agree. Laziness almost always turns out to be a language barrier, or ADHD, or stress, or whatever. "Laziness" isn't a real thing, it's just a way to justify social and soemtimes physical violence against people who don't conform. Poor character is often more about different cultural expectations or people being judged for neurodivergence or disability.
This is probably something we, like leftists around the world, need to fix. We've got scads more biomedical research to pull from, we know a lot about behaviorialism, like the science and psychology of behavior, we know a lot more about physical exercise, allergies, food, all that stuff factors in to what the olden days were called "Good character". And we've got the last 10,000 years of people trying to puzzle this out on paper to draw from.