Collective Self-Help, What and Why

I describe this podcast as a form of 'collective self-help.' In this episode, I explain what that means and why it's exactly the kind of help we need.

The self-help industry has been steadily growing for decades. Some love it and can't get enough, while others are critical of its purveyors and the movement at large. The real situation, I argue, is much more interesting than the usual good/bad, helpful or not frame would suggest. 

There's much to be skeptical of in the realm of self-help. There are also good reasons why people today need help more than ever and there's good help to be found there. I discuss some practical ways we can use the best of what self-help has to offer while multiplying its benefits for the good of all—ourselves and the collective.

*Podcast descriptions for Getting to Know Reality are human-generated.

Transcript

Speaker 0:00

People are struggling in so many ways. So the fact that we have such an extensive menu of options for getting help with all that must be a good thing, right? Then again, some wonder: when the world is unraveling and there are so many avoidable tragedies, can we really afford to focus on ourselves? In this episode, I explore why this opposition, as it's often presented, is really a false choice. I offer a different way to think about and address our needs at both levels, individual and collective, which are not really opposites at all, but two sides of the same coin. And the sooner we learn how to attend to both of them, the better off we'll be. Welcome to Getting to Know Reality, the podcast for inquisitive people who want to help shape a better future and feel better doing it. I'm Debbie Casper, here weaving together threads from science, sociology, and spirituality to promote greater understanding of ourselves and the world we share, and to offer the collective self-help we need to use it well. Hello and welcome to episode three. I am so glad to have you here with me today. In the introduction you just heard, I describe this podcast as collective self-help. And I have been wanting to explain what that means. And I figured it's time to do that now. So let's get to it. Self-help. It goes by lots of names these days: personal development, self-improvement, personal growth, self-discovery. But here I'm going to just stick with the phrase self-help. It's short, accurate, and to the point. Now, I know it comes with a lot of connotations. For self-help enthusiasts, it's an exciting wonderland of possibility. For others who take a more dim view of the genre, it may have an ick factor or be a target of scorn. For some of us, like myself, it might be both of those things. And it potentially includes a huge number of subjects. But when I say self-help, I'm simply referring to the broad category of resources aimed at supporting people to solve certain problems in their life, relieve various sorts of pain, and to achieve their goals. In short, it's help for getting more of what we want and less of what we don't in order to have a better life or a better experience of our life. Those who have studied self-help as a phenomenon place its beginnings in different times and places. Some locate the original forms of self-help in ancient texts and teachings dealing with the philosophical, medicinal, religious, and other kinds of issues that people have always needed help with. I love this way of thinking about it because it reminds us that humans have always sought and created and benefited from having guidance, especially in challenging times or during periods of grief or great change. These resources offered guidance for knowing what to do and how to live. With respect to the more modern sense of self-help resources, most people put it starts somewhere within the last couple centuries. Whatever metrics you want to use, number of books published, magazine and newspaper articles, or websites, businesses, or social media accounts devoted to this stuff, one thing is clear. These offerings have exponentially increased over the years, resulting in what, by conservative estimates, is currently said to be over a trillion dollar global industry. It occurred to me while I was thinking about this episode that without really trying, I've been an observer of this genre for most of my life. Being born in the 70s and having grown up in the 80s, I was witnessing the growth of this movement in popular culture, though I didn't really know it at the time. For better and worse, I watched a lot of TV growing up and I read a lot of magazines. It was the age of talk shows and the emerging tell-all ethos, along with advice columns, books, and feature articles reflecting an obsession with things like weight loss, relationships, makeovers and looking younger, health, sex lives, success habits, and the mainstreaming of interest in Eastern spirituality. Side note to that, I remember as a kid knowing who Shirley McLean was, but not as an actor. Before I ever knew her as an actor, I knew her as the chakra lady. All of this has only continued to develop over the years. Now the emphases and the language have changed a bit. Some of it sounds more technical and scientific now. We have terms like optimization or biofeedback and biohacking that have become household words. But the basic aims are still the same. People want to solve their problems, get relief on their greatest pain points, and achieve their goals, big and small, to live their best life. Who could have a problem with that, right? Well, actually, as it turns out, a lot of people. It seems to me that there's always been a tension there. Even as a kid, I picked up on it. I was aware of critiques coming from different corners of my social world, especially among old school Midwesterners who weren't really interested in this stuff at all, who didn't really talk much about themselves, and they didn't want to, especially not to air their dirty laundry. And from people who exuded a kind of can-do DIY, I'll figure it out myself attitude. They weren't into healthy foods or exercising in public, or come to think of it, for most of the men I knew growing up, even wearing shorts in public, they just weren't into doing many of the kinds of things that we have now come to think of as normal. As I would later discover, there were also more serious critiques coming out from intellectuals at that time. The first one I remember encountering was Christopher Lash's book on the culture of narcissism, while I was doing some research for a paper in graduate school. There was also David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd, Richard Sennett's The Fall of Public Man, and lots more, as I keep finding out. Just last week, in fact, I discovered Tom Wolfe's apparently famous essay, The Me Decade. So while this movement was massively popular and really powerfully increasing, some were noticing and speaking up about problems with these developments, especially about their long-term implications for families, kids, societies, especially democracy, and for culture at large. Those critiques would continue and they would morph over time to aim at different targets, as the focus on me, myself, and I, and self-gratification became increasingly normalized. But the public conversation about it tended to retain a kind of either or sensibility, enthusiasm versus cynicism. Love it or hate it, embrace it or reject or maybe completely ignore it. Today, if we look at just wellness and well-being stuff as a subset of the much larger world of self-help offerings, and this is the stuff that I'm most interested in, we can still see evidence of this. On the one hand, interest and concern in issues related to well-being are ubiquitous and really have become staples in some sectors. In the mainstream media, for instance, these days, pretty much every major news outlet now has segments on wellness, well-being, or self-help. NPR has a thing called Life Kit. Washington Post has its feature called Well Plus Being. Fox has a segment devoted to health. Everybody's got something. For example, concerns about the effects of environmental and social crises on mental health have become ubiquitous. We hear a lot these days about things like climate anxiety and eco-grief and the need for self-care in the face of all that. On the other hand, there has also been a backlash. People coming in with harsh critiques, some of which are very thoughtful and well-studied and well-reasoned, and some of which seem to just want to be provocative or contrarian for the sake of it. So, in those same news outlets I mentioned, we regularly find interviews and feature stories and people criticizing what they call the wellness industrial complex or the wellness trap, where people are sharing concerns about how the wellness industry threatens healthcare or spreads misinformation or takes advantage of vulnerable people. In my field, you'll hear arguments that this kind of heavy focus on ourselves works against our being able to do the bigger work that needs to be done to address the bigger crises we have right now, that an obsession with our personal lives is inappropriate at a time when the world is falling apart and we need to be focusing on systems rather than individuals. I see arguments like these all the time playing out in email listserves, in books and essays, like the one I recently encountered, the title of which declares that well-being is killing us. Overall, it seems that many of the critics want to simply say self-help doesn't work. It's a sham, as one book title describes the self-help and actualization movement. And I want to say these kinds of counter-arguments, these critiques are really important because there are trends and counter-trends, emerging sensibilities and critiques of them, and that is to be expected. And it's really good for us to be aware of the pendulum swing of social thought. They're also really valuable for drawing our attention to the elephant in the room, which is that measures of health and well-being, physical, mental, or spiritual, tend to show that people on average are generally doing worse. As cultural critics like Stephen Jenkinson bluntly put it, despite the decades of listening to experts and sitting at the feet of self-actualization gurus and participating in endless kinds of support groups, we have the world we have. All this would seem to cast doubt on the whole proposition, to prove their argument that maybe self-help isn't so helpful after all. As I said, I really appreciate these perspectives. And also, I argue that the ways that the question often gets posed, as either it works or it doesn't, as either we help ourselves or we help others, are actually quite unhelpful. For one thing, it's just more nuanced than that. It's not really a matter of helpful or not, self or society. But also, taking a stand at either extreme, we run the risk of losing sight of two really important things. People really do need help. Speaking for us in the US at least, but there's evidence that this is true in other parts of the world, people are suffering, are physically, mentally, and or spiritually unwell. And we've got big problems. Collective forms of unraveling at larger scales, capital T troubles that are affecting ourselves and others now and into the future in untold ways. Dealing with these will require efforts beyond the individual level. What I want to argue here is that it's not a matter of either or. It's much more nuanced than that. And this really becomes obvious if we just start to ask better questions. Then, does it work or not? Should we focus on individuals or systems? If we can zoom out a bit and examine our assumptions, we gain a much better understanding of the situation and therefore of what we can do about it. I'll give you three better questions we can be asking. One good place to start, for example, would be to define our terms and simply ask, what is the self? Investigating this age-old question, whether from philosophical and religious perspectives or scientific and sociological perspectives, or all of them, as I like to do, reveals the same basic answer that we are not independent, self-existent, fixed entities. We are relational beings, inescapably so, and always in process. We are dynamic interdependence. And when we understand that, we can begin to see just how wrong we've gotten things in modern Western thought and how those errors have caused us so much trouble. It's kind of like a math problem. If you make a mistake early on, everything else is going to be off. And so it is with our sense of self. We could also get curious about what's going on and simply ask, why are so many people so desperate for help now? What has happened? What makes this moment so different? Just asking the question takes you to some useful places, highlighting some of the radical and increasingly rapid changes that have been taking place in recent centuries. For example, in biophysical conditions like our landscapes, built environments, our settlement patterns, to communication and transportation technologies, to our own bodies, and more. There's also been exponential expansion in the size and complexity of the social networks we're embedded in, and the accompanying changes in our ways of life, our ways of being, in the kind of context-specific second nature we acquire growing up in, developing within those environmental and social contexts. And of course, there's been the massive increases in the impacts of all that we do. When you really take all that in, it's hard not to conclude, as sociologist Doug Massey does in his excellent book, Strangers in a Strange Land, the book I happen to be using this semester, that many of us today are living in a world we're not really that well adapted for. And as a result, among other problems we've created, one is that many of us are feeling really unwell. And to a large degree, we have no idea why. But we want to feel better. And of course, as we know, many are seeking help to do so. Of all the kinds of help on offer and all the ways we might use it, another good question that's important to consider, but is rarely asked, as conversations with students over the years have revealed, is this. How can self-help or self-care as we know it go wrong? Given this simple prompt, we might conclude, as my students have, that when taken to excess or used in the wrong ways, it can become, in their words, selfishness. It runs the risk of leading us to neglect others, shirk responsibilities, ignore reality, take superficial actions that don't really amount to caring for ourselves, can lead to missing opportunities in the interest of avoiding discomfort and therefore not developing the skills we want to have or need to achieve our goals. These answers came out of a conversation last year at our annual outdoor teach-in in September, where the ethics theme of the year was care, and each of us professors devised a different topic, and students could pick, you know, which circle they wanted to join. And my topic was self-care. And so we got into stuff like this. Our conversation led to further great questions, such as where's the line between self-care and selfishness, between actions that matter and those that don't, between taking a needed rest and taking the easy way out. These questions don't have any easy answers, but thresholds like these are critical to explore. Especially, I would argue, early in life when one's ideas are starting to solidify. But according to what I'm seeing and what students are observing, the rhetoric of self-care appears to not be asking these questions and to be fairly simplistic and uncritical. Okay, so I've given you three examples of better questions. And what I want to point out is that these questions all really inform each other. When you understand what the self actually is, you see just how off base we are in our sense of it. And when our ideas about the self, about who we are in the world with others, are fundamentally misguided, much of what we do in the world, and even what we do to try to help ourselves will ultimately steer us wrong. So we gain some invaluable understanding, and with that understanding, something really important, a critical insight is revealed. Not only is it not a matter of whether to start with the individual or with social systems, we find that addressing both at once is actually a far more effective and efficient approach. And I would take it a step further and say that for best results, we actually need to do both at the same time. And the best news of all is that doing either one of those well naturally entails doing the other. How can this be true, you might wonder? How can we take on two such massive kinds of problems at once? Well, when we see ourselves more accurately as interdependent beings, embedded in webs of relations, or to get a little more nerdy with it, when we see ourselves as systems, we're systems of systems, operating within systems, then it all becomes clear. We see that these two key factors, people's well-being and our capacity to face the challenges of our times, form a positive feedback loop. Putting it simply, this just means that these two things reinforce each other. They amplify the effects of each other such that they both change in the same direction. So the more unwell we feel in body or mind, or both, the less capacity we have to deal with our greater unfolding crises, to engage in our work of taking on those challenges, whatever that might be for us, or certainly to sustain it. And the worse we collectively allow things to get, the more our fear and worry and despair and other strong emotions escalate, which leaves us increasingly less capable of taking meaningful action in a positive direction. In other words, our well being and our capacity decline together. But likewise, on the other hand, they also increase together. The greater our well being, in the mundane sense of feeling better and Body and mind, as well as in the more profound and genuine sense of knowing reality as it is, to quote a classic maxim I've mentioned before, the greater our capacity is to take on bigger challenges, to do the work that some consider to be the project of our times. So the kind of help I am interested in is the kind that both increases our well-being and as a result increases our capacity to do this good work. This is what I call collective self-help. It's collective in a few senses of the word. One is that the help in question pertains to more than just the individual person. With reference to the definition of collective, the group, the plurality, the whole situation is included in some way as the subject of aid, of benefit, of help. As opposed to being strictly focused on me and the widely accepted ideas like I need to fill my cup first and putting my oxygen mask on first. Even if there's some truth to these in some situations, they tend to imply a zero-sum game perspective that ultimately is it works against us. And so what I'm talking about is a more intentional consideration of the kinds of help one needs for themselves, yes, but also for themselves in order to be able to do their good work on behalf of others. It's also collective in another sense, in that this kind of help ideally takes a form that can multiply its effects and can expedite and scale its positive impacts. And thirdly, it's collective in the sense that it acknowledges and understands that in so many ways, what ails us, whether chronic disease or chronic dis-ease, has its root in social, that is collective, dynamics, in social and environmental conditions and changes in them over time. In some ways, you could say this approach isn't totally new. After all, many people seek help for themselves, at least in part, so that they're better able to benefit their families, their communities, workplaces, and others. But what I have in mind when I say collective self-help is distinct in the sense that I'm talking about an approach that does all three of these things, seeks to benefit others, is scalable and multiplicative in some way, and understands the collective roots of what's causing our unwellness in the first place, and does them explicitly and intentionally. There's a lot to say about what this means and what it could look like, and I'm going to be unpacking this concept over time. For now, I just want to briefly share a few observations that can help us begin to imagine what collective self-help in this sense could look like and how to do it. It seems to me that for starters, at a minimum, doing collective self-help well requires three main things. One is awareness, both of what the self is, as I mentioned before, not a self-existent, fixed, permanent entity. But like reality itself, it we are a process and always participating in relations of interdependence. And also self-awareness. We need to be onto ourselves so as to avoid rationalizing behaviors or actions that ultimately are not good for anybody, ourselves or others. As always, the maxim know thyself holds true. The second thing is intention. We need the intention, which at some point becomes a decision, to use ourselves, our bodies, our knowledge and understanding, our lives for the benefit of all, which of course includes ourselves. And we need actions which are informed by both of those, by greater awareness and by an altruistic intention to be of service, to work for the greater good in some sense. Awareness, intention, well-informed action. In identifying these three qualities, I'm not really saying anything revolutionary here. Saying these are valuable almost certainly echoes stuff you've heard before. Wisdom you already know. That's because all of these find endorsement and support in spiritual traditions going back millennia, in contemporary scientific research, which is using experimental methods to explore the effects of how we experience ourselves, to measure the effects of altruism and beneficent action and lots of other interesting things. And it's also represented in some of the best aspects of contemporary self-help. I point this out because I think it's a really normal response when we find things that don't make sense to us or that just feel wrong or that bring up aversions in us, as religion or science or self-help can do in some of us. It's normal to dismiss all of it, to throw the baby out with a bathwater, as they say. I still run the risk of giving into this impulse. I have plenty of disagreements and aversions in all of those directions. But I've cultivated a different habit. I've gotten really good at recognizing what's valuable and helpful and being able to sift that out from what's not. I have no trouble separating the wheat from the chaff and also remaining open to changing my mind about which is which, which has happened quite a lot over the course of my life. And this is so awesome because there is so much good stuff out there. We don't have to reinvent the wheel, though sometimes we do need to repair it or rebuild it using better materials and assembling them in new ways. Truth be told, this is just a really helpful approach to life as a human in general, because let's face it, all of us are a mixed bag, and so are all of the systems and institutions we create. We are highly imperfect beings, and we have a lot of good in us and a lot to offer, and to be able to see that and not feel like you have to reject a person or an institution or an entire body of work wholesale, but instead to be able to recognize the good that's there and then to pull it out and develop it and make the most of it in whatever ways you can, that has changed my life for the better in so many ways. Okay, that was a bit of a digression, but I really wanted to emphasize the point because as some of my colleagues in what we call the transition space, those working to nudge our collective path toward better futures, as they like to say, we need all hands on deck. I agree, and I would just add, we also need all supports on deck. We need all the supports we can get, different angles and different ways of saying things for different people with different perspectives at different phases in their lives. There are a lot of helpful resources out there, but if we reject them upon finding things that we don't like about them, we miss out on all of it. So, where was I? Awareness, understanding who and what we really are, and being onto ourselves, especially our habits of mind, the intention to be of benefit, and the willingness to take action from wherever we are in ways that are informed by those. We can all cultivate all of these qualities in ourselves starting right now, and that is so good, and we should do it. And also scaling up efforts towards a collective self-help means, among many other things, deliberately scaling up supports for these qualities in ourselves and others. Supports for developing greater awareness and understanding, for cultivating our altruistic intent, and for taking action. These kinds of supports can take any number of forms, but I just want to mention two general ways you can think about engaging with them. And one is by thinking about the activities you're already doing or plan to be doing someday, and considering very deliberately about the kinds of impacts they have or could have. With the right mindset and support, you can really design and execute your work in a way that maximizes these benefits, that really helps you make the difference and the positive changes that you aspire to make to help shape a better future and to really promote these qualities in others as much as possible. Whatever your work happens to be, as maybe a teacher, writer, a researcher, a parent, a leader of some sort in your workplace or profession or your neighborhood or wherever. Maybe you're an activist or an artist, a designer, gardener, farmer, a builder, maybe you're a communicator or a civil servant or a volunteer or whatever else it might be. I give you a lot of examples just to emphasize that you can find ways to offer this kind of um help for others, no matter what you do. And I think it's super fun to think about how our unique combinations of experiences and interests and gifts and knowledge and skills equip us to do our work, whatever it is, in very particular ways. And as I said, with the right approach and a little bit of guidance and help, we can really maximize the impacts of our activities. And we should aim high. Given the severity of the troubles we face right now, this is no time to think small. But we do need to be prepared because as you probably know, big goals naturally come with big challenges. The bigger the goal, the bigger the challenge. And here's the secret, though. Many of the challenges that that keep us from achieving what it is we set out to do come from within ourselves. We, and especially our messy minds, can be our own worst enemies. Which brings me to the next point. The second way to think about how we can scale up these kinds of supports in the name of being able to work toward the greater good. And this is within ourselves. As we are on our way to becoming the kind of teacher, leader, scholar, parent, neighbor, entrepreneur, or whatever it is we aspire to be, so that we can do whatever it is we aspire to do, it's almost certain that we would benefit from getting some personal support and guidance and coaching along the way that can help us get out of our own way, that can help us be onto ourselves and our very biased and reactive and tired brains, that can help us feel better, see a path forward, make decisions more effectively. Or you might simply say, supports that can help us solve problems, relieve pain, achieve goals, and get more of what we want and less of what we don't. In other words, we can take advantage of the best of what self-help has to offer. To recap, these two approaches essentially mean that we can aim to help other people, the collective, to help themselves, and we can also get help for ourselves that allows us to better help the collective. And I would argue that for best results, they really go well together. But here's one more cool thing I want to add. In either of those scenarios, either work we're doing for others or work we're doing on ourselves so that we can do better work for others. Beyond the formally intended effects we're after in either one, those efforts will also have all kinds of unanticipated, informal, and probably largely invisible benefits that we had not even considered. Through a combination of the work we're doing and how we're doing it, think of all of the other ways we might be impacting those who are watching us. By being a role model of more intentional living, an example of what's possible, by being a calmer and less stressed and less reactive parent or spouse, employee, boss, giving them permission to take risks and do the unconventional thing, inspiring others by what they see you doing and trying and failing at and continuing to do anyway, by being an example of commitment to something different, showing them the potential for a different quality of life that they maybe never even knew was possible. When we think about self-help in this way, and all of the modalities that can help us feel better and be able to do our work better and in this larger context of awareness and intentionality and taking action on behalf of not just ourselves, but others, we see how good and beneficial it can really be. And I would argue necessary, something that we should be explicitly and deliberately working on right now. There's so much more to say about this, but I think this is enough of an introduction to the subject for now. Bottom line, there's so much good work to be done, and so much good work you and I can do. There's no time to lose in clever debates about whether to focus on easing our own discomfort or to just forget about ourselves and focus instead on changing the system. It's really a matter of getting out of the habit of either or thinking and getting on board with accepting the both and nature of it all. People do need help. We need help, and there are a lot of changes we can help make. Let's be strategic and start doing both in earnest. In reality, as I see it, we can't really do it any other way. In so many ways, our personal struggles are intimately bound up with our collective troubles. With the right kind of awareness, intent, and action, we can move them both in a better direction. It's not a quick fix for all that ails us. It's definitely not a cure-all, but it is a worthwhile and necessary starting point. Because whatever our work happens to be at this moment, we want to be able to do it more effectively. And certainly we want to be able to sustain it so that in the long run, maybe long after we're gone, it will have contributed to making a difference that makes a difference in some way. Okay, that is what I have for you today. Thank you for joining me for this episode. As always, I welcome your thoughts. If you want to share something with me, please send me a message. And until next time, I'm wishing you well. To learn more about my work and how to listen and subscribe for free, go to Debbie VSCasper.com. That's Casper with a K.