Confession: I Love Self-Help!

There are a lot of bad books, but we shouldn't leave the genre up to right-wing idiots. Embrace self-help!

Browsing the shelves of a Barnes and Nobles, or the Amazon bestsellers list, you’ll notice that many of the books fall into the category of “self-help”: the far-right idiot Jordan Peterson’s “12 Rules for Life” stays high on the list, as do books like “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck,” “Atomic Habits” (“Tiny changes, remarkable results!”) and a bunch of books about how to get rich that have been on the bestsellers list for years or even decades.

There’s no doubt that many of these books are extremely stupid. “Atomic Habits” for example has this very scientific graph in its first few pages:

And so there has been a (largely justified) backlash to self-help in recent years.