We Don’t Need Positive Vibes
How Arthur Brooks newest book is nothing more than self-help gaslight tactics.
If you want to get a grasp on how the self-help industry is doing you only have to look at what Arthur Brooks is doing and has done over the years. Brooks has led a pretty diverse life and has a bit of a knack for pivoting from one thing to another with many people not seemingly to notice the obvious paper trail he’s left behind.
These days he’s got a regular column on The Atlantic where he shares advice on how to be living your happiest life. This weekly column is one of the most highly anticipated columns on the site. He was Pocket’s 2022 top author, helping readers rethink happiness and hosted an event in May 2022 where he hosted a multi-day conference on happiness.
The tickets were $700 per person.
And the multi-millionaire is on the verge of making even more thanks to him co-authoring with Oprah.
I mean, it’s Oprah.
And she makes the best collaborations with people, right?
But like the fact Oprah is the co-author to his newest book (where she has a tendency to write opening paragraphs to chapters and nothing more), looking more at the details and doing some research and you can find the intent and message is misleading.
Arthur Brooks: The Man Of Many Faces
To first understand why this is a big deal and the gravity of the situation it’s important to know who Arthur Brooks is in the first place. Because while his image now has been carefully cultivated for the past few years as the go-to guy on happiness, a lot of his actions in his past lives makes it pretty convenient to be in the position he enjoys today.
The most key feature to know about him is he has unusually strong powers of self-invention — embodying one of the rules of the 48 Laws of Power to “recreate himself”.
In his 20s he was a French horn player.
By his 30s he became an academic economist.
A decade later he became a professional policy wonk. This ended up with him being the head of the American Enterprise Institute(AEI) — the US’s most prominent and conservative think tanks.
By 2015, Brooks was in the ear of key Republican politicians. He had Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio, Eric Cantor, and many others in his pocket. At his peak moment in politics, he was one of the most important voices of conservatism in the US.
His ideology was to be believed to be the next face of the Republican party.
And then Trump happened.
Brooks isn’t full on MAGA based on his public refusal for Trump’s plan to deport millions of undocumented immigrants. However that still doesn’t make him the greatest conservative. He, like many other conservatives, back-pedalled and offered some leniency to Trump.
Like the time AEI hosted Mike Pence at their headquarters where Pence called Brooks “a friend” and “mentor”.
Regardless, his efforts back in AEI still made it clear what his conservatism views truly are underneath his seemingly sunny outlook on life.
As the head of AEI he:
- Insisted the issue wasn’t about thin social safety nets but rather politicians giving out benefits to people.
- Opposed labour unions and state employees demanding for better pay.
- Has issues with “entitlement” programs.
- Wants to gut and privatize social security.
- Disagreed with Medicaid expansion.
- And dislikes the idea of free college, rent control, and free healthcare.
Like so many other exceedingly wealthy individuals, he believes the issues are people feeling too entitled and aren’t “working hard enough” while he sits on his millions of dollars.
Even though we know the housing crisis and rent situation right now in general is really bad.
Even though we know government assistance and the creation of social safety nets is pretty helpful.
In the end, he is your typical rich conservative who dislikes change and human betterment. But unlike so many other people, Brooks has had a hand in leading humanity towards that path in the first place.
Again, AEI is an influential group in conservative politics. And through Brooks’ leadership, sowed despair about a variety of programs that actively helped people.
And now that the damage is done, he has “recreated himself” into the guy who has the cure.
As the Guardian put it “he is walking the well-trodden — and lucrative — path from arsonist to firefighter.” And looking over Brooks’ career thus far, it puts his book into a whole new light.
The Issue With Micro-Solutions
Teaming up with Oprah creates the veneer that what Brooks is doing is for the good of people. And combined with his more practical outlook on happiness it can look like he is a bit different from the rest of the wealthy self-help gurus out there.
He’s spent 3 years working on this more positive outlook and what it means to be happy through his weekly column on The Atlantic. And so combined with his other success of books in the past, he used this experience to tell various stories and offer some practical advice.
Reading over summaries, the book dives into things like:
- Developing growth mindsets
- Building meaningful relationships
- Having practical goals
- Having healthy habits
- And managing stress
All of these things are pretty good on paper, but as The Guardian points out, a lot of these are pretty standard for self-help books these days. It follows an individualistic premise and naturally leads into a very common trope that Brooks told people wouldn’t be in the book at all.
Bootstrap tactics.
In fact, the first story is precisely that where Brooks tells us about his Spanish mother-in-law reclaiming her life and filling it with happiness by diving into a new career after living with an abusive husband for years.
I’m happy for his mother-in-law to find a happier life all around, but the issue with micro-solutions is that they work in vacuum.
Spain only recently started to treat women better than they were before. In other words, Brooks’ mother-in-law had to deal with positive discrimination which still has remnants today in Spain. Instead of trying to combat that systemic problem, she ignored the plight of other Spanish women and focused on her own problems.
The issue with all of that is that it can often blindside people and make them ignorant of particular problems.
Like The Guardian article pointed out, methods like working fewer hours, focusing on yourself rather than others and so on comes with a particular cost — time. And as humans we all have some level of responsibilities too that take up our time.
It’s easy for Brooks to offer this advice when he can effortlessly hire plenty of individuals to do anything and everything he doesn’t want to do. In fact, that’s kinda what Oprah did since she only provided a few paragraphs in each chapter of this book he’s peddling — another detail The Guardian pointed out.
The issue with micro-solutions is that they completely disregard privileges and individuals wealth. They simply assume that people are in kind of a similar position to them. Able to afford to pay some of their problems away, and are only dealing with small inconveniences in life.
These solutions are ill-suited for individuals who are below those standards.
But Brooks is also the most ill-suited to offer this information since he was the head of an organization that actively steered the government system to where it’s at. A system that doesn’t tax the rich all that much, softens protections from consumers and the environment, and attempts to remove safety nets that are crucial to every day Americans for survival.
All while thinking that his efforts back then and what he’s doing now will somehow make America into the next Finland.
You know what’s going to make America great again? The answer isn’t positive vibes, better goals, and an individualistic growth mindset. Helpful as those may be — as plenty of studies point that out — it’s hard to develop those things when a lot of people’s goals are trying to keep the lights on and pay for food and medication among a whole host of other things.
You know, things that are generously offered by Finland’s government.
And things that are viciously fought over in America due to organizations like AEI muddying the water and preventing any real change.
It’s Nothing Short Of Gaslighting
The issue with self-help these days is that the rich self-help gurus think that self-help isn’t political or that culture issues don’t matter.
The reality is self-help is political and culture issues do matter in these situations. If you want humans to improve, they’re going to need a foundation and that foundation isn’t just positive vibes and a better mindset.
You can’t growth mindset your way out of sky high medical bills. In America, you’re expected to go into massive debt if you ever get in an accident, need medication, get pregnant, want higher education, and in some cases even getting a job.
It’s insensitive to ignore those plights or be ignorant to those things. But in Brooks case, it’s effectively gaslighting since he led America down this pathway with his past rhetoric.
And instead of trying to fix these issues, Brooks continues to hold conservative values, feels honoured about his work in AEI, and thinks that buying his book is the better solution rather than addressing underlying issues that he specifically sabotaged. And sure enough, a lot of people are eagerly spending their $30 to listen to what he primarily has to say on what makes people happier.
From people who can effortlessly spend that money on a book that doesn’t solve a lot of issues plaguing America.
Even with his findings being backed by studies and is more grounded in reality, it still offers some dissonance as Brooks thinks Americans working longer hours or multiple jobs is something that people want to do.
When in reality, these things are a sign of the fact that companies keep raising prices, wages are stagnating, and the solutions that people are offering to those directly impacted by that are done by rich folk who say that the poor are too entitled and should pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
Rich folk that are equally rigging the systems in place to be harsher on poorer people and less so on those charging six figures for every speaking gig they show up to.
Obviously people like myself aren’t Brooks’ primary audience. His audience is those in upper and middle class. Those who can afford to take some vacations to attend his speaking gigs, buy his books, and live in relative ease. As I’ve said before, self-help isn’t really designed for marginalized (or poor) individuals. And this particular issue will persist until something is done about it.
But it says something about the self-help industry that we allow people like Arthur Brooks to come in, propose the same bland answer that many others offered before and people herald him as a brilliant individual. He isn’t.
He steered people into this direction. And now that things are more broken, his solution to “fix” the problem he created is to think more happy thoughts.
We don’t need positive vibes right now. We need actual change.
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