Feel-good is bad.(Sham: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless)(Brief Article)(Excerpt)

The "self-help" and "self-actualization" movement is seldom recognized for what it is: a contributing factor to many of the problems now plaguing our society. It is almost impossible to assess the full magnitude of what self-help has done to America. Whether you follow self-help's teachings or not, you have been touched by it, because its philosophies bleed into every area of day-to-day life in America--the home, the workplace, the educational system, the mating dance. "Enlightened" policies aimed at protecting self-esteem increasingly add costs to businesses, and obstacles to social improvement. The celebration of self has recently infected health care, spawning an aggressive new wing of alternative medicine that shoos people away from proven mainstream treatments by persuading them that they can cure themselves.

The self-help movement has changed the meanings of right and wrong, ...