Overdosing On Oprah

NRO: The Side Effects Of Empowerment

(National Review Online) 
The larger point is that, with the gods of empowerment cheering in the background, society has embraced concepts like confidence and self-esteem despite scant evidence that they're reliably correlated with positive outcomes. The work of legitimate psychology notables Roy Baumeister and Martin Seligman indicates that often, high self-worth is a marker for negative behavior, as diagnosed in sociopaths and drug kingpins. Furthermore, self-esteem may be expressed in the kind of braggadocio -- "I'm fine just the way I am, thank you" -- that actually inhibits personal growth.

Unfazed by pesky questions about whether happy thoughts can even guarantee results for any one individual, today's champions of positive thought unflinchingly portray their quest as the folkloric rising tide that lifts all boats, supposedly enabling America en masse to reach new levels of happiness and prosperity. A nice thought-- but impossible barring a wholesale change in the way the free market operates. Many pursuits are zero-sum affairs. For each winner, there usually must be a fair number of losers. Nonetheless, I have been to sales seminars where the motivational speaker implied to 250 real-estate professionals from the same company that all of them could be the firm's No. 1 salesperson next year. One of them will be. The other 249 will not. Consider, then, the psychic costs of coming up short in a philosophical system that disclaims the role of luck, timing, or competition, and admits no obstacles that cannot be conquered by the sheer application of will. If winning is a straight-line function of "character," then what does that say about those who lose? Of course, one never really loses in this brave new world of hopeful euphemisms. "There is no such thing as failure," posits a core maxim of the neurolinguistic programming regimen from which Tony Robbins drew much of his patter. "There is only feedback."

But why settle for redefining mere words when you can redefine the very world in which you move? Hence, the solipsistic outlook that fuels today's empowered thinking: Reality becomes an arbitrary affair wherein each individual decides his personal truth. One is hard pressed to find a setting where such reasoning is deemed inappropriate. At a presentation to the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, Dale Walsh, vice president of Riverbend Community Mental Health, hailed the new resolve that mentally ill "clients" feel about playing "a significant role in the shaping of the services, policies, and research" that affect them -- this, as part of "taking power back from the system." A second mental-health activist, Selina Glater, writes that "empowerment," in a treatment setting, is about "clearly stating what it is you need in order to feel whole again." Inmates running the asylum indeed.