Mehta summarised the trade-off as long ago as 1979, in her excellent book Karma Cola:
The westerner is finding the dialectics of history less fascinating than the endless opportunities for narcissism provided by the Wisdom of the East … Coming at the problem from separate directions, both parties have chanced upon the same conclusion, namely, that the most effective weapon against irony is to reduce everything to the banal. You have the Karma, we’ll take the Coca-Cola, a metaphysical soft drink for a physical one.
The comic writers Christopher Buckley and John Tierney attempted to satirise the phenomenon in their book God is My Broker: A Monk Tycoon Reveals the 7½ Laws of Spiritual and Financial Growth (1998) – supposedly written by one ‘Brother Ty’, a failed, alcoholic Wall Street trader who saves his soul and earns a fortune after joining a monastic order devoted to the great Chopra. Brother Ty’s ‘laws’, though amusing enough (‘If God phones, take the call’; ‘As long as God knows the truth, it doesn’t matter what you tell your customers’; ‘Money is God’s way of saying “Thanks!”’), serve only to confirm that the genre is beyond parody, and probably immune to mockery anyway. Is Brother Ty’s second law –‘God loves the poor, but that doesn’t mean He wants you to fly coach’ – any more hilariously absurd than Chopra’s advice in Creating Affluence: ‘B stands for better and best … People with wealth consciousness settle only for the best. This is also called the principle of highest first. Go first-class all the way and the universe will respond by giving you the best’? And Brother Ty’s seventh law –‘The only way to get rich from a get-rich book is to write one’ – does not seem to apply to piss-takes. Although the publishers of God is My Broker claimed that it was ‘destined to be a cult bestseller’, it remained all cult and no bestseller. Chopra himself continued to flourish, heedless of the sniggering sophisticates. Named by Time magazine as one of the hundred top Icons and Heroes of the twentieth century, he is reported to earn more than $20 million a year from his spiritual business empire. No coach class for him.
In style, as in content, the sub-genres of self-help literature had much in common. Jonathan Lazear’s Meditations for Men Who Do Too Much, aimed at workaholics who burned themselves out by reading Keep Going for It and The Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun, had clearly bought its wisdom off the peg from the same retail chain patronised by the management gurus, Statements of the Obvious Inc. ‘Our families, our partners, our extended families, our children will always be there for us if we can make the decision to be there for them’; ‘We need to learn to pace ourselves’; ‘Wealth doesn’t really translate to happiness’; ‘Trusting no one can be as dangerous as trusting everyone’; ‘We can learn from our failures’; ‘No one is happy all of the time.’
The gurus who were chortling and whooping all the way to the bank might have questioned that last assertion. Kenneth Blanchard parlayed the success of The One-Minute Manager into an income of $6 million a year from videotapes and lectures promoting his message that ‘people who produce good results feel good about themselves’. In the late 1990s Stephen Covey’s Utah-based consultancy had annual revenues of more than $400 million, and employed 3,000 people in forty countries to spread his gospel of ‘Principle-Centered Leadership’. Anthony Robbins, who once worked as a school janitor, had earned about $80 million – some of it from books such as Awaken the Giant Within and Unlimited Power, but mostly from his talent for persuading sober-suited executives to shout ‘Yes! I can do it! I will lead not follow!’ while Tina Turner’s ‘Simply the Best’ blasted out of the PA system. John Gray had an ‘income-stream’ of $10 million in 1999, partly from 350 Mars and Venus ‘facilitators’ who paid him for the privilege of distributing his books at monthly workshops. By the end of the century, self-help publications were worth $560 million a year, and according to the research firm Marketdata Enterprises the total income of the ‘self-improvement industry’ in the US – from seminars, personal coaching, CDs and videos – was $2.48 billion. As Newsweek reported, ‘With slick marketing and growing acceptance by mainstream Americans, authors like Covey, Anthony Robbins and John Gray are amassing fortunes that rival those of Hollywood moguls.’
Why would mainstream Americans pay to be told what they knew already? One of Blanchard’s satisfied customers tried to explain. ‘What he’s saying is a lot of common sense and not really new,’ the executive manager of B. H. Emporiums, a Canadian retail chain, conceded. ‘But if I pay him $15,000 to say it, my general managers and my people listen. If I’m paid to say it, my people don’t listen in the same way.’ The mega-stars in this branch of showbiz may have had nothing original to impart, but they knew how to put on a performance. Anthony Robbins, a six-foot-seven Superman lookalike, would ask his audience to take off their shoes and socks and walk across hot coals while he repeated the soothing mantra ‘cool moss, cool moss’. The frenetic stage persona of Tom Peters, former McKinsey man, was a cross between Mick Jagger and Pete Townshend – arms flailing, sweat drenching his shirt.
So what are the seven habits of highly effective people? How do we awaken the giant within? The short answer is: never overestimate the intelligence of your audience. ‘Did you ever consider’, Stephen Covey asks in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (1989), ‘how ridiculous it would be to try to cram on a farm – to forget to plant in the spring, play all summer and then cram in the fall to bring in the harvest? The farm is a natural system. The price must be paid and the process followed. You always reap what you sow.’ The echo of Chauncey Gardener, the idiot savant who dispensed horticultural wisdom in Jerzy Kosinski’s satire Being There, is presumably accidental.
Anthony Robbins prefers to take his imagery from the kitchen rather than the farmyard. ‘A nice metaphor for the components and use of strategies is that of baking,’ he observes in Unlimited Power (1986). ‘If someone makes the greatest chocolate cake in the world, can you produce the same quality results? Of course you can, if you have that person’s recipe … if you follow the recipe to the letter, you will produce the same results, even though you may never have baked such a cake before in your life.’ This weary analogy clearly had a profound effect on at least one reader. ‘There is no better metaphor for the products of the knowledge economy than the recipe,’ the British guru Charles Leadbeater writes in Living on Thin Air: The New Economy (1999). ‘Think of the world as divided up into chocolate cakes and chocolate-cake recipes … We can all use the same chocolate-cake recipe, at the same time, without anyone being worse off. It is quite unlike a piece of cake.’ Tony Blair, in turn, was deeply impressed, hailing Leadbeater as ‘an extraordinarily interesting thinker’ whose book ‘raises critical questions for Britain’s future’. Another Labour minister, Peter Mandelson, described Living on Thin Air as ‘a blueprint for what a radical modernising project will entail in years to come’.
The man ultimately responsible for all this lucrative twaddle is Dale Carnegie, and most of his successors stick pretty closely to the formula (oh, all right, recipe) devised by the pioneer. It was certainly Carnegie who cottoned on to the selling power of animal analogies, peppering his prose with such eternal verities as ‘no one ever kicks a dead dog’ and ‘if you want to gather honey, don’t kick over the beehive’. Studying the titles on display in the management section of Borders’ bookshop, you might assume that you’d stumbled into the natural history department by mistake: Lions Don’t Need To Roar: Stand Out, Fit In and Move Ahead in Business, by Debra Benton, Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive by Harvey Mackay and Teaching the Elephants to Dance: Empowering Change in Your Organisation by James A. Belasco. Charles Handy’s The Age of Unreason has a picture of a leaping frog on its front cover. Why? ‘If you put a frog in water and slowly heat it, the frog will eventually let itself be boiled to death,’ he explains. ‘We, too, will not survive if we don’t respond to the radical way in which the world is changing.’ Not to be outdone, Stephen Covey includes a section on fish in his Principle-Centred Leadership. ‘I’ve long been impressed’, he reveals, ‘with the many parallels between fishing and managing. In reality, senior-level executives are really fishing the stream. That is, they’re looking at the business in the context of the total environment and devising ways to “reel in” desired results …’ And what does it get them? A pile of dead trout.
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