Help!: Debunking the Outrageous Claims of Self-Help Gurus
Product Description
Under the guise of self-help, a disturbing tribe of “gurus” has formed; its leaders include Deepak Chopra and, most recently, Rhonda Byrne with her much-ballyhooed The Secret. Do these authors really provide helpful and coherent ideas about dealing with life’s issues? In Help!: Debunking the Outrageous Claims of Self-Help Gurus, Paul Damien exposes these authors and other “professionals” in this field as emperors without clothing. With a devastating combination of humor, satire, and logic, he reveals the vagueness, vapidity, and utter silliness that constitute the work of many prominent self-help authors. Drawing on influences such as Emily Dickinson, Richard Feynman, and Bertrand Russell, Dr. Damien shows that self-help books are about as useful as a root canal on a toothless person…. More >>
Help!: Debunking the Outrageous Claims of Self-Help Gurus
I found myself at a quandary when reading Paul Damien’s Help!: Debunking the Outrageous Claims of Self-help Gurus. First of all, I wanted to be totally open to what Paul Damien had to say. I have read numerous books on The Secret and the Law of Attraction in the past few years and let me say beforehand that I have read books from the “gurus” and from those who took looks into the industry, movement, or whatever other label might fit it. And I must say that although Paul Damien’s book might not have been the first to lambaste these gurus, it was the first book that I had the opportunity to read through and through.
First I would like to say that I have had many of the same doubts as Paul Damien regarding the industry of spiritual self help books. Though there is help to be found in many of them, or even most of them, they often do rely on alchemy and false logic to promote their causes. Paul Damien has an excellent nose for this, for which he points out many grand examples throughout his work. Several of these books would rely solely on false science and quasi-religious mysticism to pull in their readers like a symbolic venus fly trap. And I agree as Paul Damien points out that most of these author gurus feed upon one another in their shallow philosophies, often borrowing directly from one another’s pages like medieval religious writers. In fact, one pet peeve of mine that Paul Damien didn’t seem to cover the fact that so many of these guys use the same quotes of famous people over and over and very often even get the quotes wrong or out of context, which only backs up the author’s overall argument.
That being said, all well and good… Paul Damien made many strong cases against Deepak Chopra, Rhonda Byrne and others but in my opinion he went overboard. Yes, overboard. Rather than simply taking points and dissecting them, which he did, Damien added far too much negative sarcasm to take all of his arguments seriously. Did he prove his point? Yes, at times. Did he miss his mark and get off the point? Yes, at times. I felt it very difficult to keep an open mind reading this book because the author’s tirades were often so vicious you wanted to see his targets as victims rather than subjects of a book dissecting their theories and testimonies. It seemed he saved his biggest salvos for fellow countryman Deepak Chopra as well. In this way I felt that Paul Damien does himself an injustice in his own effort, no, let’s say crusade against these self help gurus. By creating his own aggressive language for the book (Choprasinners, Insect Nation, She-Mantis and many others – often related to bodily functions as well…) and in describing negatively concocted, highly improbable imaginary scenes and conversations one is forced to wonder whether Paul Damien’s only gripe with these people is that he believes they are resting on false science.
What I am getting at is this: I believe the author’s rational arguments would stall much taller if they had been given simply as rational arguments and not emotive rants – meaning that he should have done a better job at keeping his cool. If Paul Damien’s job was to pick apart the self help books I would call the book a triumph. If his job was to persuade I would have to say the author shot himself in the proverbial foot.
Writer Paul Damien says in the preface of his Help!: Debunking the Outrageous Claims of Self-help Gurus that the aim of Help! His intention is to assess critically what he calls a ominous class of trendy books that tends to rear its unsightly head from time to time.
Having read the preface; I set out to examine the book itself.
Chapter 0 is The Pustulates; in which the writer sets down what he views as the theories upon which Deepak Chopra bases his manuscript Ageless Body, Timeless Mind in addition to being the focus for many of his later works.
Chapter – 1 titled: The Negation in which writer Damien is persuaded that statistics used aimed at mass consumers in the US are an endeavor to deride us. In addition, Chapter 1 brings the reader information for Writing (Dirty) Secrets.
I found the chapter to be filled with a touch of the whimsical as the writer offered a series of words to learn by heart but not to necessarily comprehend in order to generate what he calls – guru type sentences – to ‘grab the reader’s attention by sounding as though a great, mystical concept is being put forth that could change the reader’s life’. Damien says to become a guru; writers will need to develop a compilation of words to use. Whether the writer understands them is not important however. Writer Damien even offers some suggestions for writing self help books including a note that qualifications for doing so are actually none.
Reading through Help, it became evident that Author Damien has found a recent tome offered by author Rhonda Byrne to be particularly troubling. Damien states unabashedly that Byrne and Chopra are his main targets, Chopra because in the notion of Damien he is an amalgamation of Dr Fritjof Capra and Dr Scott Peck. Damien says where fitting, connections to Byrne’s resent book are posited.
Other chapter titles include 2 Insect Nation, 3 Damien’s Laws to combat the Seven Choprasin Laws and 4 The Three Tenors. Chapter 5 entitled The Guru talks of the Placebo Effect, and Originality, while Chapter 6 touches on Deadened Buyers. Chapter 7 wraps up the work with Final Thoughts before listing appendices, 4, and listing a group of notes prior to the bibliography.
I’m not sure how much sincerity Writer Damien intended readers would share while reading his book Help!: Debunking the Outrageous Claims of Self-help Gurus. His writing is proficient, sharp and laced with humor. Damien points out that Self Help gurus make lots of money by purportedly enlightening the public on the subject of the great secrets of the world. Gurus according to Damien tell the rest of us how to live and what to believe on the pages of their books.
Writer Paul Damien uses a blend of stinging wittiness and mordant satire to take on Deepak Chopra as well as others of the various gurus. Damien feels that the secrets they develop will aid us all toward becoming little more than intolerable people. He says that to be a guru, it is fundamental to generate an aura of writing with passion. To do so, according to Damien, the flourishing guru jazzes up inconsequential sentences with Eastern twaddle.
At time Paul Damien uses an almost overpowering blend of wittiness, lampooning, and common sense, to divulge the haziness, characterless, and entire ludicrousness that he feels encompasses the so called work of a good many well-known self-help authors. Interesting read, interesting premise, happy to recommend for those who are not at all sure they agree with gurus.
Molly Martin
Reviewer
With Help: Debunking the Outrageous Claims of Self-Help Gurus, Paul Damien aims his sights on a class of trendy books that he describes as sinister and authored by some well-known masters of the game, Dr. Deepak Chopra, Rhonda Bryne, Dr. Fritjof Capra and Dr. Scott Peck. As indicated in the Preface, the motive of the book is to critique and parody these so-called “gurus.” It should be pointed out, as mentioned, some of the arguments advanced are thanks to Professor Ernest Geller, based on his insightful book, Words and Things.
Indian born Damien was educated in England where he received his doctorate in mathematics from Imperial College, London. He is an elected Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society of England, and a recipient of the United Kingdom Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council’s Outstanding Researcher Award. Presently, he is the B.M. Rankin Jr. Professor of Business for the McCombs School of Business Administration at the University of Texas, Austin.
You may ask if Damien is qualified to write this critique and to which he cleverly replies: Is Chopra qualified to write about quantum physics even though he has no formal training in theoretical physics. Incidentally, Damien fiercely illustrates how Chopra twists the principles of quantum physics to fit into his teachings. As for Bryne, is she qualified to teach us about the “law of attraction” which, as Damien shows, is really not a law? As pointed out, what in fact these two have in common and have cleverly interwoven into their teachings is the rephrasing of others’ ideas that are mixed with non-ideas. They then claim everything fits into your paradigm and shrewdly market all of this preposterous nonsense with the aid of two or three buzzwords.
If we take Chopra’s work as an example, Damien sums it up as resting on three basic premises: 1) “His claim of having “proved” the grand unified theory (which even Einstein, Feynman, Hawking, and others have failed to do)”. 2) “Three Hindu mind-body principles (doshas), which bear a curious resemblance to the “mug-shots” of humans found in paper place mats in cheap Chinese restaurants.” 3) “Reciting the poetry and prose of dozens of Eastern and Western writers and making the questionable claim that the meaning in different art forms and in science is simply one and the same.” Damien devotes considerable ink in dissecting these elements and proving that basically Chopra is a master at the juxtaposition of words in order to produce the effect of possessing some meaning.
What is quite interesting is that there are no easy answers as to why so many people buy the products put out by Chopra and his colleagues. Perhaps, it is due to the fact that many individuals are looking for a quick fix without putting in too much effort to resolve their problems. Damien states: “In the Web Age, accessing data has been equated to intelligence; processing data is considered uncool.” Essentially, as stated, Chopra interweaves unrelated ideas, non-ideas, recipes, exercise routines, chanting, and oil baths and sells it as science-scripture. His followers are not very interested in questioning his methods or philosophy as after all it does contain traces of science, religion, poetry, or anything else you can dream of, et voilà, they are now educated and they can return home much enlightened.
Throughout the book, Damien makes a very convincing argument that too many of us have been hoodwinked into swallowing the gospel of these “gurus.”
Their self-help techniques are nothing more than a monotonous and brash pimping of the English Language. It is questionable if any of their followers have in fact benefited from their pimping, as it is extremely difficult to measure it due to the haziness surrounding their methods.
Damien’s 162- page critique brilliantly succeeds in making his case in a very efficient and coherent way and provides us with a unique glimpse into the world of these self-help experts. His clear- headed prose does a terrific job of dismembering the fallacies of the teachings of Chopra, Bryne and company. In the end, what we have is an informative and impassioned wake-up call to those who still blindly believe in the mumbo jumbo that is extensively propagated by these so-called authorities.
Norm Goldman, Publisher & Editor Bookpleasures