AndrewBrunelle.com

Writing on this blog as of late has been a joy for me, finally getting out some thoughts I’d kept inside for a long time.  A couple of years ago, my blog was a carbon-copy self-help blog, but now it’s something that I actually feel good about, even if readership has slightly dropped off.  I got away from the run-of-the-mill self-help blog because, first of all, it’s too common on the Internet and I would just get lost in the cracks, not to mention that I would be every self-help junkie’s drug for the day, which helps no one, except for them in the short-term.  Self-help starts with the basic assumption that “you are not good enough and your life isn’t good enough, so we’re going to show you how to make it better.  Better by our standards, but better nonetheless.  We are going to throw around obscure terms like autonomy and consciousness and use them at every turn so that we can sound sophisticated and intelligent and bullshit you to your goals.  We are going to give you pointless exercises to do to help you decide what kind of worker drone you want to be.  You are an extraordinary being put here by the spirit world to succeed at whatever it is you put your mind to.”  And it just goes on like that.

That type of thinking is a mistake and it is certainly not for me.  It is completely delusional.  Most of these self-help gurus haven’t accomplished anything other than becoming a self-help guru.  Not only that, but if someone isn’t even what they claim to be, then why bother and take their advice.  I could put out articles about how I ran a marathon and I lost 100 lbs., but how would you know whether or not I actually did it?  I could say I graduated college in 3 semesters, or that I eat a completely 100% raw diet, but you’re not here to confirm that.  Most of these people exaggerate their lives to prop themselves up above the rest of the field.  They become almost cult objects, where people wonder what their opinion on everything is.  What’s Tony Robbins’ opinion on abortion?  What’s Steve Pavlna’s opinion on pornography?  Who cares?  They’re not some omnipotent being here.  They are people who have milked the self-help teet for their own personal gain under the guise that they really love to help people.

These types of people live in a fantasy world, where they actually believe the whole world is right in front of them to serve their purposes, like they are some kind of God.  That they can do whatever they want because they are the lords of the Earth.  They claim to eschew materialism while they are constantly buying new cars and computers, to feed their undying lust for consumerism.  They figure that since they are in the top 1% of the world’s wealth, why not make the other 99% have less while we keep writing bullshit articles about stuff that truly doesn’t matter, other than to make people with low self-esteem feel good and we get paid handsomely for the inauthentic drivel we put out.  They use the world as their oyster, yet they say they have compassion for all living things.

This whole idea that they convey:  We can all have more.  That is the biggest mistake of them all.  Isn’t that what’s killing us in the first place.  More, more, more, until there’s nothing left.  Self-help gurus will say to put yourself in an abundance mindset and then  everyone can have more, but the facts say differently.  Oil is running out, iron is running out, trees are running thin.  Not everyone deserves their own house.  Steve Pavlina hardly ever talks to his parents.  Tony Robbins, who used to talk about how to create a fulfilling relationship, just divorced his wife.  What self-help gurus do is isolate themselves to people who agree with them, and they are living in what I would call a sub-world.  They don’t deal with people who contradict them and when someone does, they ignore it or praise that person for giving them marketing.  They feed the addictions of the self-help junkies by telling them what they want to hear, but never giving them enough information to really make anything actionable happen.

I realize that this entire post is just bashing a very small subset of the population, and it is probably not so relevant.  But these people have thousands if not millions of loyal followers, much like a cult.  They encourage people to destroy more of the Earth to fulfill their materialistic fantasies instead of becoming human again.  Saying that everyone should live the way these gurus do is so dangerous that it would probably put the human race on the verge of extinction.  I’m only bashing them because their worldview, that you can have everything you’ve ever wanted, is not mentally sound because if that were the case, then everyone would be a self-help blogger, 6 billion people blogging on the Internet about how starving sucks because no one was on a low enough plane to go out and either grow or find food.

Unfortuneately, our society depends on people not making their full potential.  We need people to grow food (not really, but in today’s barren landscape, yes).  We need them to build alienating devices like the automobile and computers.  Why don’t these self-help gurus talk about taking the whole system down?  Why don’t they talk about revolution? Because they’ve willed themselves to the top of society and someone at the top will never give up that position.  It is the only position that’s better than living like we used to, as hunter-gatherers.  And there’s a reason why such a small percentage of people ever get that high.  The people at the top suppress those below them because that means more unnecessary resources for them and less for the people below them.  If they were to strip the system down to how we were thousands of years ago, then they would lose all the perks they used to have, stolen perks.  Stolen in the sense of tracing back through history, when we used to belong to the land, and now we’ve stolen all of it.  Everything we own comes from the Earth, so in fact we have stolen it.  It doesn’t matter how much we’ve paid for it, it’s still stolen.  How many animals and habitats were stolen from the world in the name of progress?  In the name of self-help guru encouraged progress?  When some loser reads Lifehack.org and becomes more and more technical and ends up becoming the programmer of a new software and buys a brand new house built on ancient burial grounds of the Hopi Indians or in the middle of a forest, why doesn’t anyone think of the habitat that’s being destroyed?  Because most of these people are in a delusional fantasy that they can have whatever they want at the expense of others and other creatures.  “This is America, damn it!  I deserve 100 acres of land to do with as I please!  It’s MY land!”

It’s partly about money because money=power.  Money or violence equals power.  And in this sick and pathological society, the more power people have, the more they feed into the system, by dominating more land, having more material things, and contributing more and more to the destruction of the ecosystem and the whole world as we know it.  This is why I don’t feel like writing self-help blogs anymore.  Even the whole spirituality paradigm is rooted in hierarchy, where some people feel that they are on a higher plane than you.  Give me a break.  It shouldn’t be all about status-climbing.  That isn’t what life and afterlife are all about.  Getting more and more power and more and more dominance is not mentally healthy.  It’s totally destructive.  And anyone who is sane will realize that all this progress is for nothing because the human race, staying on this current track, will destroy itself and keep crashing and burning until the entire race goes extinct completely unless we figure out a way to live indefinitely, with no progress, with stable populations, and no conquests.  Not to mention no agriculture.  I just hope everyone sees self-help for what it is: Encouragement for more destruction of the Earth while feeling good about it.  Or as Tyler Durden said, “Self-improvement is masturbation.”

If you found this post funny, insightful, helpful, or throught-provoking, feel free to donate to my site.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 30th, 2009 at 4:56 pm and is filed under Anti-establishment, Rants, Theories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.