Popular Culture Review Vol. 16, No. 1, Spring 2005 | Page 117

Self Matters
113
Basking on the warm sands of their inner Tahiti, Hughes concludes,
“everyone [becomes] his own Noble Savage.”10 But this is only one pernicious
symptom of the postmodern American cult of the self, which, ten years after
Hughes wrote these words and thirty years after its emergence on the cultural
scene, has assumed monstrous proportions.
Your Sacred Self. . .Self Matters. . . Your Authentic Self. . .In the twenty-
first century’s opening decade, the list of self-help or -enhancement book titles
in America is unending. Entire sections of Borders and Barnes & Noble
bookstores are given over to this flourishing genre, and professional self-help
gurus like Wayne Dyer (Your Sacred Self), Dr. Phil McGraw (Self Matters), and
Ric Giardina (Your Authentic Self) have become national figures.
To demonstrate how hard, if not impossible, it is to tell where self-
esteem leaves off and narcissism begins in contemporary culture, consider the
following passage from the third edition of Matthew MacKay’s and Patrick
Fanning’s best-selling book, Self-Esteem. MacKay and Fanning escort us
through a day in the life of a person in dire need of “cognitive techniques for
assessing, improving, and maintaining . . . self esteem.”
We begin with a post-shower ritual:
Now you’re out of the shower and dried off. You’re getting
dressed in your favorite clothes. See the colors of the clothes.
Feel the textures as you slowly draw each article of clothing
on over your clean, warm body. Tell yourself, “I deserve nice
things. I deserve to feel good.”
Next stop, needless to say, the mirror:
Admire your clothes. See how nice you look in them. Stand
up straight and feel how clean and refreshed your skin feels
under the clothes, how strong and resiliant [sic] your muscles
feel when you stand straight. Notice with pleasant surprise
that your usual aches and pains are gone at this moment. Tell
yourself, “I look fine.”
“If a self-critical thought comes to mind,” the authors
interject, “shrug your shoulders and let it pass. Tell yourself,
‘I’m actually OK just as I am.’”l 1
Far from producing true self-esteem, these effete exercises amount to
little more than self-hypnosis (indeed, the authors follow up with a chapter
entitled “Hypnosis for Self-Acceptance”). One wonders just what sort of “self’
MacKay and Fanning desire their readers to “esteem.” The Stepfordian 12
protocols outlined above (and those of many other self-help authors) routinely
airbrush the rigors of growth—struggle, sacrifice, disappointment, and failure—
from common human experience.