 "Photo: Bryant Haertlein")
Paul Damien, a UT business professor, has some tips on how to write a best-selling self-help book. He suggests that you start by making an outlandish claim (path to immortality, secret of the universe, shoot lightning from your hand) then master the linguistic gibber of the guru: Searching for the selfless self and the egoless "I" will align your energy with the wave function of your chakra, and lightning will spring from your hands. Oh, and if it doesn't, you did something wrong.
Damien's new book, "Help!," is a blistering indictment of modern guruism. He dissects the arguments of several best-selling self-help authors, including Deepak Chopra, Rhonda Byrne and Fritjof Capra, accusing them of praying on people's fears for personal profit. Damien's tone is lighthearted and humorous as he dismantles the techniques used by these self-proclaimed gurus.
The idea for "Help!" began when Damien read some self-help books to contrast them with theology.
"I read quite a few of them, and my initial disbelief turned to a burning desire to discredit and disprove these people," Damien said. "I felt that debunking the self-help book is itself a form of self-help."
This burning desire turned into a systematic study of the methods used to generate a successful, Oprah-quality best seller. And what sets the best sellers apart?
"Clever marketing," Damien said. "As professor in the business school, I am telling you it is just clever marketing. These books are a dime a dozen, and very few of them make it to the top. The ones that do have a good marketing strategy."
Damien explained how Chopra was already marketing guruism before he even wrote his first book.
"He was a follower of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who was one of the biggest intellectual con artists of all time," Damien said. "Chopra was his salesman and he made his first couple of million dollars selling Yogi's products. He had copyrighted the word "ayur-veda," and then he marketed all these products under the guise of healing and youthfulness. From there it was easy for him to get into the mainstream of self-help gurus. Then he appeared on Oprah and his book sold like 130 thousand copies in an hour."
But Damien sees the dangers of this kind of thought in other places, namely business schools. He jokes that MBA stands for Master of Buzzword Analysis and BBA for Basic Buzzword Analysis.
"I strongly believe that this use of buzzwords is diluting the ideas and concepts in economics or mathematics, so when we talk about these ideas in class in business schools, we give them such a watered-down version," Damien said.
Damien's example of a buzz phrase that has overtaken its deeper and more fundamental meaning is "expectancy theory of motivation."
"This is nothing more than a very simple idea in economics, which is to optimize things that add value to your life, your utility," Damien said.
Damien believes that the blame for this abandonment of rigor lies with both faculty and students. The students want things given to them in pieces that don't require too much thought, and the professors oblige. Supply and demand. Consequence-driven motivational selection. Man, buzzword creation is fun.
The bottom line, as Damien sees it, is that self-help authors are manipulating people's fears to make money. But if it is so easy to make money this way, why isn't Damien writing self-help books?
"I think there are more pleasant ways of making a million dollars," he said. "Writing a self-help book is easy to do if you know how to manipulate words, but I find the task rather distasteful."
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