Self help messiah, p.42
Self-help Messiah, page 42
Carnegie’s diagnosis identified several psychological flash points. He related the story of a GI who came out of the war exhausted, unhappy, and unfocused. Worrying constantly about his future, this soldier began to suffer crying spells and weight loss that culminated in a breakdown. Finally he ended up in the hospital where a doctor concluded that his “problems were mental” and offered counseling that set him on the path to recovery. Carnegie pointed to the business arena, where people were so intent on crowding forward in search of advancement and material possessions that it was no “small wonder that insecurity, worry, and ‘anxiety neurosis’ ” were running rampant. He found another danger zone in America’s postwar prosperity, where he quoted a Ladies’ Home Journal survey indicating that “seventy percent of all our worries are about money.” This variety of pressures attending modern life—particularly their tendency to encourage worry about future problems, dreams of future bliss, or regret about things done in the past—led Carnegie to a stark denunciation. The “emotional sickness of worry” had become ubiquitous, in his view, causing “ten thousand times more damage than smallpox.” American society presented a startling picture of “how we destroy our bodies and minds by anxiety, frustration, hatred, resentment, rebellion, and fear.”18
This pressing array of emotional maladies prompted Carnegie to search for a cure from the world of psychology. He endorsed psychoanalysis (in a diluted version) because of its “healing power of words. Ever since the days of Freud, analysts have known that a patient could find relief from his inner anxieties if he could talk, just talk … All of us know that ‘spitting it out’ or ‘getting it off our chest’ brings almost instant relief. So the next time we have an emotional problem, why don’t we look around for someone to talk to?” More often, however, Carnegie turned to commonsense strategies that involved a clear-minded assessment of mental problems and a realistic forging of solutions. He advocated a tactic of accepting the worst possible outcome that might flow from a problem, and then working on improving things from there. He quoted William James: “Be willing to have it so … [because] acceptance of what has happened is the first step in overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.” Carnegie added, “Psychologically, it means a new release of energy! When we have accepted the worst, we have nothing more to lose. And that automatically means—we have everything to gain!” He advocated the time-tested technique of losing yourself in work and activity as an antidote to anxiety. “ ‘Occupational therapy’ is the term now used by psychiatry when work is prescribed as though it were a medicine,” he wrote. “Any psychiatrist will tell you that work—keeping busy—is one of the best anesthetics ever known for sick nerves.”19
But Carnegie’s favorite psychological solution to worry came from a longtime influence on his thinking: the positive-thought tradition, which stressed that focusing mental resources could shape social reality. In part four of How to Stop Worrying, he turned once again to the therapeutic powers of positive thinking. Entitled “Seven Ways to Cultivate a Mental Attitude That Will Bring You Peace and Happiness,” this section explained the “mental attitudes that lead to inner security and happiness.” Carnegie grew passionate. “The longer I live, the more deeply I am convinced of the tremendous power of thought,” he exclaimed. “I know men and women can banish worry, fear, and various kinds of illnesses, and can transform their lives by changing their thoughts. I know! I know!! I know!!!”20
For Carnegie, the basis for this deep conviction lay in the unity of mind and body, the mental and the physical. For support he cited great thinkers ranging from Plato (“the mind and the body are one and should not be treated separately”) to Marcus Aurelius (“Our life is what our thoughts make it”) to William James (“Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not”). Thus thinking positive thoughts and banishing negative attitudes, Carnegie believed, created an atmosphere in which self-fulfillment would flourish. “Yes, if we think happy thoughts, we will be happy. If we think miserable thoughts, we will be miserable. If we think fear thoughts, we will be fearful. If we think sickly thoughts, we will probably be ill. If we think failure, we will certainly fail,” he wrote. “If we wallow in self-pity, everyone will want to shun us and avoid us. ‘You are not,’ said Norman Vincent Peale, ‘you are not what you think you are; but what you think, you are.’ ”21
Carnegie shifted into high inspirational gear to insist that worry could be eradicated by utilizing “the magic power of thought.” He urged readers to embrace the idea that peace of mind and a joyful sense of living stemmed “solely from our mental attitude. Outward conditions have very little to do with it.” Happiness was a state of mind. “Put a big, broad, honest-to-God smile on your face; throw back your shoulders; take a good, deep breath; and sing a snatch of song. If you can’t sing, whistle. If you can’t whistle, hum,” Carnegie exhorted. “You will quickly discover what William James was talking about—that it is physically impossible to remain blue or depressed while you are acting out the symptoms of being radiantly happy!”22
With an ironic twist, Carnegie buttressed this positive-thought formula with a relic from his past. As a young man, he had rejected his mother’s stern Protestant doctrines from his childhood and then in adulthood he spoke rarely of religion, either in his private life or writings. But now, in How to Stop Worrying, he returned to spiritual belief. It was less a case of going back to religion, however, and more a realization of its emotional utility. “I have gone forward to a new concept of religion. I no longer have the faintest interest in the difference in creeds that divide the churches,” he explained.
But I am tremendously interested in what religion does for me, just as I am interested in what electricity and good food and water do for me. They help me to lead a richer, fuller, happier life. But religion does far more than that. It brings me spiritual values. It gives me, as William James put it, “a new zest for life … more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life.” It gives me faith, hope, and courage. It banishes tensions, anxieties, fears, and worries.23
In other words, Carnegie now embraced religion for its therapeutic function. Matters of salvation, the trinity, and the Gospel never came up. Instead, he argued that spirituality and psychology, religion and science, had converged in a modern approach to achieving happiness and fulfillment. Many psychiatrists, for example, endorsed the notion that prayer and religious faith helped eradicate many of the anxieties and strains of life. “The newest of all sciences—psychiatry—is teaching what Jesus taught,” he wrote. “Today, psychiatrists are becoming modern evangelists … they are urging us to lead religious lives to avoid the hell-fires of this world—the hell-fires of stomach ulcers, angina pectoris, nervous breakdowns, and insanity.” Carnegie called several prestigious psychologists as witnesses. Carl Jung had written that among his patients “there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them felt ill, because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given to their followers, and none of them has really healed who did not regain his religious outlook.” William James agreed: “Faith is one of the forces by which men live, and the total absence of it means collapse.”24
Carnegie took these admonitions to heart. In his own life, he confessed, he often felt rushed, stressed, and anxious as he dashed about the country for teaching and speaking appearances. So he adopted the habit of dropping by a church—whichever one was at hand—on a weekday afternoon for a period of quiet contemplation. “I say to myself: ‘Wait a minute, Dale Carnegie, wait a minute. Why all the feverish hurry and rush, little man? You need to pause and acquire a little perspective,’ ” he confided. “I find that doing this calms my nerves, rests my body, clarifies my perspective, and helps me revalue my values.”25
Eventually, this therapeutic sensibility led Carnegie toward another major issue in postwar America. A decade earlier, in How to Win Friends and Influence People, he had promoted a new paradigm of personality keenly attuned to demands of bureaucratic interaction, consumer expectation, and leisure aspiration in modern America. Now, in the postwar period, he confronted the consequences produced by the new-model individual he had done so much to invent. This encounter placed Carnegie in the middle of a debate that, because it cut so deeply into the grain of American behavior and beliefs, attracted a great deal of attention.
In 1950, David Riesman published The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character, one of the most influential books of social analysis ever written in modern America. A sociologist at the University of Chicago with additional training in the law and literature, Riesman had become fascinated with a new social type he believed had been called forth in the modern age. In an older nineteenth-century society devoted to production and entrepreneurialism, he contended, an “inner-directed personality” of strong moral values, sturdy personal character, and a dogged work ethic had guided individuals through life. By the early twentieth century, however, an increasingly complex economy propelled by consumerism, bureaucratic forms of labor, and leisure opportunities had called forth the emergence of a new “other-directed personality.” This modern ideal type, operating in an atmosphere of constant human interaction, relied on a charismatic personality and skilled human relations to meet goals and advance through life.26
Riesman carefully described the traits of this modern ideal type. Unlike his inner-directed forebear, who tended to go it alone according to internalized principles implanted by family, church, and economic creed, the more cosmopolitan and urban individual who had emerged by about 1920 came into contact with and responded to a much wider array of influences. “[O]ther-direction is becoming the typical character of the ‘new’ middle class—the bureaucrat, the salaried employee in business,” Riesman asserted.
What is common to all other-directed people is that their contemporaries are the source of direction for the individual—either those known to him or those with whom he is indirectly acquainted, through friends and through the mass media … While all people want and need to be liked by some of the people some of the time, it is only modern other-directed types who make this their chief source of direction and chief area of sensitivity … Social mobility depends less on what one is and what one does than what others think of one—and how competent one is in manipulating others and being oneself manipulated … [D]rives for mobility are still embedded in [the other-directed’s] character. But the product now in demand is neither a staple nor a machine; it is a personality.27
These traits—processing signals from diverse sources, cultivating bureaucratic skills, needing to be liked, engaging in self-manipulation, shaping personality—created a new formula for success. The modern individual’s “interactional qualities,” in Riesman’s words, were key. “He wants to be loved rather than esteemed; he wants not to gull or impress, let alone oppress, others but, in the current phrase, to relate to them … [to gain] assurance of being emotionally in tune with them.”28
Riesman illustrated the historical shift from inner-directed to other-directed individualism with a brilliant metaphor. The nineteenth-century individual, seeking goals according to his own principles, was directed psychologically by a “gyroscope,” a compass-like mechanism set in place by parents and other authorities that always kept its holder on course regardless of external circumstances. But the other-directed individual operated in a broader world defined by interactions with others. So he “must be able to receive signals from far and near; the sources are many, the changes rapid.” Rather than being guided by an internalized gyroscope, the other-directed person moved according to a more elaborate psychological mechanism that “instead of being like a gyroscope, is like a radar.” Now one’s personal radar plotted a course through life by constantly bouncing signals off of others.29
Riesman stressed that the broader culture, in all of its historical forms, always sought to control the character types it had called forth. The tradition-directed type—an archaic variant that appeared in agricultural societies of small, tight-knit communities and was nearly extinct—suffered the sanction of shame when violating approved standards of conduct. The entrepreneurial inner-directed type, operating by internal piloting, suffered guilt when veering off course. But the modern other-directed type, in scrambling to interpret the numerous, rapid, and often varied signals constantly coming in from others, suffered anxiety as he sought to move toward success. Constantly adjusting his own emotional tuning to others, “his anxieties, as child consumer-trainee, as parent, as worker and player, are very great,” wrote Riesman. “He is often torn between the illusion that life should be easy, if he could only find the ways of proper adjustment to the group, and the half-buried feeling that it is not easy for him.”30
The Lonely Crowd touched a powerful cultural nerve in postwar America. It captured the anxieties of an age done with economic depression and war, but confused by suburban affluence and the emotional demands of status chasing. The book sold 1.5 million copies, an unheard-of figure for an academic tome, and landed its author on the cover of Time magazine, an even more unprecedented achievement for a university professor. The magazine cover displayed a photograph of the earnest, probing “Social Scientist David Riesman” surrounded by sketches of a bewhiskered Victorian entrepreneur confidently striding forward with a gyroscope strapped to his back and a modern businessman beseeching others as he moved onward carrying a radar dish. Time described Riesman’s ideas as a response to an age of rapid postwar change where “the American self-picture has gone out of focus.” Many people were desperately looking for ways to understand modern life that went beyond older conceptions of class struggle or the frontier thesis, Time asserted, and “Riesman seems to be leading thousands of Americans on this quest.” His interpretation had achieved “already a kind of classic status.”31
Indeed, by the late 1940s American culture seemed awash in anxiety suffered by the other-directed personality. The 1948 Life roundtable, with its panel of experts, dissected the frustrated pursuit of happiness in postwar America. Leonard Bernstein presented Symphony No. 2: The Age of Anxiety, in 1949 while the same year saw Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play, premiering on Broadway with its heartbreaking tale of Willy Loman, a failed disciple of human relations who, desperate to be liked but incapable of selling himself, grew so anxious that he committed suicide. Rabbi Joshua Liebman’s best-selling book, Peace of Mind (1946), offered a self-help formula of spiritual values and psychological self-esteem to overcome unhappiness, while the existential psychologist Rollo May explored these issues in The Meaning of Anxiety (1950). In the practical world of politics, Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s tremendously influential book The Vital Center (1949) opened with a chapter entitled “Politics in an Age of Anxiety.”32
Unquestionably the greatest exemplar of Riesman’s other-directed modernity, however, was Dale Carnegie. His 1930s bestseller, How to Win Friends and Influence People, had heralded this modern personality type with its clear delineation of radarlike skills—making others feel important, projecting a pleasant personal appeal, winning others to your way of thinking, being sensitive to group dynamics—needed to navigate through the bureaucratic, consumer maze of modern American life. Now with his 1948 best seller, Carnegie addressed the upshot of this new cultural milieu—what Riesman had described as the gnawing anxiety besetting the other-directed individual as he struggled to process a vast array of external signals picked up on his radar. Riesman, in fact, noted in The Lonely Crowd a connection with the popular writer, pointing out that Carnegie’s first book had recommended “self-manipulation exercises for the sake not only of business success but of such vaguer, non-work goals as popularity.” Now Carnegie’s second best seller, Riesman observed, addressed not only “the change from depression to full employment” after World War II but the pressures to use self-manipulation “in a solipsistic way to adjust one to one’s fate and social state.”33
Riesman’s sense of intellectual camaraderie was accurate. Indeed, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living broadcast the clearest, most far-reaching cultural signal of concern about the anxiety-ridden, other-directed individual in postwar America. Having earlier created the urtext of this personality type, Carnegie now turned instinctively to eradicating the emotional problems that had come in its wake. He suggested two remedies. First, other-directed types needed to adjust their radar to differentiate between the true signals that would lead to happiness and the dangerous static that would throw them off course. Second, they needed to adjust more smoothly to social demands, a maneuver that would create emotional reconciliation rather than alienation.
A concern for finely calibrating one’s personal radar permeated Carnegie’s text. Elaborating on his earlier principles of human relations, he contended that happiness often lay in coming to terms with the ups and downs of personal interactions. For example, the successful individual needed to cope creatively with, rather than bridle at, negative behavior among co-workers, friends, and family. Human ingratitude, jealousy, and envy was natural, Carnegie counseled, and individuals should expect it. Even Jesus, after healing the lepers, had received scant thanks, so should we “expect more thanks for our small favors than was given Jesus Christ?” The lesson was clear: “Human nature has always been human nature—and it probably won’t change in your lifetime. So why not accept it?… Let’s not expect gratitude. Then, if we get some occasionally, it will come as a delightful surprise. If we don’t get it, we won’t be disturbed.” Such an attitude was essential to avoiding stress and heartache. Instead of hating your enemies and obsessing over criticism, try to forgive and forget. Cultivate a sense of serenity and poise, and a lively sense of humor. When Jesus said “love your enemies,” he was “not only preaching sound ethics. He was also preaching twentieth-century medicine,” wrote Carnegie. “Jesus was telling you and me how to keep from having high blood pressure, heart trouble, stomach ulcers, and many other ailments.”34
