Rule #6 from Jordan Peterson's self-help book "12 Rules for Life."
Self-help books have no politics. Indeed, in self-help books, there is, to quote Margaret Thatcher out of context, “No such thing as society.”
If the essence of neoliberalism is an ideological faith in the righteous virtue of individual choice, then self-help books are the true heirs of Milton Friedman. In self-help, the self is all, and “help” consists in convincing readers that there is nothing else.
Readers of self-help books, of course, don’t expect to read about politics or society. The genre is about unlocking the key to individual health, wealth, and wisdom, to use the categories from Tim Ferriss’s 2017 Tools for Titans. Gary John Bishop’s 2017 book is titled Unfuck Yourself, not Unfuck Your Nation; William H. McRaven wrote Make Your Bed (2017), not Make Your Neighbor’s Bed. There are no shortage of books about politics, injustice, and inequality. People pick up self-help books to find out how to get ahead in the world we’ve got. If you want to read about how to change the world, you read something else. It’s unreasonable, you could argue, to expect a genre called “self-help” to try to help people other than yourself.
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