I love self-help books so much that my love for them wasn't even tarnished by the one self-help seminar I actually went to.

About twenty friends and I spent a day with a leadership and personal empowerment guru who was promoting his two dozen steps to personal and professional success. We'd all read the book and liked it just fine, but it was clear that there must be additional depths to this material. We held onto this belief right up until the moment at the end of his presentation of each of the steps where he told us that, to really understand the point he'd just talked about, we'd need to buy the $200 CD set in the lobby. None of us was a math whiz but, multiplied by each of the 24 steps, that seemed like quite a bit of cash. And, technically speaking, each of us had already bought his hardback book on the subject and paid the not-insignificant seminar fee. At what point would he actually tell us his points?

As any Oprah viewer will tell you, we Americans want better lives! We're rich but we don't feel rich. On the standards of anywhere else in the world, we're empowered but we still feel like victims. As Gregg Easterbrook tells us in his potent book The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse, every single generation of Americans since our founding has been better off in every measurable way than every preceding generation (crime, real wealth, likelihood of fighting a war, longevity, work hours), yet all surveys tell us that we're less and less happy with each passing generation.  Enter self-help, a uniquely American, eight billion dollar per year phenomenon.

Self-help has feet in a number of different pools-spirituality (of course), business, psychology, even sports. Its fundamental insight is straight out of Emerson: life boils down to self-reliance! Don't play the victim! Quit your excuses; take charge of all aspects of your life! Self-help asks us to establish goals and set up measurable steps to reach those goals. It requires a positive attitude. Ideally you'll find a team of "life coaches" to help you in your journey. And you'll need to take charge of your relationships. If this guy is bad for you, quit playing the victim and act! If this woman is good for you, then set your face like flint towards building the nurturing, lasting relationship you both deserve to have. No one is responsible for your life but you. YOU!

I eat this stuff up. It really is like having the greatest-ever high school basketball coach continually yelling at you, calling you only by your last name, telling you to get your butt in gear. And which of us doesn't need that?

Still, there are a growing number of folks who offer a dissenting viewpoint of some power: the only real downside of self-help is that it doesn't work.

Some of those dissenters are loud and shrill. Steve Salerno, for instance, formerly an editor at one of the leading self-help magazines, Men's Health, has recently published SHAM: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless. He has no good things to say about any of the self-help superstars and much that's damning, but his fundamental point is that the economic engine of self-help is repeat business. The guru in question tells us some provocative things along the lines I've just outlined, and then says that, to really benefit from the insight, we'll need to buy the super-expensive next step. As I read that, I felt a twinge of recognition. Salerno paints self-help as the ultimate mirage-tantalizing and always just over the next horizon, a horizon we're told we can get to for only a small additional fee.

So... bummer! If we Americans are rich and empowered but miserable nonetheless, and if this eight billion dollar per year industry we've built to address that problem is only a tease, what hope do we have?

I'm a pastor, okay? How do you think I'm going to answer that question? But, that said, it does seem worth wondering if Mother Teresa or Francis of Assisi or CS Lewis-or that great friend you have who does actually seem to have found something real in this faith they've rediscovered-are onto something, something that might transcend even the insights of Dr. Phil.