Sophistry, self-help, and sales

When undergrads have Socrates week in their Ancient Philosophy class and they hear about the Sophists, they turn off because it’s such ancillary information. But look, from Wikipedia:

Many sophists specialized in using the tools of philosophy and rhetoric, though other sophists taught subjects such as music, athletics, and mathematics. In general, they claimed to teach arete (“excellence” or “virtue”, applied to various subject areas), predominantly to young statesmen and nobility.

What else is self-help than this?

Sophos originally referred to anyone with expertise in any domain that could be assigned a skill value. Over time is came to mean general wisdom and especially practical wisdom about human affairs—self-management, self-comportment, budgeting, long-term self welfare planning. Then it became marketed as a life-skills training with special emphasis on political (motivational) speech writing. Sophist instructors made a lot of money, and many of their students learned the “lessons” so well that they became teachers themselves.

Fast forward to 1968 … and Mind Dynamics. Someone had the bright idea that the rhetorical extroversion embodied by the personal selling mode, that is to say, the seductive pitch, would also make a great default personality. If all your action engaged the same persuasive energy, you would Be Unstoppable™. Sales training became psychotherapy.

That was the day the universe changed. We’re all in sales now. There is no self-being that is not also self-marketing. Surely, it has always been this way. The only difference is that this role or function has now been, a la Foucault, named, invented, studied, theorized, and sold as a skill. Who doesn’t want to be wanted?

Self-help is a business and each “method” or—the hilarious word I love to employ, even on MapSelf—“tech” not only helps the client, but also stamps her with a love for the brand. Ordinary plagiarized sales techniques are renamed in the special jargon of the cult, to make it look like exclusive property of the brand. Getting others to join is sold as a way of boosting your own magickal power to get “anything you want for yourself or your life … out of your participation in The Landmark Forum.” Just like sending money to televangelist leads to miraculous tax refunds from the IRS or money being accidentally delivered to your door in a box.

Any good business sells its brand (minimally: as the desire to buy the same product in the future) with its product. Landmark builds marketing Landmark into the very tech. You gain power by getting your friends to join. After all, how can you maintain high-level Landmark optimism and self-mastery outside the social agreement (or “conversation”) that props it up?

The marriage of sales and self-help was inevitable. The self really is, for others, an object among objects. Marketing is the applied science of persuasion to sell a brand and its product. Sophistry is the applied science of persuasion generally. This narrowed over time to the selling of political ideas, because politics is one of the few jobs where you get paid to do nothing but sell ideas, usually ideas that service the people paying you. Republicans do this transparently. It’s their platform to aid the ruling class (though in the uniquely American way that stupidly threatens capitalism but pushing it to towards crisis by legislating maximum immiseration for the sake of short term profits. Remember: smart capitalists are actually socialists. Treating labor well is an investment by capital in capital itself, qua institution.

Anyway, students would like it if teachers just said “Tony Robbins” during the Sophism discussion. It would make things much clearer.