Instant gratification, ability to forget concerns for a while, feel pumped up, feel good about yourself and the people you are with. That's what alcohol and drugs do for you.

Sorry. I meant self-help books.

It's an addiction masquerading as a useful product. What is being sold nominally isn't what is being bought in actuality.

As Marx said, religion is the opiate of the masses. Self-help is merely religion repackaged and refined, offering the same consolations. It is a peculiarly American market, that has very deep roots in American religiosity, particularly in the reaction against the harsh, tough-love doctrines of Protestant religion (Calvinism in particular) that it displaced. It helps that unlike straight-up religion which is a little too vulnerable to intelligent skepticism, self-help can be packaged in impenetrable psychobabble.

Barbara Ehrenreich takes the industry apart with systematic brutality in "Bright Sided" and reviews the history and evolution of the field carefully:

Bright-Sided by Barbara Ehrenreich: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/0...

I'd say about 85-90% of the literature is of the type she talks about and deconstructs.