James Arthur Ray and the Cult of Self Improvement

Welcome back to Naptime Nightmares corner, where we dissolve over things that should be actively less depressing than the heavy hitters!

This recap is going to be a little different, since it involves reviewing and discussing the documentary Enlighten Us (2016) directed by Jenny Carchman. For the sake of the director/producers, we won’t go into the film’s details - you’ll want to watch the documentary and then come back to the episode for that - but I’ll delve a little into the things that kept us up at night. Think of it as a teaser! Or an unpaid advertisement to watch this insanely effective documentary. Sponsor us, Netflix.

In a nutshell, the documentary focuses on once-motivational speaker James Arthur Ray’s rise to fame and subsequent plummeting back to Earth after a tragic accident (read: gross negligence) during a self help retreat. What unfolds is a case study into the world of self help, especially self help in the late 90s and early 2000s.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with self help - or, rather, helping yourself. There’s plenty of good advice in books about being happy and positive thinking and eating right, etc., etc., etc. But what mustn’t be ignored about the self help industry is that it is exactly that: an industry. A handful of folks have established themselves as experts in the field of “general wellness” and serve canned advice for the purpose of making money. What is so inherently insidious about these motivational speakers is that they don’t really care about you, whether they have convinced themselves otherwise or not. Their business is a business and will always come before the physical and mental health of those subjected to their content.

Believe us, we know.

We both have personal, firsthand experience with self help seminars in particular. Olivia’s was through Landmark Worldwide, and Brooke’s was through the Millionaire Mind Intensive. As a first note - kids under 18 get in free. Why? Because it’s easier to indoctrinate kids. Why else would they encourage literal children to attend seminars about becoming multimillionaires? Whereas they’ll tell you that it’s for the sake of the child “getting ahead” in life, they’re really just hooking an impressionable demographic on an attractive product. Then, when the kids turn 18 and feel obliged to continue with these "personal development” courses, they’ll shell out thousands of dollars per seminar for the rest of their lives. Cha-ching.

Second, I want to clarify that the advice in these seminars is not always thoroughly bad. It’s not bad to advise people to think more positively and focus on the good things in life. Objectively speaking, that will most likely lead to a more fulfilling overall life. Hooray. But it’s also advice that I could get if I went to therapy - plus, I’d be in a room with a professional who a.) knows psychological best practices and b.) could tell me if I needed more rigorous treatment. Motivational speakers, as a general rule, are not thoroughly trained in psychology or medicine, and yet routinely give out sometimes-harmful personal development advice on the basis of a minutes-long conversation. Even worse, some of these “gurus” opt for more aggressive approaches, resorting to demeaning and shaming audience members in front of hundreds of other attendees. This, of course, is done under the guise of tough love, which can often do more harm than good.

This lack of training, as the documentary explores, can have disastrous consequences, especially when the motivational speakers in question are motivated by their own egomaniacal god complexes (as is the case with James Arthur Ray). For us, it seems fairly clear that to prescribe a $10,000 retreat to someone struggling to pull themselves out of credit card debt is selfish sociopathy. What terrifies us the most is the pattern of motivational speakers and self help gurus fostering trust from a large, often-disenfranchised group of people for the sake of conning money out of their already-empty pockets. Worse yet is when these people suffer physically, emotionally, and mentally only to be met with callous apathy or the blatant and self-righteous rewriting of history by the motivational speaker in question.

This brand of self help is absolutely snake oil, and it preys on an extremely human desire to have our pain heard and acknowledged. For the full picture of how devastating its effects can be, watch Enlighten Us (2016) and listen to our impassioned yelling. And if you, like us, were roped into believing your own introspection was the work of a guy yelling from a stage - I promise therapy is a far better use of your money. And, in cases like James Arthur Ray’s, a far less dangerous one.