The Inhuman Potential Movement
by Wentworth Sutton, assistant vice-principal, Mitchell Hepburn Collegiate Institute, Don Mills, and president emeritus, Semiologico-Hermeneutic Institute of Toronto
Fifty years ago Americans used to be told that they were contemptible and weak, but in fact they felt worthy and strong. These days they’re told that they’re worthy and strong, but instead they feel contemptible and weak.
In the old days institutional Christianity told them they were weak and sinful, and that by themselves they were incapable of leading worthy lives. Then after the Second World War, Joshua Loth Liebman published a book called Peace of Mind, which argued that everyone had the potential to accomplish whatever he or she wanted. The book was a bestseller, and other people thought either:
- that that idea was a good one and worth spreading to more people, or
- that they could make some money with it themselves, or
- both.
Mr. Liebman’s analysis was drawn from psychoanalysis, but it proved appealing to people in other fields of unscientific psychology. Soon there was a self-styled Human Potential Movement, with superstar therapists like Fritz Perls and Alan Watts, and a geographical centre at the Esalen Institute.
In those days, though, the message was a bit different than it is today. The central question which the human potential movement has to answer is, If everyone has the potential to accomplish whatever he or she wants, why ain’t he or she accomplishing it? In the 50s and 60s, the answer that human potential movement practitioners gave to that question was…the Man is keeping us down. The Establishment, as the Man was often known, or the Military-Industrial Complex, or the Fascist War Machine, prevented people from realizing their potential because allowing them to realize it would threaten the Establishment’s control of society.
In the 70s that message started to change, in part because human potential practitioners learned that they could sell these ideas to big corporations if they toned down the anti-Establishment ideas a bit. Their motivation was not necessarily venal, either – if you believe your ideas will transform society for the better, then why not take advantage of the opportunity to get them disseminated by the very people you’re trying to overthrow? Seems like a plan, eh?
What people forgot was that Big Business is called Big Business for a reason. Among other things, big corporations tend to have really, really big budgets for advertising and promotion. Once Big Business got its hands on the idea of limitless human potential, it made sure that the version of that idea which people heard about was one that suited its interests. And really – whose interests did anyone expect them to serve? They have shareholders, after all.
Hey – the Man was keeping us down again!
The human potential movement then evolved from pseudo-science into pseudo-religion. These days there are innumerable motivational speakers and writers and coaches who give us The Good Word about Self-Esteem. As the earlier therapists did, they argue that you have the capacity to accomplish whatever you want. They have a different answer, though, to that question about why you’re not accomplishing your potential.
The new idea is that if you’re not accomplishing your potential, it’s because you’re some screwed up. All this potential and you’re not using it – you must be in the grip of some powerful pathology, eh?
In a recent article here, Natalie Flemme showed how Oprah Winfrey, one of the advocates of human potential movement principles, sees the human race, and especially those members of it who are women:
The most frequent theme on her website is that women need to improve themselves. They need to be more organized, they need to figure out what they want to do with their life and then do it, they need to improve their health, and, most of all, they need to lose weight.Oprah’s view of the world, and that of her close comrade-in-arms Dr. Phil, and of innumerable other preachers of the same principles, is that the world is full of people who could accomplish so much if they would just stop acting in the wrong ways. The view of the old-style Christian preachers was…pretty well the same thing, eh?The preachers had an additional principle, though, which the human potential movement cannot accept, and that is that you can be saved from your misery and sin by a force outside you. So, after telling you that you’re a miserable sinner, the preachers showed you, as modern Christian preachers do, that you didn’t have to depend on your own feeble resources to get yourself out of the mess you were in. You could receive the benefits of a Higher Power.
In the human potential movement, of course, there is no Higher Power. There is only a Lower Power, namely you, who are a lower power because you are failing miserably to realize your truly miraculous potential.
Evangelical Christianity is like those vacuum cleaner infomercials which show you how many allergens could be lurking around your house because of that inadequate vacuum cleaner you insist on using, but then immediately show you how you can banish dirt and allergens from your home with the new Super-Cyclonic Super-Sucker vacuum. The human potential movement, however, is like an infomercial which shows you how many allergens could be lurking around your house, and then tells you that’s because you're completely incompetent at cleaning house.
So this movement that started off telling people how powerful they were ends up making them believe they are entirely inadequate, while a movement that started off telling people what sad excuses for human beings they were ends up making them believe that they can accomplish anything. Which is why evangelical and fundamentalist Christians have more influence on politics in the United States today than do followers of the human potential gurus. They actually believe they can make a difference if they go out and do something, so they go out and do something. The followers of the human potential gurus go and buy another book by their favourite guru in the hope that this time something powerful enough to save their sorry souls will be revealed.
I started off this article describing the human potential movement as an American phenomenon. Of course, it has spread to other countries, but it is most highly developed in the United States, as are evangelical Christianity and Christian fundamentalism. The fact is that the United States has never progressed intellectually past the nineteenth century. It is a country in which candidates for the presidential nomination of their political party are quizzed, as the Democratic candidates recently were during a televised debate, about their favourite Bible verses.
The fundamental idea of American evangelicalism, American fundamentalism, and the American human potential movement is that, just as the United States transformed evil British despotism into virtuous democracy, so you can transform your evil self into something pure and godly.
Unfortunately, most of the people who promote that last idea seem to believe it. As does most of the population of the United States.
The Inhuman Potential Movement © John FitzGerald, 2007
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