"The person with no fear of what may happen next, nor even any real sense of same, can be very, very dangerous to the rest of us."-- Steve Salerno, commenting on people who decide to "live in the now". He's the author of Sham: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless
The Salerno book has good intentions, and is abysmally bad.
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ReplyDeleteFuck you.
Steve Salerno is a damn good writer (I found SHAM to be a serious page-turner, and I'm not surprised to also find his articles in the WSJ): his book practically saved my life. NewAgers can't appreciate the service he's provided (for obvious reasons) but I dare anyone to name a better expose' of the SHAMscape, because I haven't found one. If anything - being a really nice guy - he went too easy on them: I would've tried to put the literary equivalent of a hot poker through their eyes.
But it was he, alone, who nailed a manipulative, and destructive, genre others - myself included - just accepted on face value as an "obvious" good; even while it was destroying individual lives, and tearing at the fabric of society. Shit, Steve Salerno was so far ahead of the curve, it's a crime his book hasn't received more praise.
If you ask me, the only thing "bad" about SHAM is that Steve's personal integrity didn't allow for the type of ugly, full-on, attack SHAM deserves - or that it didn't focus on the NewAge Movement more - but that's as far as I'll go.
Once NewAge folds in on you - and it will - you'll find yourself thanking him one day: though he may not be Churchill during WWII (that would be me) he's definitely FDR; for whatever reason, holding back all he's got.
I don't expect cultists to say nice things about SHAM but - as someone in the trenches - I know Steve Salerno is a great man for what he's already done. If anything, like Churchill, I'm hoping, one day, he'll forget his pretensions to NewAge's PC standards of decency and do more.
We need men like him, now, more than ever.