In the early 20th century the autobiography was the primary way that fascist ideology was made available to the public. Today, it is the self-help book.
“neoliberal psychopolitics is always coming up with more refined forms of exploitation. Countless self-management workshops, motivational retreats and seminars on personality or mental training promise boundless self-optimization and heightened efficiency. They are steered by neoliberal techniques of domination, which aim to capitalize not just on working time but on the person him- or herself: all the attention the individual commands and, indeed, his or her very life. Neoliberalism has discovered integral human being as the object of exploitation. The neoliberal imperative of self-optimization serves only to promote perfect functioning within the system. Inhibitions, points of weakness and mistakes are to be therapeutically eliminated in order to enhance efficiency and performance. In turn, everything is made comparable and measurable and subjected to the logic of the market. It is not concern for the good life that drives self-optimization. Rather, self-optimization follows from systemic constraints – from the logic of quantifying success on the market…In contemporary American self-help literature, the magic word is healing. The term refers to self-optimization that is supposed to therapeutically eliminate any and all functional weakness or mental obstacle in the name of efficiency and performance. Yet perpetual self-optimization, which coincides point-for-point with the optimization of the system, is proving destructive. It is leading to mental collapse. Self-optimization, it turns out, amounts to total self-exploitation…It entails a new form of subjectivation. Endlessly working at self-improvement resembles the self-examination and self-monitoring of Protestantism, which represents a technology of subjectivation and domination in its own right. Now, instead of searching out sins, one hunts down negative thoughts.” -Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power
