Can Self-Help Heal the Body Politic?

After Marianne Williamson garnered enough support to land her on the Democratic debate stage twice, politically engaged people had little choice but to take her half-seriously, and look into what her “politics of love” was all about. Many were horrified by what they found. In the critics’ view: an ableist, anti-science fat-shamer who has achieved celebrity peddling a coldhearted individualism cloaked in a disingenuous celebration of love and spirituality.

This assessment, circulated widely on the internet alongside incriminating old tweets and highlighted passages from her many books, shines a light on the whole self-help industry, as well as the woo-woo West Coast variety that Williamson has helped make mainstream. Since the 18th century, boosters of self-improvement strategies have posited that sheer personal will—or, in religious variants, prayer—are the solutions to problems better understood as structural and complex. The fact that Williamson’s teachings ground these dubious principles in the esoteric religious text , said to be dictated directly by Jesus