It is 1964 and my father is up a ladder in a second-hand bookshop on Charing Cross Road. This is how we’d spend our Saturdays, hunting for old stuff: philosophy, psychology, fiction and politics. My father, an Indian, was also looking for something in Buddhist and Taoist texts that would give him, as he put it, “direction in life”, which his parents had failed to engender in him.
Years later, without knowing it, I found myself following him. I too would scour bookshops, searching for works of literature, or for books on psychology, where I might find the key to some kind of liberation.
After I left home, I was aware there was something lacking in me. I wasn’t who I wanted to be. I knew I had to become a different kind of person. My life became consumed by this quest for “self-improvement”.
We boomers always wanted to be new people, free from the constraints of our conservative parents: we would open our minds with drugs, experiment with our sexuality, make new kinds of families, and be innovative with our work.
Self-help gurus and influencers prey on people’s insecurities. In our world of inestimable choice, who doesn’t want guidance?
Today, self-improvement means redesigning yourself for an already existing system; smoothing off your rough edges so you can find employment and then rent a flat. Self-help gurus and influencers prey on people’s insecurities. They have the answers for how to live, what to buy, and how to master your neuroses and become a super-capitalist.
In our world of inestimable choice, who doesn’t want guidance? In Woody Allen’s wonderful Play it Again, Sam (1972), the protagonist, played by Allen, is in constant conversation with an imagined Humphrey Bogart. A cross between a mentor and therapist, the Bogart character consoles and advises Allen on how to deal with the women in his life.
In our imagination, our heroes are those who appear to have escaped the manacles of their history. They are free and powerful. However, there is always a conflict between the collective, equal society we desire, and our beguilement by those who break with convention.
Rise of the charismatic Right
Heroes matter because they map possibility. Musicians like David Bowie and Bob Marley weren’t just artists — they were insurgents who redefined identity and resistance. You might say that our characters begin when we start to esteem others, beyond the parent paradigm.
The political Right’s rebirth hinges on its ability to channel a primal human desire: the yearning for self-improvement and heroic individualism. While the Left fixates on systemic equity, the Right speaks to personal ambition, offering a vision of success rooted in autonomy, resilience and self-creation. They promise that through sheer will, one can transcend limitations, a narrative the Right weaponises against the Left’s collectivist ethos.
Gym culture is a microcosm of Right-wing ideology... it’s no coincidence that tech bros are into martial art
Consider gym culture: a microcosm of Right-wing ideology. Fitness regimes valorise discipline, competition and physical mastery — traits coded as masculine and tribal. It’s no coincidence that today’s tech bros and libertarians are beefed-up and into martial arts. On the other hand, for the younger generation — the first generation in centuries not to be wealthier than their parents — the gym is a place of self-determination and overcoming.
The Right has stolen the Left’s charisma, its revolutionary fervour. For the 20th century — from Lenin and Trotsky, to Che Guevara and Castro — the Left were the leaders in radical optimism. These outsiders were hip innovators, who would destroy existing structures and make a new future.
The Right are the new revolutionaries; punks who hate tradition. It would be farcical if it weren’t so tragic
Conservatism once meant the preservation of the past. But now the Right are the new revolutionaries; punks who hate tradition, ripping up the present and starting again. It would be farcical if it weren’t so tragic.
Look outwards, not inwards
I collect and have read dozens of writing manuals, which I find both stimulating and pointless. And I have read some self-help books, in particular Robert Greene’s entertaining manuals on power, seduction and war, which assume that others are only competitors and not collaborators.
What kind of person would you be if you read nothing but self-help books? You might gain some discipline, but you’d have no knowledge. Self-improvement is a trap; the idea should be to leave yourself behind. What is required is not more of yourself, but less — to live outwards rather than inwards. You might have noticed that I have fallen into the trap myself, of giving advice on how to live.
The people I am most impressed by — and whom I try to surround myself with — are drastically uninterested in themselves, and lacking in narcissism. They are full of stories, anecdotes and gossip, finding wonder in what is around them. Big talkers, they want to impress on you something they’ve seen or heard, invigorating you with their energy.
This is why I find it so unusual that the narcissists of today hold the public in thrall, since they are so boring. They only have one story, and it’s inevitably self-aggrandising.
Looking back at those Saturdays in the bookshops, with Dad up a ladder searching for ideas, I realise now he was attempting to commune with the most serious thinkers. Today’s ladders lead to masterclasses, online courses and viral success stories. We’ve replaced the search for knowledge with the pursuit of metric-driven self-optimisation.
Hanif Kureishi is a novelist, playwright and screenwriter
