Why on earth are people still buying a self-help book from 1936?

DALE CARNEGIE’S PRIMER ON SELF-RELIANCE RELEVANT AS EVER

It's been 80 years since Dale Carnegie published How to Win Friends and Influence People, and probably 79 since its title became a cliché. But remarkably, it sits at No. 3 on the Amazon.ca bestseller list for all of 2016 so far (and at No. 9 on Amazon.com's equivalent), and it continually haunts the Top 20 on Publishers Weekly's iBooks audiobook chart.

Why on Earth are people still buying a selfhelp book from 1936?

Carnegie's principles of relentless positivity are right at home in a culture of ingratiation, from the widespread drive to amass online friends by liking their posts (and thence to become an influencer) to the way every interaction with someone in the service industry feels like the prelude to a customer satisfaction survey. His ideas retain a startling currency in a society whose very drives and mores he helped to create.

Formerly a journalist and an actor, Carnegie collected the inspirational stories of politicians, artists and businessmen whom he figured his readers would want to emulate. Retelling them in what we now know as listicles (Twelve Things This Book Will Do for You and Six Ways to Make People Like You), Carnegie explained how everyone from Napoleon to Franklin D. Roosevelt apparently got ahead by adopting a theoretically genuine interest in what others have to say, and, crucially, making these people feel like one's suggestions and advice are simply intensifications of what they believe themselves. Influence comes as a consequence of establishing bonds and understanding the other person's drives. Or as Tony Montana might have put it: First, you get the friends. Then, you get the power. Then, you get the money.

Although affluence isn't the stated goal of his book, Carnegie certainly is in love with the word “million.” Chief among the many case studies he cites is that of Andrew Carnegie (after whom the author adapted his real last name, Carnegey): the steel magnate, we're told, “made millions” by offering public recognition to people who would co-operate with him and help him fund projects. Carnegie preaches a win-win situation: Make people feel good about themselves, and you, too, will reap rewards.

In his biography of Carnegie, Self-Help Messiah Steven Watts, history professor at the University of Missouri (Carnegie's home state), credits the How to Win Friends author with helping to “redefine the American Dream” from its Puritanical model of “economic self-sufficiency, stern moral character and self-denial.” Carnegie, Watts writes, preached “material abundance, human relations, and self-fulfillment” — and it's no surprise that his megasuccessful acolytes include Warren Buffett and Oprah Winfrey.

Curiously, Carnegie had originally titled his book How to Make Friends and Influence People, but Simon & Schuster suggested that a shorter third word would look better on the cover, so he went with the more competitive “win.” If there are winners, can there be losers too?

Says Watts, “Of course there are, and it's implied in the book but not addressed directly ... It also raises the troublesome ghost in the Carnegie model: this question of ‘authenticity,' and whether all these techniques are merely a kind of manipulation to get people to do what you want — techniques that you use to wind your way up through bureaucratic organizations to get ahead.”

Watts suggests that Carnegie's own interest in other people was in fact genuine; regardless, Carnegie used his philosophy to his great advantage, both personally — he somehow managed to befriend a man whose wife he was sleeping with — and professionally. The son of permanently broke farm workers, Carnegie built a self-help empire starting with his motivational speeches, and his Depression-era tome kick-started an entire industry.

While Scottish author Samuel Smiles arguably got there first with his 1859 bestseller, SelfHelp, which preached thrift, Carnegie's rags-toriches story — included in his book — served as a model for self-help writers themselves. Says Jessica Lamb-Shapiro, author of the book Promise Land: My Journey Through America's Self-Help Culture, Carnegie “didn't really have a background that qualified him more than any other person, so you think, ‘If I can figure out the information and the right delivery, I too can sell hundreds of millions of books.' ”

And one needn't have qualifications to do so, just a knack for repackaging common sense as a “secret” and a strong sense of how to apply psychology. Says Lamb-Shapiro, “People who want to be self-help writers just like the idea of it. You don't need to spend years in a lab proving everything that you're going to say. All you need basically is an opinion and an idea.”

Carnegie continued to write in his lucrative field, most notably with his 1948 bestseller, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, whose section titles nowadays sound like templates for Outbrain links (e.g., “Seven Ways to Cultivate A Mental Attitude That Will Bring You Peace and Happiness”). Although he died back in 1955, How to Win Friends has been continually revised to keep up with the times. Its newest edition appends the words “… in a Digital Age” to the title, but it's packaged in a sober cover to suggest timeless wisdom, and its core tenets remain the same. Meanwhile, Dale Carnegie Training, his public-speaking and leadership course, operates in 90 countries, from Canada to Côte d'Ivoire, from Mauritius to Mongolia.

According to Watts, “the exporting of the Carnegie model of success and achievement is hand-in-glove with economic and cultural globalization,” and the continual exporting of American culture. But are Carnegie's values of overt civility and ingratiation under threat in the United States? Growing unrest about inequality has led those who feel disenfranchised to flock to the likes of president-elect Donald Trump, with nearly half the U.S. electorate embracing his outrageously boorish behaviour. Trump, Watts notes, “takes all of Carnegie's lessons and throws them to the ground and stomps on them. But I think in a broader, deeper way, Americans are so used to Carnegie-style social interaction, there's a ceiling on what Trump can do. He's grating to our sensibilities.”

For Watts, societal friction is being produced not by contrasting philosophies of what constitutes success, but by differing ideas about how many people should be able to achieve it — and who they should be. “I see the culture of selffulfillment, self-esteem, personality, consumer abundance, as vibrant now — I don't think it's on the horizon to turn it upside down.”