How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World summary

It’s no coincidence that self-help books saw a huge rise in popularity at the same time as neoliberal economic policies began destroying the economies of the United States and the United Kingdom. After all, it was a time when millions suddenly found themselves desperately seeking new paths to success.

Unfortunately, some of the best-selling books of this genre are not as life-changing as they claim. In fact, some of the most successful pieces of self-help literature made millions of dollars without laying out a single original thought.

So, self-help icons rise to fame not because they make meaningful contributions, but because they use a flamboyant rhetorical style. In a similar fashion, academics who tell of the “end of history” aren’t famous because their views are correct, but because of the way they dress them up.

So-called “end of history” theories work on people’s emotions and have no grounding in reality. For instance, the scholar Francis Fukuyama published his best seller on the topic in 1992, titled The End of History and the Last Man. It espouses the theory that Western neoliberal capitalism is the dominant and final political and economic force.

So, the political mainstream and self-help literature have been thoroughly steeped in nonsense and, since the 1980s when post-structuralism became fashionable in American universities, so has academia.

By the early 1990s, post-structuralism, a school of philosophical inquiry, had become accepted and even prescribed in humanities departments across the United States and continental Europe.

In the late 1980s, a leftist British politician was campaigning for nuclear disarmament and the rolling back of Margaret Thatcher’s neoliberal economic policies. His name was Tony Blair, and you might be surprised to hear what happened after he led the Labour Party to victory in 1997.

Blair’s economic policies turned out to be just the same as Thatcher’s. After being elected Labour leader, he took the party in a different direction, dubbing it “New Labour” and adopting new positions that entirely contradicted his previous ones.

We have seen that bogus irrationality is passed off as wisdom fairly often. But what can we do about it?

In truth, we just need to work together and learn from each other to produce rational solutions that benefit all of humanity. Luckily, we can take some inspiration from the past.