Dale Carnegie's 1936, 'How to Win Friends and Influence People,' has remaining in continuous print since 1936, selling over 30 million copies. Something is selling here. Carnegie has distilled a distinct ideology one deeply ingrained in the Western corporate world’s ethos of mandatory optimism. While Carnegie's insights are not inherently flawed, their luminescence casts a particularly dense umbra. Carnegie's book aligns with something we know about ourselves, echoing George Orwell's observation: 'The best books tell you what you already know.' The book plays into our innate longing for acceptance and affirmation, fostering a confirmation bias where we gravitate towards ideas that affirm our pre-existing beliefs. Reading Carnegie I could not help thinking of it's antithesis. Arthur Miller's 'Death of a Salesman' (1949) delves into the perilous consequences of such biases. Willy Loman, epitomises the tragic fallout of conflating charm,...
mediocrity articulated. Deathly dull book reviews