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How to win friends and influence people. Dale Carnegie. A review and some thoughts.

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, popularity and economic success with morality and meaning. Willy's relentless pursuit of superficial acclaim blinds him to the harms he is causing his wife and children and makes his decent into dementia pointedly tragic. 



Both Carnegie and Miller explore the intersection of personal ambition and ethical integrity. While Carnegie may seem to endorse leveraging human frailty for personal gain, a more charitable interpretation suggests an encouragement to empathise with our shared imperfections. Miller, casts a cold eye on the superficial nature of likeability. Miller highlight a particular kind of madness: the conflation of morality with economic success. This phenomenon exposes our vulnerability to manipulation and our propensity to prioritise meaningless superficialities over loved ones and family.



'Death of a Salesman' stands in stark opposition to Carnegie's philosophy. The play’s tragic commentary; 'Be well liked and you'll never want' and Biff's reality confronting tirade 'Pop I am a dine a dozen.  I am not a leader of men and neither are you.  I am one dollar an hour and so are you,' challenges Willy to face, what is so obvious, but continues to be denied.  



Carnegie's book shines a bright light on strategies for personal advancement, it inadvertently casts a shadow on the darker aspects of human nature, such as our susceptibility to superficial validation. 



Barbara Ehrenreich's Smile or Die also inspired these thoughts.

https://www.blinkist.com/en/books/smile-or-die-en

Here is a well written book review, which contrasts sharply with this one https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/jan/10/smile-or-die-barbara-ehrenreich

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