How Self-Help Books Quietly Replaced Collective Struggle With Personal Blame

From bestselling productivity manuals to motivational podcasts, the global self-help industry has built a multibillion-dollar culture around discipline, mindset, and personal transformation. But beneath its language of empowerment, a growing intellectual debate is emerging over whether self-help literature has quietly trained millions of people — especially in struggling economies like Kenya — to interpret poverty, unemployment, and inequality as personal failures rather than the result of deeper political and economic systems.