What makes a non-fiction best-seller? Ask Allain de Botton.
“To be shown love is to feel ourselves the object of concern: our presence is noted, our name is registered, our views are listened to, our failings are treated with indulgence and our needs are ministered to. And under such care, we flourish.”
The term “status anxiety” first came to my notice a couple of years ago in a short documentary on Brazilian TV. Recently, coming across the book by the same title, I decided (why not?) to skim over it, ending up going cover to cover. The Swiss author’s writing is enjoyable, straightforward and even somewhat informative. So it is not so surprising that this guy has been best-selling quite often. He plays the role of this wise and trustworthy friend whom you would call at night to share your problems. By simple, numbered, illustrative paragraphs, he drives you smoothly, almost nonchalantly, to visualize his point and introduce some ready-made solutions extracted from the varied Western cultural reservoir, which is, realistically speaking, largely unknown to most of non-specialists.
De Botton has a point: it might not even be a perfectly diagnosed sociological phenomenon, but his descriptions manage to convey what he intends, and the reader feels easily inclined to buy that something really happened in the big picture that caused their own anxiety. Yes: in our urban post-modern world the odd relation between means of production (and reproduction) and cultural identity seem to create singular psychological conditions—that is reasonable enough. I would even risk stating that most of these conditions are identity issues: modern individuals base their sense of self-esteem, belonging, and honor on completely artificial factors like fandom, libido, hobbies, entertainment or a vague sense of status deriving from consumerism, normally having publicity standards as reference. This is actually pretty obvious; it is , after all, common sense. De Botton is no brilliant mind; he is not a fantastic writer either. Posing everyday questions and tackling them with aphoristic drops of quasi wisdom added with a pinch of frank friend-to-friend salt—that’s our man.
If there are indeed reasons to undervalue De Botton’s philosophical relevance: his “pharmacological” view of philosophy, his over-simplistic approach to rather complex issues—”He wants to put people back to sleep!” some grumpy retired fighter sitting in the corner could shout—, on the other hand our Alpine London-based essayist is also steeped in an existing philosophical, or at least literary tradition; not the one of Boetius—from whom he borrows the title “Consolation of Philosophy” to one of his best-sellers (which I did not read)—, but rather a “philosophy of consolation” of late Greek and Roman kind, or of the French aristocratic moralists. All things considered, his practical merit as a popular writer is really having transposed therapeutic, aphoristic, essayistic, philosophical formulae to the wider appreciation of mainstream urban middle class avid readers.
