Duff McDuffee - Beyond Critique

Cool change of direction at Duff's Beyond Growth blog. Is there something in the air?

Beyond Critique

BY DUFF MCDUFFEE ON SEPTEMBER 20TH, 2011

Critique is of vital importance to self-development. Our vision at Beyond Growth was to make a space for intelligent critique of the frequently shallow ideas and manipulative marketing in personal development culture to expand the field. In the past two years of writing we have featured articles on many topics, but overwhelmingly the most popular articles were our critiques of self-help gurus.

While I think it is a valuable thing to root out corruption and critique shallow ideology, it has never been my intention to be the self-help police, nor is that the focus of this group blog project. (Other people do it better anyway.) As a philosophically minded person, I am more interested in general principles, in seeing the pattern.

In particular, I see several problems with focusing too much on a critique of individuals . . . .

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