The best way to approach research into popular culture is usually to just turn on the TV – it’s important to tap into media channels that are known to have high viewership. I’ll admit I didn’t do this intentionally either, I was actually watching TV for fun with my girlfriend, and the popular talk show Ellen came on, hosted by Ellen De Generes. After her usually goofy dancing through the audience and light-hearted humor with her initial guests, she brought on Dr. Wayne Dyer. In his most recent book, Dyer’s biographical summary states that he is, “an internationally renowned author and speaker in the field of self-development.” (Back Flap). While Dyer spoke, it became clear that his latest lessons for readers, which he presents in the book Change Your Thoughts – Change Your Life: Living the Wisdom of the Tao , dealt with concerns about one’s reputation and place in the world. He told Ellen that it’s important to be able to detach yourself from your worldly reputation, and find inner peace based in the fact that we’re all spiritual beings having a human experience. Though this statement seems wholly unrelated to the economic issue of educational accreditation, there is certainly a relationship which I’ve suggested in the title above: educational accreditation is a potent form of reputation capital. Dyer’s message is to lower the importance of both material wealth and reputation capital in your life in order to find peace. Later in the paper, we’ll see that a book by Hardball host Chris Matthews shares quite different self-help wisdom on the topic.
Reputation capital is familiar to us in so many ways. We can’t get a low interest home loan without a good credit score, which is said to suggest to lenders our credit worthiness. Many people have no idea that their score is generated by a computational neural network and then reevaluated by 3 monolithic credit bureaus before it’s passed to every financial institution in the nation. Most people do understand that they don’t want it to be too low.
Educational accreditation is at the highest level of reputation capital, because accrediting organizations are the gatekeepers for thousands of universities and institutions of higher education – without the accreditors seal of approval, legitimate degrees cannot be issued to students for use in the larger economy. Institutions seeking accreditation have to care about their own reputation capital, because they want to be able to issue similar reputation-bearing currencies to their members and students. This is a highly organized apparatus for bestowing institutionally-guaranteed reputation capital on an individual, and it’s an extremely powerful system. But is a high level of focus on this system and its rewards good for us as individuals? In the case of Ellen, should she obsess about what the critics say about her show? Dyer says no, emphatically, and I’m inclined to agree at least that overemphasis on reputation could easily become stressful and toxic.
Dyer is questioning the importance of this system and asking us to detach ourselves from it in order to be a bit more in tune with ourselves. Since I did bother to purchase Dyer’s book, let’s take a look at a typical quote from him: “This far-reaching verse of the Tao Te Ching asks you to let go of seeking results in money, accomplishments, acquisitions, fame, and so on. Instead, shift your attention to the energy in the beginning of all things – the elusive and intangible Tao.” (102) This is not particularly useful advice for getting a job or home loan, but it may certainly help some people diminish their obsession with personal accumulation of wealth or fame. From the popularity of Dyer’s books (of which he’s written over 30 in the “self-development” genre), it seems that this sort of advice appeals to a good number of people.
As mentioned earlier, Hardball host Chris Matthews has quite a different take on the importance of reputation. In his latest book, Life’s a Campaign: What Politics has Taught me About Friendship, Rivalry, Reputation, and Success, Chris Matthews introduces concrete tools for marketing yourself, interacting productively with others, and cultivating your reputation. This is essentially a book about finding opportunities for building one’s reputation capital and exploiting them very intentionally. Again, this book was profiled on TV, on Jon Stewart’s popular talk show, and the interview has become popular on YouTube. Take a look: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sddRviP8-do
The video shows Chris Matthews being slammed by Jon Stewart for essentially writing a self-help book with no soul. Perhaps the best indication of the book’s life lessons is provided in the front and back flaps:
“The big payoff in Life’s a Campaign is what you’ll learn about human nature:
- People would rather be listened to than listen
- People don’t mind being used; what they mind is being discarded.
- People are more loyal to the people they’ve helped; than the people they’ve helped are loyal to them.
- Not everyone’s going to like you
- No matter what anybody says, nobody wants a level playing field”
As Jon Stewart points out, this looks like a “recipe for sadness”, largely because it seems so cynical. Some of the luminaries reviewing Matthews book on the back cover however, disagree, particular chairman and CEO of General Electric, Jeffrey Immelt: “…People think that leaders ‘tell people what to do.’ More frequently, leadership in business is about selling teams on a vision, and leveraging friendship and trust to get things done. Chris does a great job of bridging his experience in politics with commonsense rules.” (Back Cover)
Immelt may be on to something here – Matthews is simply digging into the mechanisms by which people with significant reputation capital go about using that capital to get things done. When one reaches the stratosphere of political achievement, a lot of the reputation dynamics have to be driven by the players themselves. They are ‘churning’ their reputation capital (i.e. – accumulating it and spending it) at a very high rate. For the average person however, the sort of posturing and strategy Matthews has observed may not be quite so necessary, since in its place, we have many institutions that are ready to grant us credit for our accomplishments and vouch for our ability to perform certain tasks.
The books selected for analysis here were intentionally pulled out of the self-help literature because they present such a profoundly opposing view of how to achieve success – largely because they define success differently. If there are to be criticisms lodged against these two authors, it would be that Dyer is a hypocrite, and Matthews is a cynic. Wayne Dyer does not seem to shy away from tooting his own horn in order to convince us of his credibility – stating that he is a “Dr.” and has written over 30 books. While I don’t question his truthfulness or begrudge him his right to include this information, his book seems to suggest so fervently that reputation is unimportant for well-being that the prominent use of his reputation to market the book does seem like a hypocrisy. Chris Matthews seems to believe that the key to success is in almost fooling others into trust by putting up a façade of likability. The people who I think we generally have the deepest connections with are those who we still like when we see them at their most vulnerable. Deep friendships ought not be based on mutual likability alone, and certainly not on mutual envy of another’s reputation capital stock. This is likely what Jon Stewart was getting at, and he was justified in pointing out Matthews’ cynicism.
In order to bring this issue back to educational accreditation, and the general popular view of accreditation, let’s consider that both these books were popular, and sold well on Amazon. As of March 7, 2008, Chris Matthews’ book ranking on Amazon was #11,251 and Wayne Dyer’s book ranking was #81 – while this may seem like a large difference, Amazon ranks millions of books, so these two are both likely in the top 1% of Amazon sellers. Therefore, people likely have a fairly balanced understanding that outward reputation and inward peace or reflection are both crucial for whole living. Any good educational accreditation program will likely seek to map very carefully onto the natural lives we live – capturing who we are, without interfering with our desire for authenticity.
If you are defined by your diploma, it is fair to say you’d be missing out on life, and may have difficulty discovering what you’re truly passionate about – since the diploma is essentially a contrived label bestowed by others. If you are so self-reflective however, that it serves as a shield or barrier from the interests and concerns of others, then people will simply not know you or trust you to do the work you may be capable of. Somewhere in the middle, popular culture will move to embrace methods of accrediting education and success that aptly recognizes learning and accomplishment, without seeking to exert restrictive influence over its creation.
Works Cited:
Dyer, Wayne. Change Your Thoughts – Change Your Life. Hay House Inc. 2007
Matthews, Chris. Life’s a Campaign. Random House, New York. 2007.
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