Introduction
Self-help. What an enormous industry we’ve build with it. I think the current state of what we call self-help deserves a post for itself, but that won’t be today.
What I do find fascinating is how it parallels to previous centuries, and how it links to capitalism, to our favorite philosophers and to religion.
A lot of light is shed on it in the book Caliban and the Witch. It’s an awfully interesting book by Silvia Federici. She explores the middle ages, witch-hunting, the human body, and violence. I recommend it. The topics I write about today are better explained in there.
For this post, I want to look at Societal and Religious discontent in the Middle Ages, the raise of Capitalism, how Rationalism influenced it, and what relation it has to modern self-help. This is, no doubt, a simplification of what happened, and I’m only looking at a certain part of history. It’s not a complete account of what happened, nor the only explanation of how we came to where we are.
Unsatisfactory Years
Let us set the scene first. The Middle Ages were not nice. Hardly a surprise to anyone. By the 11th century, most people were ruled by iron fist both by a feudalist society that exploded them, and a church that extorted them. Feudal Europe was experiencing shifts in power dynamics, leading to dissatisfaction among peasants and urban populations.
Feudalist Society was experiencing a good deal of changes. Due to an increase in population, land became scarcer. The disintegration of the Carolingian Empire left much of Europe fragmented into smaller, localized feudal states. Lords and nobles wielded significant power over their territories, often at the expense of central rulers like kings or emperors. This led to a patchwork of authority, with competing loyalties and frequent conflict. For peasants, this meant navigating the demands of multiple authorities (lords, bishops, and monarchs), exacerbating grievances. They faced heavy labor obligations, high taxes, and rents.
On the religious side, efforts to eliminate corruption and centralize papal authority created tensions with local clergy and secular rulers. With the apparent instability of the Church, many sought a deeper, more personal connection to God, often through movements outside the official Church. There was a spiritual hunger created by a Church that had become increasingly abusive and descreasingly effective in addressing deepern needs.
One consequence all this had was the surgence of heretics. Whilst it is true that there were in large part a group of early hippies, they are the symptom of a society that grew largely dissapointed with the system in place.
The heretics held Heresy’s beliefs: those that contradict or reject officially accepted teachings of religious institutions. Many heretics lived on the fringes of society, often in rural or secluded areas, away from the influence of the Church and the political structures of the time. Some heretical groups, like the Cathars or Waldensians, had communal lifestyles that emphasized simplicity and rejection of worldly wealth.
Even if not everyone was a part of these groups, their ideas resonated with many people. The working class started to feel less happy with their work-arrangements, and the powerful started persecuting these beliefs by execution, witch-hunting and torture.
Heretics started to act against the flaws the system had, and that were difficult to ignore for everyone.
Again, the heretics was not a representation of the whole society, rathe an extreme response. But by looking at extreme responses, we can gain some insights on the moderate views too. And the heretics are a good example of that, even if their influence was limited compared to other events that were most important.
When things went south
It finally cracked when the great famine and the Black Plague hit. Many died, and people start caring very little about work-arrangements or rules. Understandably, I might add. A hostility towards work developed in the lower classes. The by-product of it was a power shift.
By the 15th century, the European peasantry and urban workers found a new, unprecedented power. The explanation of this is easy: there were way fewer of them, and they were less willing to work as much. So the offer of work was down. But work was still demanded. That meant higher wages and more liberty. This also gave them a higher sense of value, that gave them even more power, because they were now also willing to aim higher in negotiations.
This started a revolution that was difficult to stop. The upper classes fought back how they could, by imposing sanctions, creating rules, eliminating rules. It looks a bit like they tried a lot and saw what sticked. They became increasingly desperate, reaching points like, for example, legalizing prostitution and significantly reducing the consequences of sexual violence. The idea behind the mentioned examples was to quiet and distract a very important portion of those revolting: young men.
These changes all lead to more chaos, antagonism, frustration and fear. The working class was less and less willing to work, and those in power were more and more in need of controlling them.
There are different opinions about what tipped the scale, but it does seem that at one point, the unison of the nobility, the Church and most notably, the bourgeoisie put the brakes on the momentum of the lower classes.
This is also when capitalism solidified it’s tracks. Due to new sea routes, the Columbian exchange and an increase in colonies, europeans started importing and exporting, which gave the workers the final blow, as now they had to compete with cheap labor and produce from outside. The salary dropped, and so did the purchasing power. It was a brutal defeat to classes that had grown their power and wealth to levels that would not be reached again until the 19th century.
But even if the power went back to the hands of the upper classes, the lower classes were still unsatisfied, if not more than before. Apart from seeing the injustices and the possibility of shifting them, the idea that they were exploited was impossible to erase. The problem of productivty and willigness to work continued.
And because you can only fight ideas with ideas, it was not until there was a major shift in how we humans viewed the world that capitalism could really take of.
Rationalism
That shift in thought came: rationalism. This based reason as the superior form of knowledge in contrast to experience, faith or feelings. More importantly for us, this sets the scene in which the human body is viewed as a battlefield. There are two opposite forces:
The forces of Reason: parsimony, prudence, sense of responsibility, self-control.
The carnal self, or the wisdom of the flesh: these carnal desires corrupt the powers of the mind.
Some leading thinkers of the time viewed human desire and inclinations as something to fight with logic and scientific method. Of course, Rationalism stood in contrast with empiricism during the Enlightenment. There was a philosophical battle being fought to see if reason (rationalists), or human experience (empiricists), should be our main ultimate form of truth. But even the most representative empiricist, like John Locke, recognized the importance of reason in guiding human behavior.
“The discipline of desire is the background of character.”
John Locke
And because we like to compare our bodies and minds with whatever is hot at the time, we also needed to find new metaphors of our body. In the same way nowadays the mind is compared to a computer (or Plato and Aristotle compared it to plants or the lyre) during the 16th century we started comparing the body to a machine. The human body was viewed as something governed by physical laws, like a clock.
Machines are created to do a function. That function is nearly always related to production.
This caused the human body to be the battle-front of the epoch for social policies. Many started seeing the body as the most important resource for the productive work that early capitalist societies were so in need of, whilst also starting to see the flaws in the body that impeded precisely that work.
And you might, fairly, argue that the human body was always the main resource for productive work. But there is a subtle, important shift. It goes from human that is governed by some spiritual or divine force, to a body that is composed of many individual pieces that can be studied and manipulated.
And, what do you do when your most essential machine does not work how you require it to? You take it apart and start looking at the pieces. If the machine you’re looking at is too complex (and the human body is just that), you start observing how the different pieces interact with each other. This is when anatomy starts to pick up, after a quiet period in the Middle Ages.
But it’s both the mechanical qualities of the body and the psychological ones that start to be examined. Descartes, Humme, Locke, and Kant started exploring the human mind in these centuries.
But let’s focus on the first.
Descartes
Descartes becomes the most influential voice, and he makes both psychological and physical qualities the central topic of Treatise of Man. He did chicken out of finishing it when he learned of Galileo’s faith. But it was published shortly after his death, accompanied by The Description of the Human Body and All Its Functions (La description du corps humain et de toutes ses fonctions). Other writers that influenced this trend were Hobbes or Vesalius.
It’s fair to say that Descartes was critical in the new establishment of Mechanical Philosophy. Not surprisingly, he proposed that the human body could be understood as a complex, self-regulating machine. In his view, all bodily functions (digestion, respiration, circulation, and reflexes) were mechanical processes governed by the laws of physics and devoid of intrinsic vital or spiritual properties.
I mention these vital or spiritual properties because before him, it was the Aristotelian view that was dominant. It held that living beings were animated by vital spirits, or a soul, that governed bodily functions. Descartes rejected this, emphasizing a naturalistic and mechanical explanation for biological phenomena.
And I’m aware that the tone I’m using might come across as critical, but this shift in view was essential for the developments in medicine that would come afterwards. It was a big and necessary step towards understanding our species better. His observations encouraged anatomists and physiologists to investigate the body through empirical observation and experimentation.
All in all, for the class that was in control of the means of production but in desperate need for a productive work-force, these currents served both to reaffirm the working classes’ subjection, and to maximizing its social utility. For a ruling class prioritizing productivity, the metaphor of the body as a machine implied that it could be optimized, repaired, and disciplined for labor. It also implied the idea that the physical labor of the working class could be treated mechanistically, while intellectual pursuits (reserved for the elite) could be elevated as the domain of reason and governance.
These ideas let to studying the body as a system of inputs and outputs, leading to a focus on its control and regulation were instrumental in shaping systems of discipline and surveillance. Factories, schools, and prisons began to operate on the principle of monitoring and optimizing bodily behavior to increase efficiency.
This trend continues until this day, where the questions around work-policies always center around productivity – but more on that later.
The final player
There was one problem, though. You can’t just install work-ethics on workers because it will benefit you, the owner of the means of production. They have to be onboard too. Rewards help, policies that protect the worker help, better pay helps, that they can use some of your territory to harvest their own food helps, offering remote work helps, and Friday-pizzas in the office help (I’m kidding, they don’t). But unless there is an intrinsic motivation, it is going to be difficult to have a consistent motivated and productive workforce.
And here enters the final player: Religion. Most concretely, Protestant faith. When Max Weber published The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, it was received with various criticism, mostly revolving around his overemphasis on religious factors, Historical Inaccuracy, and misinterpretation of Protestant theology. But what is hardly argued against is that there was no correlation.1
Protestantism, particularly Calvinist theology, contributed to the cultural environment that supported early capitalism by emphasizing discipline, frugality, and personal responsibility. This influence was not uniform across all Protestant sects or regions, but it did serve as determining factor in improving productivity.
In a society that was highly influenced by religious thought, what was needed was the green light from God. And that came when the Protestant work ethic started to play a crucial role in shaping attitudes toward work and self-improvement during these centuries. Protestantism emphasized hard work, discipline, and frugality as signs of spiritual virtue.
There is no unique explanation of what exactly happened. The topic is too complex, and we know too little about the time and human psychology to be certain. Many factors that we haven’t looked at today played a significant role in both the rise of capitalism and shifts in attiude towards work.
But it is fair to assume that the development of early capitalist society also came from a combination of societal tensions between means of production and work-force, the Mechanical view of the Body and religious beliefs that emphasized hard work and discipline.
Conclusion
There are many parallels with the 21st century. We often see descriptions of this generation as one that feels devoid of meaning and will to submit to work. There are serious shifts in the workspace, and companies are trying to fight that lack of commited talent with remote-work policies, reduced working hourse or other benefits.
But this does not adress underlying issues like, for example, the tremendous loss of purchasing power younger generations face, a catastrophic world-view installed on them and a world full of cheap distractions.
For a lost generation, self-help has become that antidote to desperation that many seek, and something capitalism needs to secure a productive work-force. Much the same function Religion had 500 years ago.
The resurgence of self-help is not a disease, but it might be symptom
- The rise of capitalism was also shaped by broader economic and social factors, such as urbanization, trade, and shifts in labor dynamics. While Weber’s thesis remains influential, it is best understood as part of a larger tapestry of explanations rather than a definitive cause-and-effect relationship. ↩︎
leo burghaus 
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