What a Column About “Idiots” Reveals About Self-Help

In April 2026 Mark Manson published a column titled “Intellectuals are F*cking Idiots,” arguing that academics build models of the world, grow attached to them, and stop checking whether they work. His evidence: a Nature megastudy on gym motivation, a “Harvard Business Review study” on corporate training, research on DEI training, a paper on psychotherapy, the Blue Zones, Robert McNamara and Paul Ehrlich.

Federico Malatesta follows each citation back to its source. The gym-study forecasts were not made by the scientists Manson names; no such HBR study appears to exist; the DEI report says the opposite of his summary; the therapy paper is a forty-year-old reply about paraprofessionals. Most of the mistakes the column lists were caught by the academics it mocks. Drawing on Alasdair MacIntyre’s account of emotivism, he argues that self-help keeps the vocabulary of evidence and drops the constraint that gave citations their meaning.

The piece places this critique beside Barbara Ehrenreich, Micki McGee, Edgar Cabanas and Eva Illouz, Will Storr, Oliver Burkeman, Svend Brinkmann, Christopher Lasch and Jeffrey Masson, and beside his book, They Are Lying to You: The Self-Help Delusion, out now, which follows self-help claims from the sentence back to the source.

In April of this year, Mark Manson, the popular self-development author, published a column titled “Intellectuals are F*cking Idiots.”¹ Its argument is that intellectuals (he seems to mean academics) build models of the world in their ivory towers, grow attached to them, and after a while stop coming down among the mortals to check whether those models still work, or ever did.

As an anti-academic tirade, it is neither original nor especially insightful. It caught my attention because it packs into one column several of the self-help habits I describe in my new book, They Are Lying to You: The Self-Help Delusion.

Manson’s column opens with Malcolm Caldwell, the London academic who became one of the Khmer Rouge’s best-known Western defenders and was shot in Phnom Penh in December 1978, days after arriving to meet Pol Pot. The other exhibits follow in quick succession: behavioral scientists who could not predict which gym program would work, therapists who help patients no more than a stranger would, corporate training that makes employees worse, diversity training that makes people more racist. The column ends by advising readers to go looking for evidence of their own mistakes.

So I went looking at his.

My complaint is not that a popular writer took a shortcut or rounded a number. It is about the habit of an entire industry: stating absolute truths (Intellectuals are F*cking Idiots) on the strength of data the writer has either misunderstood or handled carelessly. So let’s go through the “evidence” Manson cites (to understand the rest of the essay it’s easier if you read Manson’s column first, painful as it may be).

1. Malcolm Caldwell

Let’s start where Manson begins. It’s an old story. Together with other left-wing academics of his generation, Malcolm Caldwell believed Pol Pot’s Cambodia was building an agrarian socialism that would feed itself and escape dependence on the cities and on foreign capital. His convictions hardened around an idea that was never real; nobody disputes that. His death is another matter. The story that “Pol Pot, not used to being lectured to by a professor, promptly had Caldwell killed that night” has never been established, and it is one version among several.² And even if it were true, what would it prove about a whole category of people being defined as idiots?

2. The Gym Study

Manson writes of a “study that asked 30 behavioral scientists to predict which interventions would motivate people to go to the gym more often,” and says they failed. He has the study wrong. This is the Milkman megastudy, published in Nature in 2021.³ Thirty behavioral scientists from fifteen universities designed fifty-four four-week programs, tested on more than sixty thousand gym members. The thirty made no predictions; they simply designed the interventions. The forecasting was done by three other groups: 156 professors at top schools of public health, 90 applied behavioral science practitioners, and 301 people recruited online. All three groups failed, with no meaningful correlation between predicted and observed effects. The most one can say is that experts and laypeople failed at the same rate, which is a different statement altogether.

3. Corporate Training

Manson then quotes “a Harvard Business Review study” that apparently “found that over 75% of corporate training actually makes employees less productive.” Unfortunately, no such HBR study appears to exist. The link goes to a (not particularly impressive) blog post, a training vendor’s infographic.⁴ Here you’ll find a number of unverified references, including a 2010 McKinsey survey in which 25% of respondents said training “measurably improved performance,” which tells you nothing about the other 75%. A plausible source for the number does exist; Manson does not cite it, and I had to search for it. Steve Glaveski, writing in HBR in 2019, reported that 75 percent of 1,500 managers surveyed were dissatisfied with their company’s L&D function.⁵ Obviously, that is a survey of managers’ “feelings,” nothing to do with Manson’s claim. It is the usual self-help sequence: a 2019 number about a different question gets attached to the author’s thesis, and the link offered as support goes to a commercial page that does not contain the number in the first place.

4. DEI

On DEI – today omnipresent in the public discourse – Manson mentions “recent studies that have found that diversity and racism training actually makes people more racist, rather than less.” Behind the bombastic “recent studies” sits a single report, not peer-reviewed: a 2024 document from the Network Contagion Research Institute, produced with researchers at Rutgers, that tested materials drawn from three specific sources.⁶

The report argues that participants who read excerpts from well-known anti-racist authors describing “systemic oppression” (not a standard DEI training) were afterwards more likely to see discrimination in an ambiguous admissions vignette. Similar patterns appeared in the anti-Islamophobia and caste modules. But the authors of this report also make clear that “the intervention did not produce any measurable change in warmth or coldness towards persons of color.” So, the summary is that the one variable that speaks directly to whether people became more racist did not move. The report also says of itself: “It is beyond the scope of this research to evaluate DEI training writ large and our work therefore, should not be taken as evaluating the entire industry.” On both counts it is the opposite of what Manson asserts.

5. The Therapists

Manson writes that “researchers spent years collecting data on thousands of patients and dozens of modalities. The goal was to determine, once and for all, which form of therapy would rule them all. But the study found that all forms of therapy barely work at all.”

There have been thousands of studies on the effectiveness of therapy, and Manson cites one. I could stop here. But the one he cites is neither a meta-analysis nor a general study of whether therapy works. It is a reply to an earlier, narrow review of whether patients treated by paraprofessionals improve more than those treated by professionals, and it is more than forty years old.⁷ Neither that paper nor the modern trials show that “therapy does not work,” or that training is irrelevant. They show that non-specialists, trained in a structured protocol and supervised by professionals (not random dudes “having a beer and an honest chat,” as Manson puts it), can treat mild to moderate depression about as well as trained therapists over periods of three to twelve months.⁸ A very different story.

6. The Blue Zones

On the Blue Zones, now the subject of many documentaries, Manson says of the model that “it’s built on top of bad data. Therefore, it’s not accurately reflecting reality. Yet, of course, nobody thinks about that.” Wrong again: people do think about it. Who do you think found the bad data? Academics. Saul Newman, a demographer, showed how much of the extreme-age data rests on missing birth records and pension fraud.⁹ And the argument over the figures continues, yes, again, among academics.

7. Vietnam

Manson also ventures into politics, and next on his idiots list is Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson, a graduate of UC Berkeley and Harvard Business School, and president of the Ford Motor Company. Manson argues that during the Vietnam War, McNamara relied on the wrong numbers – most notoriously, the body count – that did not measure “the North Vietnamese willingness to suffer and die. The poor morale of the US troops.” That is true. What Manson leaves out is that if the “intellectual” (or “idiot,” at least according to Manson) McNamara had a bad model of the war, so did the many anti-intellectual generals who resented him; the body count suited them too, because it was easy to measure. Idiots as well? By the way, McNamara changed his view in 1966. In 1967 he commissioned the Pentagon Papers.¹⁰ He learned from his mistakes, late perhaps, but he learned.

8. The Population Bomb

Near the end of the column, Manson turns on the biologist Paul Ehrlich and his 1968 book The Population Bomb, which warned of worldwide famine and collapse from overpopulation. And guess what happened in the field? Ehrlich was corrected by Julian Simon, another academic, who bet him in 1980 that resource prices would fall, and won.¹¹

Evidence as mood

The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argued in After Virtue that modern moral language broke.¹² We still use the words of an older moral system, but we have lost the system itself. Today words like “justice” and “right” no longer have anything that fixes their meaning. What remains is emotivism: moral claims that express an individual preference while presenting themselves as statements of fact.

Similarly, phrases like “studies found,” “researchers at Harvard,” “a Nature paper,” and “over 75%” are surviving fragments of a system in which a citation constrained the writer. Inside that system a link was a promise: please go and check, you will see that I have done serious work and that the source says what I said it says. Self-help has kept the vocabulary and dropped the constraint. The words now carry an individual, absolute conviction about the state of the world, with something behind it that looks like evidence but is not.

One wrong citation in a column is a mistake. When almost every citation fails to support what the column says, the problem is how the column was written. Manson is not the only one who writes this way; the issue is structural. In They Are Lying to You I check citation after citation, and the science is usually misrepresented, misreported or simply invented out of thin air. Much of the self-help industry cites studies because citations make a claim sound credible, without checking what the studies actually say. What matters to the industry is what they appear to say.

Books that criticize the self-help industry

The critique of the self-help industry is not new, and some of it is superb.

Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided (2009) remains the indispensable account of positive thinking as ideology, and it is both funny and sharp about positive psychology’s “double epistemic standard”: rigorous science for the journals, optimistic bias for daily life.¹³ Micki McGee’s Self-Help, Inc. (2005) gives the best structural reading, arguing that makeover culture produces what she calls the belabored self, a worker required to perform continuous unpaid self-invention in exchange for employment that no longer promises anything in return.¹⁴ Edgar Cabanas and Eva Illouz, in Manufacturing Happy Citizens (2019), take apart happiness science as both an industry and a political instrument, and Illouz’s earlier Saving the Modern Soul (2008) shows how thoroughly therapeutic language was built into modern institutions rather than set against them.¹⁵ Will Storr’s Selfie (2017) supplies the history: how the Western self was assembled, from Greek perfectionism through the self-esteem movement to what he calls the age of perfectionism, and what that assembly costs the people living inside it.¹⁶ Oliver Burkeman’s The Antidote (2012) is the most useful counter-program, a case for the negative path made without contempt for the reader.¹⁷ Svend Brinkmann’s Stand Firm (2017) is the sharpest refusal, an argument to stop developing and start standing on ground you have chosen.¹⁸ Behind all of them sits Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism (1979), and Jeffrey Masson’s Against Therapy (1988) is still the most uncompromising book on the list,¹⁹ no matter which side of the debate you are on. The most recent book on the subject, They Are Lying to You: The Self-Help Delusion (2026), is written by me.²⁰

Between them, the earlier books cover the ideology, the labor, the political economy, the history, and the case for refusal. My approach was different. I looked at the whole industry, by genre – including motivational and success literature, manifestation, pop neuroscience, repackaged Stoicism and Eastern wisdom, therapy-speak, and the cult of the authentic self – and tried to follow each claim from the sentence back to its source. I put myself in the reader’s shoes, going through the pages at eleven at night, trying to find an answer to something that matters to them, something that could change their lives, deciding whether to believe what they are reading.

They Are Lying to You: The Self-Help Delusion is out now. Over twenty-six chapters and some eight hundred notes, it examines the industry at much greater length than this column allows for Manson.

Live by the citation, die by the citation

Now, Manson is probably writing for a general audience, not a peer reviewer. Maybe one of his interns wrote the column, unsupervised. Columns compress, figures get rounded, and popularizers don’t often expect a Substack post to survive the treatment I have just given it. Finally, the underlying observation is occasionally correct: some intelligent people do build models that stop touching the world, and the Caldwell story is a frightening illustration of exactly that. But all of this, applying the column’s own standards, still does not rescue the writing. A piece arguing that readers should do their own homework can be judged by whether its own evidence survives a look. It did not.

Ironically, several of the errors the column lists were caught by the academics it mocks: a demographer found the bad Blue Zones data, an economist won the bet against Ehrlich, McNamara commissioned the history of his own failure, and the therapy paper Manson cites is itself one group of academics correcting another. Academics get things wrong, often and sometimes badly, and their world is set up to catch those mistakes, maybe later than we would all like, but eventually. A column has no such arrangement. The only people in a position to check it are its readers. Once in a while, do your own homework makes perfect sense.

Notes and sources

1. Mark Manson, “Intellectuals are F*cking Idiots,” Mark Manson (Substack), April 14, 2026, https://markmanson.substack.com/p/intellectuals-are-fcking-idiots. ↩
2. Michael Ezra, “Malcolm Caldwell: Pol Pot’s Apologist,” Democratiya 16 (Spring/Summer 2009): 155-178, https://cambodiatokampuchea.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/caldwell-malcolm-ezra-malcolm-calwell-pol-pots-apologist-democratiya-issue-16-spring-summer-2009.pdf, sets out the competing accounts: a Vietnamese commando unit (Philip Short), opponents of Pol Pot inside the regime (Richard Dudman, Ben Kiernan), an order from Son Sen, and an order from Pol Pot himself. Elizabeth Becker, who was in the guest house that night, gives her account in When the War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986). ↩
3. Katherine L. Milkman et al., “Megastudies Improve the Impact of Applied Behavioural Science,” Nature 600 (December 16, 2021): 478-483, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04128-4. ↩
4. “Infographic: Why Corporate Training Is a Colossal Waste (And What to Do About It),” Endurance Learning, accessed September 21, 2026, https://endurancelearning.com/blog/infographic-why-corporate-training-is-a-colossal-waste-and-what-to-do-about-it/. ↩
5. Steve Glaveski, “Where Companies Go Wrong with Learning and Development,” Harvard Business Review, October 2, 2019, https://hbr.org/2019/10/where-companies-go-wrong-with-learning-and-development. ↩
6. Network Contagion Research Institute, in partnership with Rutgers University, Instructing Animosity: How DEI Pedagogy Produces the Hostile Attribution Bias (November 2024), https://networkcontagion.us/wp-content/uploads/Instructing-Animosity_11.13.24.pdf. ↩
7. Jeffrey S. Berman and Nicholas C. Norton, “Does Professional Training Make a Therapist More Effective?,” Psychological Bulletin 98, no. 2 (1985): 401-407, https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jeffrey-Berman-3/publication/19261008_Does_Professional_Training_Make_a_Therapist_More_Effective/links/00463529dc24d7caf3000000/Does-Professional-Training-Make-a-Therapist-More-Effective.pdf, replying to John A. Hattie, Christopher F. Sharpley, and H. Jane Rogers, “Comparative Effectiveness of Professional and Paraprofessional Helpers,” Psychological Bulletin 95, no. 3 (1984): 534-541, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6399757/. ↩
8. David A. Richards et al., “Cost and Outcome of Behavioural Activation versus Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Depression (COBRA): A Randomised, Controlled, Non-inferiority Trial,” Lancet 388, no. 10047 (2016): 871-880, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27461440/; Vikram Patel et al., “The Healthy Activity Program (HAP), a Lay Counsellor-Delivered Brief Psychological Treatment for Severe Depression, in Primary Care in India: A Randomised Controlled Trial,” Lancet 389, no. 10065 (2017): 176-185, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27988143/. ↩
9. Saul Justin Newman, interview, “‘The Data on Extreme Human Ageing Is Rotten from the Inside Out’: Ig Nobel Winner Saul Justin Newman,” The Conversation, September 16, 2024, https://theconversation.com/the-data-on-extreme-human-ageing-is-rotten-from-the-inside-out-ig-nobel-winner-saul-justin-newman-239023. ↩
10. Robert S. McNamara with Brian VanDeMark, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (New York: Times Books, 1995). ↩
11. Paul Sabin, The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble over Earth’s Future (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). ↩
12. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), chaps. 1-3. ↩
13. Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009). ↩
14. Micki McGee, Self-Help, Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), esp. chap. 5. ↩
15. Edgar Cabanas and Eva Illouz, Manufacturing Happy Citizens: How the Science and Industry of Happiness Control Our Lives (Cambridge: Polity, 2019); Eva Illouz, Saving the Modern Soul: Therapy, Emotions, and the Culture of Self-Help (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). ↩
16. Will Storr, Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It’s Doing to Us (London: Picador, 2017). ↩
17. Oliver Burkeman, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2012). ↩
18. Svend Brinkmann, Stand Firm: Resisting the Self-Improvement Craze, trans. Tam McTurk (Cambridge: Polity, 2017). ↩
19. Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979); Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, Against Therapy: Emotional Tyranny and the Myth of Psychological Healing (New York: Atheneum, 1988). ↩
20. Federico Malatesta, They Are Lying to You: The Self-Help Delusion (Perrin, TX: Artha Press, 2026), https://lyingtoyoubook.com. ↩