Want <i>Real</i> Self-Help Advice? Stop Asking for Permission

Have you noticed lately how often people seem to be asking for permission ? And how often people are giving it?

A while back, I read a magazine profile of an advertising hotshot who divulged one of the secrets to his success. He had found a way, he said, to sell products people might want to avoid--say, potato chips to health-conscious consumers.

You sell chips, said the ad man, by giving people “the permission structure to be pigs.”

The permission structure?

All you have to do, he said, is create an advertisement in which a bunch of happy fat people are sitting around eating potato chips. The lemmingish consumer will see the ad and think to herself: “Gee. Those people are fat, happy and they are eating potato chips. I should eat some potato chips! “

Dare we pop the ad man’s bubble?

How can he not have realized that we have been so conditioned by our society’s overemphasis on appearance that most of us would take one look at a picture of overweight people chowing down on chips and say: “Why are those chip-eating chubbies smiling?”

Frankly, if you’re going to give me a permission structure in which I can feel comfortable getting down with a bag of Lay’s, you’d have to do a whole lot more than show me plump people popping potatoes.

You’d have to get rid of all the fashion magazines that showcase willowy women and make the rest of us feel so bad. You’d have to fire Cindy Crawford and replace her with Miss Piggy in a bathing suit on the cover of Vanity Fair, shaving Kermit.

You’d have to ferret out some scientific studies proving that the overweight live longer, are happier and have higher self-esteem than skinny minnies.

I mean, don’t be trying to fool me with some contrived picture of chip chompers. It just won’t work.

*

So maybe the potato chip ad was a bad example. But I think the guy was on to something with this permission business.

In the last few years, the very word seems to have puffed up and broken free of its moorings. It has sailed away into the murky clouds of the popular culture.

Permission no longer implies a clear-cut power relationship between, say, parent and child or boss and employee. (“Yes, Susie, you may have a Twinkie before dinner.” “No, Mr. Jones, you may not have a raise.”)

P e rmission is a catch-all now--an all-purpose benevolent blessing for something you should have had the gumption to do in the first place.

This trend is not good.

We now have a population of perfectly capable grown-ups--people, one presumes, who pay their own bills, make their own mistakes, arrange for their own psychotherapy--asking for permission. Permission to feel good about themselves. Permission to be mad at their mommies. Permission to eat greasy food. We are becoming a nation of wimps.

And I think I know where it comes from. It’s another drop in the stream of psychobabble trickle-down. It comes from the self-help section of the local bookstore, the place where we have learned to nurture our inner child (God forbid she should turn out to be a thuggy little pyromaniac), fight family dysfunction, break free of co-dependency (a term so abused it has become virtually meaningless).

Everywhere you turn these days, someone’s seeking permission and someone’s giving it.

* At a garden party, an artist is talking excitedly about her latest project. She is working in a dramatically different style now, all because a man she admires, a teacher of hers, gave her permission to try to something new. She said to him, “I have been thinking for a long time of trying something new.” And I believe he replied: “Hey, great idea.”

* At an all-day brainstorming seminar for a large newspaper, reporters complained about not having enough time to work on stories. They also wanted more space for their work. The editor listened impassively for a while. Suddenly, she brightened. “I hear you!” she cried. “And I give you permission to be the best you can be!”

*

Something is amiss. Doesn’t the idea of asking for permission violate the very essence of the self-help sensibility? I mean, if you have to ask someone else, then you aren’t helping yourself, are you?

Deep down, I guess, people want to be told what to do, but they also want to think it was their idea in the first place.

Advertising people know this instinctively. They have seen the chubby masses crying out guiltily for chips and have found a way to sate them. They have borrowed a psychological theory that not only holds the whole thing together but frees them from the self-loathing that all manipulators must eventually feel.

The more I think about someone giving me permission to eat potato chips, the hungrier I get.

For carrots.