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If Martians landed on earth and they turned out not to be invaders but anthropologists, we can be certain that they would find many human activities rather puzzling. Head hunting and strange initiation rituals would surely seem bizarre to them, but perhaps nothing would seem so odd as millions of people sitting glued to their televisions watching obese people try and lose weight. "Look! She is exercising! Look! He is changing his diet! This is so gripping, I can't wait until next week."
It isn't only weight loss; as far as I can tell, any sort of personal transformation makes for compelling television. Addicts who try and get clean, dumpy dressers who try and improve their wardrobe, heck, even the transformation of houses is irresistible. But weight loss is probably the most satisfying form of transformation, both because it's easy to measure and because so many viewers identify with the challenges of losing weight. Nevertheless, that doesn't fully explain why stories about transformation are irresistible to so many Americans. A few weeks ago, a formerly overweight woman won a State Beauty contest, and of course this made the national news.
For many viewers, I suspect, watching people be transformed provides hope that they too can escape the parts of their own lives that are making them miserable—whether that is their weight, their appearance, their addiction, their poverty, etc. But more broadly, personal transformation touches on something that is absolutely central to American culture—after all, "the American dream" is about being transformed into the person that you have dreamed of being.
And this brings me to psychology, because one of the reasons that psychotherapy is so popular in this country is also that people are fascinated by the possibility of transforming themselves. Where does this come from?
America is, and has always been, a deeply religious culture. Our national origin myth assigns special importance to the Puritans who formed many of the earliest colonial settlements, and these Puritans—as well as other brands of Protestants—were concerned above all about their state of salvation. For all practical purposes, all Christians of the colonial era believed that all human beings are bound for either eternal salvation or damnation (and of course, this belief persists today). Naturally, these people were interested in the question of their fate after death, and from the earliest days of Protestantism a strong "conversion" experience was felt to provide the best evidence that one was bound for glory.
A strong conversion experience typically had a particular format that began with a state of sinfulness, a period of despair as the believer acknowledged that he or she was trapped in their evil condition, and finally an experience of bliss as the believer received release from this state via the saving grace of God. In short, the best proof of salvation was a re-birth into a new life, a profound personal transformation. Today, this has become part of American culture, and even those who are not Christians continue to see personal transformation as somehow the very purpose of life.
That's why we can't stay away from stories of transformation. But there is at least one downside. Suppose I were to say that I'm basically the person I want to be, that although I have ample flaws I don't see any reason to strive to be something different. Doesn't that sound sort of smug, lacking in self-awareness, complacent? That's the downside. On some level, there's a widespread cultural assumption that everybody could use a transformation, which means that nobody is ever good enough as they are.
To learn more, visit Peter G. Stromberg's website. Photo by Tony Alter.
