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advocates of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) are also bootstrappers. In 1935, Dr. Robert H. Smith began AA, and since that time AA has assisted perhaps a million people in giving up alcohol, a problem that had once seemed quite hopeless. AA is not pure bootstrapping, however: One element in recovery is individual determination and will. This is coupled with a belief in assistance from a Higher Power and vigorous social support from the group. In fact, AA is a curious mix of the seemingly conflicting elements of self-improvement and acceding to a higher power, and I will look at its doctrines and its successes and failures more closely in the chapter on alcoholism.
    In twentieth-century America, somewhere between the ministrations of the booters and the boosterism of the bootstrappers, the dogma of human implasticity died. The old dogma has been replaced by a new dogma, its opposite, which maintains that human beings can always change and improve—by the agency of others and by themselves. Like the dogma it has usurped, the new one makes sweeping claims. All aspects of human character, it says, can, with enough effort, or learning, or insight, yield and change for the better.
    Is the dogma of human plasticity true?
    The Maximal Self
    Many widespread beliefs are true. Some, like the medieval belief that the moon is covered with a crystal sphere, are false: Some are self-fulfilling. The rest of this book is about whether the belief in limitless human plasticity is true. But before evaluating it, I want to emphasize that the belief that we can change ourselves differs from most other beliefs. It has, at the very least, one remarkable self-fulfilling aspect.
    The society we live in exalts the self—the self that can change itself and can even change the way it thinks. Our economy increasingly thrives on individual whim. Our society grants power to the self that selves have never had before. We live in the age of personal control.
    When the assembly line was created at the turn of this century, we could buy only white refrigerators. Painting every refrigerator the same color saved money. In the 1950s, the development of rudimentary machine intelligence created a bewildering range of choices. It became possible (and profitable, if there was a market for it) to, say, encrust every hundredth refrigerator with rhinestones.
    Such a market was created by the glorification of individual choice. Now all jeans are no longer blue; they come in dozens of colors and hundreds of varieties. With the permutation of available options, you are offered a staggering number of different models of new cars. There are hundreds of kinds of aspirin and a thousand kinds of beer.
    To create a market for all these products, advertising whipped up a great enthusiasm for personal control. The deciding, choosing, pleasure-preoccupied self became big business. (Now there is even a successful magazine called Self.) When the individual has a lot of money to spend, individualism becomes a profitable worldview.
    Since World War II, America has become a rich country. Although tens of millions have been left out of the prosperity, Americans on the average now have more buying power than any other people in history. Our wealth is tied to the bewildering array of choices opened to us by the selfsame process that produced the rhinestone refrigerator. We have more food, more clothes, more education, more concerts, more books, and more marketed knowledge to choose from than any other people has ever had.
    Who chooses? The self. The modern self is not the peasant of yore, with a fixed future yawning ahead. He (and now she, effectively doubling the market—and add in kids) is a frantic trading floor of options, decisions, and preferences. The result is a kind of self never before seen on the planet—the Maximal Self.
    The self has a history. We have seen that until the Renaissance the self was minimal; in a Fra Angelico painting everyone but Jesus looks just like everyone else.