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The Gilded Age Is Back. So Are the Grifters.
In 1897, Ralph Waldo Trine published In Tune with the Infinite, laying the groundwork for what would become the modern self-help industry. The book promised that thought could shape reality, that prosperity was a state of mind. It sold over two million copies by the early 20th century. Trine wasn’t alone. Orison Swett Marden, Napoleon Hill, and later, Wallace Wattles, built a booming business on the idea that belief itself was a path to wealth.
This surge didn’t happen in a vacuum. It unfolded during America’s original Gilded Age, when tycoons like Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, and John D. Rockefeller consolidated unimaginable wealth. The economy was a rigged game. Monopolies crushed competition, wages were suppressed, and working conditions were brutal. But instead of revolting, many workers turned inward. Instead of redistribution, they were sold transcendence.
Self-help flourished because it offered a spiritual escape hatch from material reality. It was a coping mechanism wrapped in the language of agency. You couldn’t unionize your way out of poverty, but you could visualize your way out. And that vision was easier to sell when the alternative was staring down the structural violence of unchecked capitalism.
A century later, the same market conditions have reappeared. The new Gilded Age has its own pantheon of…
