I am not a fan of Tony Robbins, however the reaction to this has been hysterical.
One of the many things that Americans do not understand about their own culture is that it is extremely male. America does not like women. Women are supposed to concentrate on looking good then perhaps being clever enough to help a man do something unspecified and terribly important.
Michelle Obama said it best when she announced to some schoolgirls that they should be ‘serious and study hard, because if she hadn’t been serious and studied hard, she wouldn’t be married to the most important man in America.’ (sic) This absolutely enraged me at the time. IS THAT THE BEST YOU CAN DO, MICHELLE?
In comparison with that bit of backhanded anti-feminist abuse, I do not find Tony Robbin’s open expression of American maleness particularly offensive. He is telling it like it is. Successful people in his world are people who do not take other people into account. They want what they want, and hell mend you if you get in the way. To stop and ask them to consider your issues is victimhood. Do you really want to be significant for being a victim? Isn’t it better to use that energy to push past the asshole ignoring your feelings on his need to stick his hands up your skirt?
Tony Robbins is a branch of the same tree I have been cultivating for the last few years when dealing with my feelings. (regular readers will know that this is literally the case, given that the material we are discussing right now has itself grown from the same summer camp attended by both Robbins and Wolfe many years ago)
I started on that tack many years ago. I was sexually assaulted a few times before I chose to become a chef. During the nineties in the UK, female chefs were thin on the ground so I made a point of making it to Head Chef in charge of seven men within five years. That was my response to weakness. I outworked them, then I controlled them. This, by Robbin’s logic, is a far more positive and progressive response to unfairness and assault than joining a cult of complaint. Likewise, following a few violent relationships, my overwhelming feeling was that the abuser needs as much if not more help than the abused. Balanced viewpoints are often not very pretty.
Let us not forget that Robbins himself had a rather shaky past, and in common with many ‘significant’ figures, made himself so as a response. The fact that the public, and in particular the abused female public, now choose to use his financial success to say that his opinion is not valid is more abusive than his opinion.
Dealing as I now do with somewhat larger problems than the average person, I often ponder that humanity has failed to develop much beyond ancient Greece and Rome. Humans still mis-use information to suit an agenda, they still use people’s foibles against them, and progress is stilted as a result.
In my immediate case, I am currently strategising on behalf of a very popular individual who is being repeatedly knifed in the back by colleagues who fear him as a threat, and who have a great deal of financial interest in selling my country to an economic enemy (the USA). My response, as a historian, is to look on this as minor scuffling, although to the protagonists it seems like the end of the world when it is actually happening.
There is nothing new under the sun. Men are socialised to take what they want. Women are socialised to respond by complaining when they are dissuaded from getting what they want to service that.
A true protagonist, however, ignores all that. A true protagonist views such events as being unpleasant but a learning curve on the way to attaining a position in which they can take action to prevent it ever happening again.
Since you choose to remain very small and whiny, you may not understand this.
We who are bigger have no time to care, sorry. That is what you should take away from the words of Tony Robbins in this case and I am sorry to say that he is right. That is where you should want to be, and if you are wasting time on anything else, you are not going to get there.