“Learned Helplessness: The Poison Pill Threat to Black America” by Colonel Vaughan Witten, PhD, is one of the best self-help books that tackles the American black man's self-destructive behavior and his delusory belief that he is a victim of white culture as the basic cause of his inability to adapt and flourish in today's capitalistic America.

This engrained perspective adequately blinds him and the wider black culture to the idea that discipline, effort, and industry are their only way out of their predicament rather than their reflexive guilt, pity, and destructive conduct. This acquired and internalized helplessness destroys any larger endeavor to exist as an autonomous, self-sufficient, and competitive subculture in America.

Learned helplessness is a characteristic of a being that arises when a being is repeatedly subjected to painful or otherwise disagreeable stimuli from which it is unable to escape or avoid. The ideas presented in this book make it one of the best self-help books.