'What social theorists call "detraditionalization" – the tendency of advancing capitalism to disrupt the cultures and traditions that may stand in the way of the accumulation of profit' has been seen as underpinning behind the self-help phenomenon in two (overlapping) ways. The first is the eclipse of the informal, communitarian transmission of folkways and folk wisdom: 'the charge that when self-help writers are being simplistic and repetitious, they are also being banal and unoriginal, merely offering their readers platitudes...on behalf of the best parts of folk wisdom', may simply be because they are providing a "formal" conduit for the conveyance of such "home truths" in an increasingly unstructured and anomic world.