ESCAPING
"THE SECRET" (2007)
Is there
any escaping The Secret? The book is number one on
Amazon.com, and the DVD has become a big hit at house
parties in Vancouver. The recent blessing by Oprah has
taken The Secret from a blip on the pop culture radar to a
media mothership with a wallet- seeking tractor beam.
The glitzy, Australian-conceived production is devoted to
the "Law of Attraction," a supposed universal law in which
like attracts like. The contributors to The Secret insist
that good thoughts will draw good things to you, and that
science proves it. In the film's dramatic sequences, a boy
sees a bike in a store window, and by concentrating,
eventually gets it as a gift from an adult. A young woman
focuses on a gold necklace, and a suitor eventually drapes
the selfsame jewelery around her neck. A guy visualizes
sitting in a new Porsche, and soon finds himself in the
driver's seat.
The Secret is big on manifesting wealth. Creator Rhonda
Byrne says she was inspired after first discovering the Law
of Attraction in a 1910 book called The Science of Getting
Rich.
"Let go of all those limiting thoughts," she writes in the
book. "Food cannot cause you to put on weight, unless you
think it can... You most likely know of someone who is thin
and eats like a horse, and they proudly declare, 'I can eat
whatever I want and I am always the perfect weight.' And so
the Genie of the Universe says, 'Your wish is my command!'"
Both the book and the DVD are full of this sort of witless
solipsism. It's the age-old wine of magical thinking poured
into a hip, high-production bottle. The film's participants
are identified mostly as "visionaries" and
"metaphysicians," even though the majority hail from the
world of U.S. business management and motivational
speaking.
It all may seem like harmless piffle, but there's a dark
side to this, as when The Secret's talking heads warn that
negative thoughts can result in car accidents, illness and
all sorts of dire consequences. This
create-your-own-reality idea has long been in circulation
in New Age circles, and anyone with a hard-core New Age
friend or relative is likely familiar with their
condescending, judgmental rap. Cancer, a bad car accident,
or any other life- altering downer, is your own fault,
brought about by negative thoughts or karma. They may not
say it outright, but the inference hangs in the air: you've
failed to love yourself enough or think the right thoughts,
and your fingerprints are all over the psychic crime scene.
The Secret's Oprah-friendly upgrade to the create-your-own-
reality paradigm is like crystal meth for New Age bullies.
But that's not the worst of it. Its message disconnects the
viewer or reader from any ecological, economic and
political connections, other than an imagined cosmic
hotline between the ego and its Care Bear cosmos. And then
there's the insistence that the Law of Attraction is
endorsed by science, when it's not. The Secret simply gives
spiritual narcissism a lick of new paint, lacquering the
ego with quantum pseudoscience. Yet at the same time, The
Secret is radically, even proudly, anti-intellectual. "How
does it work?" barks one of the participants in the film
about the LOA. "Nobody knows. Just like nobody knows how
electricity works. I don't, do you?" (Actually, there are
plenty of people who know how electricity works, and if
they didn't, others would still be reading self-help books
by candlelight or kerosene.)
But what's truly scary is where the philosophy of The
Secret maps over a bizarro offshoot of neocon thinking. In
2004, a "top Republican aide" to Bush shared an insight
with New York Times reporter Ron Suskind.
"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the
reality-based community,' which he defined as people who
'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of
discernible reality.' I nodded, and murmured something
about Enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me
off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,'
he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we
create our own reality... We're history's actors... and
you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'"
While the Empire looks beyond its borders with a twisted
kind of positive thinking, dreaming up one farcical war of
liberation after another, the middle class consumer
targeted by The Secret is counselled to turn inward. Look
to your navel, or even further south, and dive straight in,
while focusing on that Porsche, jewelry, monster home, etc.
Become your own pirate radio for good vibes, broadcasting a
bling-seeking signal that is in keeping with the West's
global resource wars.
As the
late, great Robert Anton Wilson once said of the New Age
scene's carnie aspect, "There's a seeker born every
minute."
Geoff Olson
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