Charlottesville Words

Charlottesville blogger John Wills Lloyd called my attention to an article in today’s Washington Post about that latest Oprah-driven publishing phenom, The Secret. Here’s the description of “The Secret” from Oprah’s site:

The Secret is defined as the law of attraction, which states that like attracts like. The concept says that the energy you put into the world—both good and bad—is exactly what comes back to you. This means you create the circumstances of your life with the choices you make every day.

So, if you want more money in your life, think about more money. Decide you will have more money. Refuse to think impoverished thoughts. The universe will respond to your attraction to money by manifesting more money.

Of course, there’s a flip side. Talk about illness, talk to someone who is ill, worry about getting ill, and sure enough, the universe will manifest some illness on you. Nasty, isn’t it.

And no, I’m not oversimplifying. It is impossible to oversimplify this “secret,” which the author claims goes all the way back to Plato. (See the DVD trailer in the sidebar to get a taste.)

But surely, you say, no one would write a book like this without some sort of research and support behind it. Otherwise it would just be a flimflam. Well, here’s the “scientific evidence“:

According to James, there is scientific evidence to back up the spiritual practices and laws defined in The Secret. “Science tells us that everything is energy, and so your thoughts are energy. Your body, your cash, your car—everything you think is solid, if you put it under a high-powered microscope, it’s just a field of energy and a rate of vibration,” he says. “And so are we. So if you think you’re this meat suit running around, you have to think again.”

One way to describe this energy is by comparing it radio waves, “The frequency you give out through your thoughts and your emotions is what you have a tendency to manifest in your life,” Michael says. “Whether those thoughts and emotions are conscious or unconscious, it doesn’t matter.”

This means that if you are sending out the same negative energy over and over—whether thoughts or feelings—you will attract like energy back to you. James says that when bad things happen people might ask, “Oh, God, why me?” “Because it is you,” he says.

Why do you have cancer? Because you are cancer. Why are you a victim of famine, hurricane, or war? Because you like it like that. Nasty, nasty stuff.

I don’t understand it. There is no pony under this pile of manure.

But then, what’s the harm if people want to think positive thoughts? Here’s Tim Watkins from that Post article:

I saw that danger at the Barnes & Noble in Northern California where I worked for several months. Three times in less than two weeks, the store sold out of “The Secret.” Time and again, the customers coming to the counter were working-class people, spending their hard-earned money on this piffle — $16.76 for the book and $34.99 for the DVD. When I started asking why, they said they’d seen “The Secret” on “Oprah.”

Winfrey first featured it on Feb. 8. According to Nielsen BookScan, the book had sold 18,000 copies the week before. During the week of the show, sales rocketed to 101,000. The show did a follow-up on Feb. 16, and sales that week reached 190,000.

Yet none of the how-the-Secret-changed-my-life stories on “Oprah” mentioned the dark side of the book’s pie-in-the-sky pitch. In February, Los Angeles Times editorial writer Karin Klein reported that local therapists were seeing “clients who are headed for real trouble, immersing themselves in a dream world in which good things just come.” Klein told me in an e-mail that she had heard from readers who were worried about friends who “suddenly start buying things, certain that the money to pay for them will just show up.”

A couple of weeks ago I saw The Secret on display at the Charlottesville Barnes & Noble. They had a table at the front of the store (which means the publisher paid B&N for that spot) covered with books, CDs, and DVDs. I opened a copy and flipped through. The book is about as big as your hand, with wide margins, big type, and lots of break-out quotes from like-minded “experts.” There was nothing in it that would tax the vocabulary or abstract conceptual ability of a 9-year-old. And it’s sold millions and millions and millions of copies. It makes Who Moved My Cheese? look like Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica.

So, my writerly friends out there, you know what you need to do. Start thinking positive thoughts. Quit striving for literary excellence and personal integrity. Write a couple hundred repetitive pages of the kind of noxious pap a desperate populace craves, slap it between two pretty covers, and use the power of positive thinking to get yourself on the Oprah show. She’ll sell anything. For a woman who clawed her way to the top with sheer guts and hard work, she sure is gullible.

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