The Secret...
Apr. 3rd, 2007 01:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
forsyth...is to write a self-help book and fleece a bunch of people who need help out of their money.
Okay, context. I've started reading The Secret, this book that's been on Oprah at least twice and a couple of the other daytime talk shows and we've been selling a zillion copies of it, the DVD, the audiobook, and the CD soundtrack. I'm only about 30 pages in, because I can't keep reading it that long, because it's crap. Seriously. It fills almost every cliche of crappy new-agey self-help books. But as far as I can tell, "the Secret" is "What you think is what you get". Which is crap. And now as I read this, I feel worse and worse about all the people we sell it to. But let me get back to "the Secret" they're talking about, and why it's crap.
Basically, it takes the power of positive thinking and dresses it up in a lot of pseudo-mystical and pseudo-scientific gobbledygook without caring about the accuracy of either. They talk about the "law of attraction" which means what you think about is what you draw to you, and try and couch it in terms of "frequencies" or "magnetism" or even more fun, quantum physics. And so by this theory, everybody who's ever died in a natural disaster or through something like say, war, violence, heart disease, or having a piano dropped on them is responsible for their own deaths. What a crock of shit. Not just because it shares the same flaw as the whole idea of karma, which is to blame the victim, but because it denies the existence of any sort of objective reality. Yes, I know the arguments that our entire world we see is created by our brain interpreting the messages from our senses, so we can't REALLY know, etc, blah blah blah. And that's stupid too. Not something you can disprove with formal logic (or even by smacking the True Believer sometimes), but it's absolutely no help. If the rest of the world's an illusion, how do you know you're not too? Or it's not all just a giant simulation using you as a battery (or co-processor, in a slightly more scientifically plausible version of The Matrix). You can't. But since pretty much all of our observations match up to the idea of their being a real objective world outside of ourselves that we can touch and influence but don't have complete control over, that sure seems like the best bet. Or at least the best bet to act like.
So with objective reality as a working hypothesis, that nullifies the whole "Secret" right there. Yeah, positive thinking is good to an extent, especially for people who continually undermine themselves with their own actions because they expect to fail (not that I'd know anything about that, personally, of course), but just thinking doesn't do anything. Thoughts are just patterns in your brain until and unless you act on them. So they only have any effect in how they get you to act. By their deeds they shall be judged.
So, I might force myself to finish reading the rest of The Secret and see if there's anything at all useful in there, but I'm not expecting much. And it's sad, it's not even entertaining crackpottery, or anything new and interesting that can make me think "Man, that's not true, but it'd be kinda cool if it was." Everything The Secret tries to do has already been done better, like by Mage: The Ascension.
Okay, context. I've started reading The Secret, this book that's been on Oprah at least twice and a couple of the other daytime talk shows and we've been selling a zillion copies of it, the DVD, the audiobook, and the CD soundtrack. I'm only about 30 pages in, because I can't keep reading it that long, because it's crap. Seriously. It fills almost every cliche of crappy new-agey self-help books. But as far as I can tell, "the Secret" is "What you think is what you get". Which is crap. And now as I read this, I feel worse and worse about all the people we sell it to. But let me get back to "the Secret" they're talking about, and why it's crap.
Basically, it takes the power of positive thinking and dresses it up in a lot of pseudo-mystical and pseudo-scientific gobbledygook without caring about the accuracy of either. They talk about the "law of attraction" which means what you think about is what you draw to you, and try and couch it in terms of "frequencies" or "magnetism" or even more fun, quantum physics. And so by this theory, everybody who's ever died in a natural disaster or through something like say, war, violence, heart disease, or having a piano dropped on them is responsible for their own deaths. What a crock of shit. Not just because it shares the same flaw as the whole idea of karma, which is to blame the victim, but because it denies the existence of any sort of objective reality. Yes, I know the arguments that our entire world we see is created by our brain interpreting the messages from our senses, so we can't REALLY know, etc, blah blah blah. And that's stupid too. Not something you can disprove with formal logic (or even by smacking the True Believer sometimes), but it's absolutely no help. If the rest of the world's an illusion, how do you know you're not too? Or it's not all just a giant simulation using you as a battery (or co-processor, in a slightly more scientifically plausible version of The Matrix). You can't. But since pretty much all of our observations match up to the idea of their being a real objective world outside of ourselves that we can touch and influence but don't have complete control over, that sure seems like the best bet. Or at least the best bet to act like.
So with objective reality as a working hypothesis, that nullifies the whole "Secret" right there. Yeah, positive thinking is good to an extent, especially for people who continually undermine themselves with their own actions because they expect to fail (not that I'd know anything about that, personally, of course), but just thinking doesn't do anything. Thoughts are just patterns in your brain until and unless you act on them. So they only have any effect in how they get you to act. By their deeds they shall be judged.
So, I might force myself to finish reading the rest of The Secret and see if there's anything at all useful in there, but I'm not expecting much. And it's sad, it's not even entertaining crackpottery, or anything new and interesting that can make me think "Man, that's not true, but it'd be kinda cool if it was." Everything The Secret tries to do has already been done better, like by Mage: The Ascension.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-04-03 07:54 pm (UTC)