The Secret Virus, or How to Write a New Age Bestseller

[robinturner]

I should clarify this title: I mean the virus of The Secret, not some biological weapon, though that might be an apt analogy. The Secret Law of Attraction Blog is full of gleeful headings like "The Secret Reaches West Africa", as though people in those countries didn't have enough problems of their own. This is not viral marketing, it is plague marketing.

And now, The Secret has reached us in Turkey. My wife bought it a few weeks ago, and suddenly I started seeing it everywhere. If I were the kind of person who believes that every event is a message from the Universe, I'd be getting a message like "You aren't safe from New Age fallout, even in Turkey." Now she's bought it for her dad as a Father's Day present on the grounds that even if it's crap, it might encourage him to think more positively. That would be the kind of achievement that might make me take Rhonda Byrne's outrageous claims a bit more seriously: my father-in-law is so negative that his square root is an imaginary number.

My problem is that although everything I hear about this book makes my hackles (or my breakfast) rise, I can't honestly dissuade my friends and family from buying it because I haven't actually read it. I can read Turkish, but it's usually an effort, and certainly more effort than the book seems to warrant. I doubt if our university library stocks it in English, and I'm certainly not prepared to spend money on ordering it through the Internet. Consequently, all I have to go on is reviews, publicity and scattered quotations. Nevertheless, these are enough to show me that the reason for the book's phenomenal success is that Byrne has mastered the real Secret: how to write a New Age self-help bestseller. Even Pythagoras hadn't mastered that one, but for you, gentle readers, I will give the recipe.

1. Assemble some obvious truths

Not all of a book - even a New Age book - can be nonsense. At times, you need to let the reader say "Oh, I knew that all along." Preferably, these truths should be so obvious that no one else has bothered to write them down, such as "you have two sets of feelings: good feelings and bad feelings. And you know the difference between the two because one makes you feel good and the other makes you feel bad." Yes, Byrne actually wrote that.

2. Sprinkle in some less well-known facts, and leaven with pseudo-science

One thing that makes New Age and pop psychology books so popular is that there are plenty of interesting bits of information lying around that lots of people haven't paid much attention to or can't explain. Acupuncture really does cure a lot of illnesses. Siberian shamans really can chew burning coals. Yogis really do levitate. OK, they can bounce around a bit. And of course, thinking positively (or negatively) can sometimes achieve surprising results, which is what The Secret is all about.

The problem with all this wacky stuff is that very little of it has been scientifically tested, let alone proven. (Acupuncture is a notable exception, which is why it's now seen as rather ordinary.) This is where pseudo-science comes to the rescue: if there is no scientific law that says what you want, invent one. The law here is the Law of Attraction, which says that "like attracts like, so when you think a thought, you are also attracting like thoughts to you." Now "like attracts like" is respectable occultism, not pseudo-science, so we need to jazz it up a bit: "Thoughts are magnetic, and thoughts have a frequency. As you think thoughts, they are sent out into the Universe, and they magnetically attract all like things that are on the same frequency." Anyone who pauses to remember their school science classes will note that (a) magnetically charged particles only attract other particles at very close range, (b) frequency is irrelevant to magnetic attraction and (c) if we're talking about magnetism, like does not attract like, it repels it. However, the answer is one familiar to all Terry Pratchett fans: it's quantum.

Add the wisdom of the ages

"Great minds think alike" is a cliche taken to extremes by New Agers. Great minds do not only think alike, they think exactly like the author. Ignore the piffling differences between the published works of, say, Plato and Einstein: they were really saying the same thing, which is ... well whatever you want it to be.

Serve with a garnish of flattery

"You deserve every good thing you want," says Byrne. This is the real Secret: tell people that despite their weight problems, their halitosis, their lack of friends, their credit card debt, their inability to do basic arithmetic ... deep down, they are wonderful and they deserve a better life. Why don't they have that life they deserve? Is it sin? Is it the International Jewish Bankers? Is it negative thinking? That is what you are there to tell them.

Comments

[blorky.livejournal.com]

Wisdom of the ages also leads to a thing called "Reciprocity of Wisdom" which basically goes like this "Wow, the Dali Lama said that he watches TV? I watch TV. I'm like the Dali Lama. No, I don't meditate, why do you ask?"

[solri.livejournal.com]

When I was a teenager I read a book by Alan Watts in which he described how as a child there was a teacher he idolised and regarded as the epitome of wisdom. Watts tried to copy everything about him that a young child could - the man's mannerisms, the pen he used, and so forth - and was most disappointed to find that wisdom was not forthcoming.

[oblomova.livejournal.com]

Someone gave that book to my mom after her diagnosis, which I found rather insulting. "See, now, if you'd just used the law of attraction, you wouldn't have that malignancy in your colon!"

Mostly, though, I'm just snickering at "this isn't viral marketing, this is plague marketing" and "his square root is an imaginary number."

[vret.livejournal.com]

You might like this
http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/07-03-07.html

[solri.livejournal.com]

Thanks, that was fun.

You may remember my old girlfriend Catherine, who worked as a clinical psychologist. She asked me for my opinion about one of her patients who was terrified because he thought he could give people cancer just by thinking about cancer. My response was, "Tell him that I've tried to curse people with various illnesses, and it's bloody difficult!"

[solri.livejournal.com]

That article that vret links to has some good comments about the essential immorality of the Law of Attraction.

[vret.livejournal.com]

It's not that hard, it just takes a very long time. If you are patient enough, and work at it hard enough, of course, it usually works eventually.

[solri.livejournal.com]

Yes, all the people I hate fall ill eventually.

I was pretty impressed by Simon Polly's boils, though. As I mentioned earlier, one day I plan to write a book called "The Power of Negative Thinking".

[ironed_orchid]

The pseudo-science is pretty annoying. Especially when it's used to 'support' some of the sillier claims.

Agree with everything you said.

[ironed_orchid]

How do people not see how horribly insulting and insensitive it is to suggest that cancer is someone's fault?

I mean, pointing out that smoking 6 packs a day isn't healthy is one thing, but claiming that it's the result of negative thinking attributes far too much control to the individual.

[grimreaperess.livejournal.com]

Thank you.

I've been ranting about this to anyone who will listen for some time now, since I saw the documentary aired on TV (I suggest rather than reading the book you download the doco).

One of the ideas is that you write down or visualise what you want from life then through mysterious acts of SKIENCE it will come to you.
Nope.
If you've decided what you want, consciously or subconsciously you'll work towards your goal and you're more likely to achieve it. Simple.

It talks a bit about how the universe will give you anything you want. This erks me a lot because this and religion puts the emphasis on some other force giving you what you 'deserve' rather than putting the emphasis on personal achievements. I'm sorry, I'll give me what I want, f*ck the universe.

Replace 'universe' with 'deity X' and you have the basis for a pseudo scientific cult.

Sigh.

I guess what annoys me the most is that I didn't think of it first, I could be rich! Really, anyone could have written this crap.

[grimreaperess.livejournal.com]

I got to "Those who speak most of illness have illness, those who speak most of prosperity have it, etc." and got angry and stopped reading.

I know the article is from a similar point of view to mine, but I just don't want to read through the crap from the book. It's so offensive.

[solri.livejournal.com]

I actually did it once, but I was only thirteen and heavily under the influence of Colin Wilson's The Mind Parasites. The reaction I got convinced me that it was a pretty shitty thing to say.

[solri.livejournal.com]

My friend, acupuncturist, masseuse and meditation teacher Şahlan believes in the book, but then she believes in everything she reads by the simple method of ignoring what the author actually says and assuming that what the author really means is what Şahlan has been saying all along. When we were arguing about it, I said "Look, if all we needed to do was to visualise experiencing what we wanted as strongly as possible, I would have lost my virginity at the age of thirteen." Unfortunately the conversation was scuppered by the clash between my English-accented Turkish and her Azeri Turkish, so she heard this as a pubescent desire to be a Canadian barber (kadınla beraber -> Kanadalı berber).

[solri.livejournal.com]

Anyone did. As far as I can tell, this is not substantially different from Christian Science, New Thought and all those other pseudo-magical currents. Byrne was just lucky enough to rehash the formula at exactly the right time (i.e. a time when real incomes are falling, America is embroiled in a long, pointless and unwinnable war, people are predicting environmental disaster etc.). If you looked through publishers' reject lists, I'm sure you'd find hundreds of books saying the same thing that didn't get their timing and marketing quite right (or whose authors didn't visualise the royalty checks strongly enough).

By the way, I say "pseudo-magical" because I don't have much against people who claim that they can do real magic - you know, angels, demons, voodoo dolls, barbarous names of evocation and that kind of stuff. Most of the time they are wrong, but they are at least entertaining.

[ironed_orchid]

Well, The Mind Parasites is pretty cool, and its premise is much more plausible than that of The Secret.

[dualistic.livejournal.com]

interesting read. I've always disliked the smugness and victim-blaming of such philosophies

on a related note:
http://www.slate.com/id/2166211

[solri.livejournal.com]

That's a good article. I am actually a big fan of "constructive pessimism", i.e. imagining the worst possible scenario and how you'd deal with it. Seneca recommends this technique, which shows that despite being a famous philosopher, a successful playwright and the richest man in Rome, he obviously didn't have the Secret.

At the risk of blowing my own trumpet ... if you liked this post, you might also enjoy my glowing review of I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional (http://solri.livejournal.com/214809.html).

[solri.livejournal.com]

Come to think of it, yes, it is a more plausible premise. Evil aliens on the moon sucking our brainwaves is an absurd idea, but it is only one absurdity - it doesn't lead to a host of other absurdities and contradictions.

If Byrne had made a more modest claim - for example, that by concentrating our thoughts and feelings we can do lots of funky stuff - I wouldn't have a problem. My problem is that if it were true that everyone is affecting the universe all the time (and that the laws of physics are a trifling matter compared to the Law of Attraction), the only universe I could imagine resulting from this premise would be some kind of hideous Lovecraftian chaos.

[dualistic.livejournal.com]

*reads and giggles*