If I were to come out and critique “The Secret” by Rhonda Byrne, then no one would be surprised. I would just be another Christian critiquing a book that I’m narrow minded about. Fine. I’ll let someone else tell you “The Secret” is about as trustworthy as pyromaniac in a store that sells fireworks.
I was reading the Sun Times today and ran across a promotion for a new book by Richard Roeper. The book is called Debunked! Conspiracy Theories, Urban Legands, and Evil Plots of the 21st Century. The Sun Times gave their readers a portion from this book in an article titled ‘The Secret’ conspiracy. Here are some quotes from the article:
I read The Secret, and I have to admit it was very effective on one level: It gave me a decent workout because I had to keep getting up and retrieving the book after hurtling it across the room in disgust.
Rhonda Byrne and her army of associates and disciples would have you believe there’s a conspiracy of smart, enlightened people in the world who have long held access to the great solution of success in life — and you, too, can possess this “inside knowledge” if you just buy the crap she’s peddling.
What’s amazing to me is that Ellen DeGeneres, Larry King, Oprah, Montel Williams and other opinion shapers have embraced this book when they should be denouncing it as immoral, unethical, and spiritually bankrupt.
Byrne’s entire philosophy is based on “the law of attraction,” which states that if you fully dedicate your thoughts and dreams and wishes to achieving something, the universe will act in accordance with your thoughts and make these things happen.
Here’s how Byrne described it in an e-mail to the Associated Press:
“The law of attraction says that like attracts like, and when you think and feel what you want to attract on the inside, the law will use people, circumstances and events to magnetize what you want to you, and magnetize you to it.
Hence the term chick magnet.
Like a lot of people who have made it, Byrne falls into the trap of believing she made it primarily because she had big dreams and more than anything she wanted those dreams to come true. You get this every year at Oscar time, when some genetically gifted, talented and extremely fortunate person says, “This proves that if you want something bad enough and you never let your dream die, you can make it all the way to the top! If you don’t stop dreaming, it will happen to you!”
Maybe. Probably not. There are millions upon millions of people who work hard and wish hard and dream hard — just as hard as the superstars of the world — and never become rich or famous or even financially comfortable and respected by their peers. Winners of the life lottery often make the mistake of thinking they tapped into a special kind of belief system that made their dreams come true, when in reality it was probably a mix of hard work, God-given talent, and being in the right place at the right time …
Even more insidious than the just-wish-for-it mentality is the explicitly stated belief that if bad things happen to you, it’s your own damned fault. According to the teachers of The Secret, if you’re broke, it’s because you have too many negative thoughts keeping money from reaching you, and if you’re sick, it’s because you believed you could become sick. Without exception, everyone deserves what he or she gets.
This is a stunningly odious philosophy. Are we truly to believe that children born with life-shortening illnesses, that victims of terrorism and genocide, that starving families in Africa should blame themselves for their godforsaken bad fortune? Tell the widow of 9/11 victim or the mother of a child with cancer or the father who has just buried his seven-year-old son who was struck and killed by a car that if only those victims had believed in the law of attraction, they would have been just fine. Go ahead, tell them …
This is the book Oprah has blessed with two full shows. A book that tells you if you want something or someone, all you have to do is visualize it happening, and it will happen. A book that tells you not to observe fat people, lest their overweightness invade your thoughts. A book that says we should blame the victim — that if something sh—- and tragic happens to you, you had it coming. A book that says you shouldn’t get involved in fighting injustice because it only adds to the injustice.
I believe there’s nothing wrong with a little positive thinking. Hell, there’s nothing wrong with a lot of positive thinking. If you dwell on the negative all the time, if you walk around with a spiritual black cloud over your head, of course you’re going to make your own life and the lives of others more difficult.
But I don’t know how anyone can keep a straight face while selling The Secret. The world is filled with positive people who never got out from under a lifetime of pain and disappointment — and miserable bastards who catch one lucky break after another.
There really is a conspiracy at work here. It’s not a conspiracy of enlightened leaders who know the secret of the universe is the law of attraction; it’s the conspiracy of self-help hucksters to sell all these cheap, warmed-over ideas to people who are so desperate to believe in quick-fix, New Age “solutions” that they’ll believe all this bulls—.
“The Secret” is really bad fiction. Mr. Roeper agrees with me, and he knows bad fiction when he sees it.
