A Sale On Snake Oil
I read something like this and I just shake my head. Writing in today's Washington Post, Tim Watkin explains the dirty little secret behind a "self-help" book called The Secret.
The secret of "The Secret" is, very simply, the "law of attraction." Despite claims on the book's Web site that it is revealing hidden wisdom "for the first time in history," the idea dates back nearly 3,000 years to early Hindu teachings that "like attracts like." But author Rhonda Byrne takes it to a new level. She told Australia's Herald Sun newspaper in January that she stumbled upon "the secret" while mourning the death of her father in 2004, via a 1910 book called "The Science of Getting Rich," by one Wallace D. Wattles……
…..It's all so laughably nutty. And it would be harmless but for the millions buying the book and DVD and the exposure that "The Secret" is getting from the likes of Winfrey and Larry King. And for the danger lurking in its philosophy.
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."
So the gist is you attract all the good and all the bad in your life just by thinking about it. If you think happy, fuzzy rich thoughts you'll get rich without doing anything at all - other than making the wish. And if you're the victim of genocide, that's all your fault, too. No, seriously, read the whole article - that is actually explicitly stated by one of the "gurus" quoted extensively in The Secret.
Wow. That's it? That's all it takes? Thinking about getting rich? Well, that's all it takes to take people for $16.76 for the book and $34.99 for the DVD and for the author to make a tidy profit. Oh that and some drooling by Oprah Winfrey - who honestly should know a hell of a lot better than this. She didn't get to where she is by wishful thinking, she got there by working for it. When the wreckage of people's lives start piling up, do you suppose Winfrey will wish it all away for the victims? We're right back to traveling snake oil salesmen and medicine shows, aren't we? And sometimes it comes right into your living room on the television.
By old_dawg, Sunday, 8 April , 2007 @ 3:30 pm
Sounds a lot like that old country song with the verse (probably poorly quoted form memory), “Everybody will be drinking that free BubBle-up and eating that Rainbow Stew.”
By Sam L., Sunday, 8 April , 2007 @ 9:30 pm
I read on some other website that “proof” of the falsity of “The Secret” is this: In the 70’s many teenage boys had that poster of Farrah Fawcett on their walls–and none of them got Farrah herself.
I can’t disagree.