I had a bit of a nostalgia moment earlier today, a colleague of mine is doing a coaching qualification at the moment, and apparently the chap who is leading the course is getting them all to read The Secret. You remember that, that’s the book from a few years back that promises you all the riches in the world if you can only keep your thoughts focussed on happy things. Now it might just be me, but given the success of the book, and the film, and the seminars, and the courses, doesn’t it seem odd that we experienced global financial chaos and the near destruction of the banks as we know them? In the UK alone this week, all this positive thinking has led to news of an £81b reduction in Government spending and massive job losses.
The basic message of ‘The Secret’ and ‘The Law of Attraction’ is this, that you get what you focus on. Focus on illness, and you’ll get ill, but focus on health and you’ll get better. Focus on debt and you’ll have debt upon debt piled upon you, but focus on wealth and people will start appearing and giving you money, right out of the blue.
Now, in a ‘power of positive thinking’ sense, some of this makes sense. As Richard Wiseman discovered in The Luck Factor (a much better and more useful book), people who believe that they are lucky, are actually luckier. It’s not that they necessarily come across more ‘lucky’ situations, it’s just that they notice them, and are open to them. If all you see is a mountain of debt, then it’s very difficult to look at the opportunities that may be out there to help you get out of debt, and it is well-known that the immune system can be effected by your mood and expectations – and if that’s as far as ‘The Secret’ went, then it would be a reasonably dull if useful book. But it doesn’t stop there.
Proponents of ‘The Secret’ believe that ‘the universe’ is actively aware of your thoughts and actively, physically, literally changes the world around you to ‘manifest’ those thoughts into your life. They regularly use the term ‘quantum physics’ as though they have any concept of what it means, to make it sound like it’s based in science, on the understanding that people will accept all sorts of crap if you are promising them an easy end to all their problems.
They will recount all sorts of ‘spooky’ anecdotes to show that it does work, really – a favourite is the ability to locate parking spaces when you need one. It goes a little something like this…
“I was driving into town the other day, and I was running late, and it’s always really busy where I was going, but I really focussed on there being a parking space near to my appointment, and when I got there, there it was!”
Now to believe that these two events (thinking about a parking space, and a parking space being available) have any sort of causal relationship at all requires you to accept one or more of the following things.
- That ‘the universe’ has nothing better to do than make sure that you are not inconvenienced by having to park further away from your appointment than you want to
- That ‘the universe’ has created more matter where there was none before in order to literally create a new parking space for your car
- That ‘the universe’ made the person who was already parked in that space return to their car and move it at just the moment that you turned up, even though they weren’t planning on moving their car yet
- That ‘the universe’ created some sort of visual illusion or fog so that even though there was an available parking space, no-one else that was looking for a space could see it
- That ‘the universe’ kept everyone who wanted to park in the area out of the area until you had found the parking space that you were looking for.
Now, you may say that people who use ‘The Secret’ to find parking spaces are delusional, but that in general, on the big things, on the ‘karmic, you get what you think about’ scale, it does work – and you’d still be wrong.
For a second, stop thinking about the people who have had good things happen to them. Don’t think about the people who won the lottery who ‘just knew’ that this was the week when their numbers were going to come up, because every week there will be millions of people who have that same feeling – until their numbers don’t come up. Let your mind linger on the darker side of life, on some of life’s unfairness, some of its tragedy. Pick anything you want – 9/11, Katrina, the Boxing Day Tsunami, child abuse, cancer, The Holocaust, Alzheimer’s, the bubonic plague, the Columbine school shooting – take your merry pick.
Now, think about the people involved. For ‘The Secret’ to hold water, each and every one of the people who was affected by those events had to have attracted it to themselves somehow. Now maybe ‘the universe’ did some forward planning and put all the people who were thinking about tsunamis on that beach at the right time, and maybe while it was doing that it was delving into the thoughts of unborn children to make sure that they were born with congenital problems which killed them within a few hours, and don’t forget it was doing this at the same time as it was putting a £5 note on the pavement infront of you when you were ‘just thinking that you needed to get some cash out of the ATM for your night out later’.
Now I suppose it ‘might’ have done that, maybe.
But to take ‘The Secret’ even slightly seriously, you have to accept an incredibly narcissistic world view, where you are not only the centre of your own world, but everyone elses too. And you have to absolve everyone else of all of their actions in the way that they interact with you. The man who rapes you on the 3rd date is no more culpable than the man who turns up with roses – you attracted them both. The customer who robs a shop is no more responsible for his actions than the millionaire who comes in and decides to buy the whole shebang – you attracted them both. And so to believe that ‘The Secret’ can work for everyone, and that it does, in fact, apply to everyone on earth, is, to put it mildly, logically inconsistent.
If you can live with that, then that’s just peachy – personally I like a bit of reality and perspective in my life. It makes it so much easier to prepare for the unexpected.
In case you’re still thinking, ‘yeah but, yeah but, yeah but’ – go and read about confirmation bias , selective attention , coincidence , and the law of large numbers. All will be explained, and without the need for a single quark.
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