What's Wrong with The Secret
The Secret teaches that victims are always to blame, and that anyone can have anything simply by wishing.
Filed under Fads, Paranormal
| Skeptoid #96 April 15, 2008 Podcast transcript | Listen | Subscribe |
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Prepare to have everything you've ever wanted, simply by thinking happy thoughts about it; and be careful of negative scary thoughts which might cause those things to happen to you to too. Little did you know that, just like in the original Star Trek episode Shore Leave, whatever you think of — either good or bad — will actually happen! This is the premise of Rhonda Byrne's 2006 book and movie, both titled The Secret.
Rhonda Byrne is an Australian television producer and author. Her book and movie propose that many of the most successful people throughout history have known a "secret" — a secret closely guarded in the marketing materials for the book and movie. The "secret" turns out to be nothing more than the old motivational speaker's standby, that positive thinking leads to positive results. But she took the idea a step further. The Secret claims that you can actually cause events to happen by wishing for them hard enough, literally like winning the lottery or recovering from terminal illness. Similarly, a focus on fears or negative ideas will cause those things to appear or happen as well. The Secret calls this the "Law of Attraction". The Secret further makes the completely unfounded claim that many great people knew and relied upon this wisdom, and taught it to others as "secret teachers". "Secret teachers" included Buddha, Aristotle, Plato, Sir Isaac Newton, Martin Luther King Jr., Carl Jung, Henry Ford, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Andrew Carnegie, Joseph Campbell, Alexander Graham Bell, and even Beethoven. This claim is just a made-up lie: Most of these people lived before the "Law of Attraction" was invented, and there's no evidence that any of them ever heard of it.
As of today, a year and a half after its release, The Secret remains #26 of Amazon's list of best selling books, better than any Harry Potter book. It has over 2,000 customer reviews. Half of them are 5 star, and a quarter of them are 1 star. This is the sign of a polarizing book. Most people either love it or find it to be utter nonsense. In the case of The Secret, most people love it. Thanks in large part to promotion by Oprah Winfrey, The Secret sold 2 million DVD's in its first year and 4 million books in its first six months.
Many of the people appearing in the movie version of The Secret are motivational speakers who spout the same old "If you can dream it, you can do it" nonsense that Amway salesmen have been chanting for decades. In essence, part of what Rhonda Byrne has done has been to simply repackage Motivational Speaking 101 inside the wrapper of a century-old philosophical construct, which we'll look at in closer detail in a moment.
As you've probably heard, The Secret has been roundly criticized from all quarters. The most common criticism is of The Secret's assertion that victims are always to blame for whatever happens to them. Whether it's a rape victim, a tsunami victim, or a heart attack victim, The Secret teaches that they brought it upon themselves with their own negative thoughts. This idea is, of course, profoundly offensive in many ways. Doctors attack The Secret for teaching that positive thinking is an adequate substitute for medical care in cases of serious illness: Wish for it hard enough, and your cancer tumors will melt away. Religious leaders criticize The Secret for its ethical claims that victims are always to blame, and for promoting the attitude that anyone can be just like a god by wishing hard enough. Many financial critics and advisors have pointed out the dangers of yet another baseless get-rich-quick scheme. The list of critics of The Secret goes on and on, as tends to happen to any mega-successful franchise.
So the question people ask me is "What do I think of The Secret?" This is really asking what is the best way to use critical thinking to analyze the validity of The Secret's claims. To do this, we first ignore everything that people say about it. We ignore the critics, we ignore the supporters and testimonial writers, and we ignore the Amazon reviews. Let's examine the claims themselves, on their own merits, and let's start by tracking down precisely where this "secret" of the "Law of Attraction" comes from.
The concept now called the "Law of Attraction" was described by James Allen in his 1902 book As a Man Thinketh. He wrote: "The soul attracts that which it secretly harbors, that which it loves, and also that which it fears. It reaches the height of its cherished aspirations. It falls to the level of its unchastened desires — and circumstances are the means by which the soul receives its own." Allen was saying that circumstances — things that happen to us — will make our desires and our fears both come to pass. Allen said that our desires and fears would "attract" those things. If Winston Churchill was indeed a "Secret teacher", we might conclude that he desired gin and feared the fire bombing of London, because both of those things certainly found their way to him. Allen wrote his book during a philosophical period called the New Thought movement, which applied metaphysical concepts to modern life. This movement was akin to what we describe as New Age today: Same ideas, slightly different buzzwords, a century apart.
Other authors followed suit based on James Allen's success, and the term "Law of Attraction" came into being among some of these followup books. A hundred years later, Rhonda Byrne read Wallace Wattles' 1910 New Thought book The Science of Getting Rich, and cleverly used it as an "ancient wisdom" foundation for contemporary motivational self-help ideas. The general public tends to love anything that can be attributed to ancient wisdom, so it's no accident that Rhonda made reference to Buddha, Aristotle, and Plato.
New Thought's "blame the victim" concept is one that's attractive to most people at a deep level. When we see someone else victimized, we take a sort of smug pride in that we did not let that happen to ourselves because we did not think whatever ugly thoughts that person must have. The Secret works! The Secret appeals to that selfish ego that's somewhere inside of all of us. This is ugly and embarrassing, but it's part of why The Secret is psychologically appealing.
Put all of these together, and The Secret is a marketing 1-2-3 punch:
- It's based on ancient wisdom, which is always popular
- It sells the same motivational self-help pitches that are always popular
- It teaches that you're already a winner because you didn't fail like those people who died in New Orleans.
Some claims in The Secret are simply factually wrong, and so fall apart under their own weight when scrutinized. Specifically, The Secret claims that quantum physics supports and explains the "Law of Attraction". At its most superficial, this claim sounds reasonable to the uncritical layperson because attraction sounds like magnetism which is a real scientific thing, and any mention of the term quantum physics sounds scientific enough to be acceptable at face value. Who's qualified to argue against quantum physics? The Secret says that thoughts have energy, and similar energies are attracted to each other. That's their quantum physics.
In fact, scientifically speaking, that statement is completely meaningless at every level, and at no level does it have anything whatsoever to do with real quantum physics. In fact, the closest analog I can find in science is that like charges repel one another, they do not attract. But we're talking about "thought energy" here, so we've already left the realm of real science and are in the world of metaphysics. Since metaphysics is a philosophical invention with no connection to real physics, either quantum or classical, you can pretty much say whatever you want and there is no scientific way to respond to it. Thus, The Secret's claim to have roots in quantum physics is childish and meaningless, yet it succeeds because it appeals to the uncritical layperson's tendency to accept scientific sounding terminology at face value. Check out Rhonda Byrne's background in quantum physics. You'll find that she took the same university courses that your cat did.
Now, it's probably important to point out that there's nothing wrong with positive thinking, and usually nothing terribly helpful about negative thinking. People with positive attitudes tend to be happier and more personable. People with negative attitudes tend to bring other people down or get blown off. In this sense, having a positive attitude is good, but nobody needs to be told that and you certainly don't need a self-help book and movie to make the point. The important line to be aware of is the division between fantasy and reality. People who buy into The Secret are not generally healthier or wealthier than anybody else, in fact they're poorer by the price of a movie ticket or a book. So go forth and be a positive person, but of claims that thought materializes into physical possessions or actions, you have good reason to be skeptical.
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© 2008 Skeptoid Media, Inc. Copyright information
References & Further Reading
Allen, James. As a Man Thinketh. Radford: Wilder Publications, 2007. 14.
Amazon. "The Secret." Amazon.com. Amazon.com, Inc, 11 Apr. 2008. Web. 11 Apr. 2008. <http://web.archive.org/web/20080411053722/http://www.amazon.com/Secret-Rhonda-Byrne/dp/1582701709>
Byrne, Rhonda. The Secret. New York: Atria Books/Beyond Words, 2006. 21,62,156.
Canfield, Jack. "Rhonda Byrne." Time.com:The Time 100. Time Magazine, 3 May 2007. Web. 12 Nov. 2009. <http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/time100/article/0,28804,1595326_1615737_1615871,00.html>
Ford, Kenneth William. The quantum world: quantum physics for everyone. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005.
Wattles, Wallace D. Science of Getting Rich. Holyoke: E. Towne, 1910.
Reference this article:
Dunning, Brian.
"What's Wrong with The Secret." Skeptoid Podcast. Skeptoid Media, Inc.,
15 Apr 2008. Web.
2 Sep 2010. <http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4096>
Discuss!
5 most recent comments | Show all 57 comments
Remember, you should always read with skepticism the comments of anyone too lame to put their real name & city.
Argumentum ad aurum, those with the gold are right. This of course assumes that this is even the argument that people with money are making, which it isn't.
Brandon, Falconer
July 18, 2010 7:52am
I feel terribly divided about The Secret. I know that all of their "Quantum Physics" studies and "proofs" are just rationalizations and wishful thinking.
But what makes me not discard The Secret completely is that some people do achieve success using those methods. Believing and never giving up normally do end up in success and the practices of Affirmations and Visualizations does change one's thoughts and motivations. Psycho-cybernetics of Dr. Maltz teach how to change your thoughts and your personality through similar techniques, and they do work even though they don't "attract" stuff, it only motivates you to trigger the changes.
So I say The Secret does teach good ways of changing your life, but the change will be created by the action the individual takes, after he crafts his mind with affirmations/visualization/believing, not by quantum physics, nor "like attracts like".
Wot, A Bunker
July 31, 2010 5:40am
What exactly does this have to do with Quantum physics?
Just a piece of advice to the secret people, Quantum physics states that a particle is made from a wave packet, which has inherant uncertainty, when it interacts with other particles it randomly chooses a position/momentum, which the other particle compensates for.
So what does this have to do with our subconscious being able to control anything?
We cannot control the randomness, and besides in relation to ourselves the quantum randomness evens out like the flipping of coins, through SM so our neurons still act deterministically.
I don't really get how they are using Quantum mechanics to support the soul...LOL.
Oh and btw joe, you have no idea what you are talking about... okay?
Lets imagine a nerve loop...okay?
What happens is outside influences affect the molecular and enzymatic reactions within the sensor cell, these reactions activate the H gradient along the nerve cell membrane, which drives the production of a neurotransmitter in the neural synapse (part connected to neuron) the neuron then transmits the signal to another nerve which "guides" it to a muscle cell, and causes it to contract. Joe, all your thoughts, despite how simple they are all just a product of your neural structure, no soul involved, buddy.
So please read prior to commenting, and denouncing others rational understanding.
Mike, Cali
August 29, 2010 6:57pm
The Secret is just insulting to the general populace, for the following reasons;
1. Assuming that Quantum Physics is beyond the understanding of most people. Just because most people have not studied it does not mean they can't understand it.
2. It expects us to believe that anybody whois rich wished into being with out working. Ergo anybody who is poor, ill, destitute or disabled has not wished hard enough. It ignores the majority of evidence (people who wish they were rich) and offers a minority as proof.
3. Assume this book was true. Until it was published you had no idea about the secret. Ergo you were not good enough for the secret.
Mean spirited and insulting BS is the worst flavour.
Tom H, Kent, UK
August 30, 2010 1:29am
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Lol, you have no idea what you're talking about or about the central nervous system. Thoughts cause actions, actions cause results. You want to talk about "This claim is just a made-up lie" then why don't you read Think and Grow Rich. Think and Grow Rich was a 25 year study of 500 of the worlds most successful people of the time Thomas Edison, Andrew Carnegie, Alexander Graham Bell, and other "Unverified sources," and they came to the same exact conclusion. If you did your research you would know that the ideas in "The Secret" originated from "Think and Grow Rich" and all the multi-multi-millionaires of the time (Billionaires by today's standards,) agreed with these concepts, and some even admitted that it was a learned (not natural) process. No Offense, but how much does skeptoid.com pull in yearly? I would tend to listen to all these ultra-rich people who promoted these ideas, rather than an unpaid or lowpaid writer for "skeptoid.com." Matter of fact, maybe you should try applying some of these ideas. I know for a fact they've worked for me.
Joe, New York
July 17, 2010 11:38pm