The Secret: All your wishes are in the catalogue. Part: 1 Posted by Damp Cardigan on May 17, 2013 · 1 Comment

The political disappearance of the left wing in the western world has given rise to the commercialisation of alternative living. Former gatherings of those seeking the counter culture, like Glastonbury Festival, now resemble vessels for mass marketing and capitalist principles. Finding new ways of conducting yourself through this minefield of profit driven ideology, hypocritically, results in a trip to your nearest book shop chain or to the Internet for an overpriced self-help manual. This bears a striking similarity to that other desperate faithfulness to a certain ancient, over scrutinised self-help text.

The inexplicable global phenomenon in line of for cross-examination here is The Secret. I will attempt to play the part of the prosecution and you the judge and jury (and executioner?).

So what on earth is The Secret?

Synopsis:

The Secret has existed throughout the history of humankind. It has been discovered, coveted, suppressed, hidden, lost, and recovered. It has been hunted down, stolen, and bought for vast sums of money.

Fragments of The Secret have been found in the oral traditions, in literature, in religions and philosophies throughout the centuries.

This is the introduction to the “facts” as the official website would have you believe. I’m pretty sure you’re probably still asking yourself what it is. I’m still not sure.

The Secret is the brainchild of Rhonda Byrne, an Australian writer and television producer, who has made herself a serious amount of money selling her borrowed philosophies to the masses. Enjoying the endorsement of America’s spiritual mother, Oprah Winfrey, will have an extremely positive effect on your bank balance and it’s within this sort of practice we dive straight into the realm of self fulfilling prophecies and their usefulness in convincing the defenseless to part with their cash.

A few years ago I was sat with my good lady and a friend in the front room of another friend’s house who had something that she wanted us to watch. She didn’t give too much away hoping it would have the same impact on us as it did her. She described it as truly life changing and, being open-minded sorts, we settled in for what we were promised would be a visual and enlightening treat. This was my first real introduction to the idea of modern, mass-market philosophy and seems the best place to start. The next hour and a half of my life was spent open mouthed and awestruck at the sheer gravity of what was played out before me. This, as the authors would have you believe, is the desired response but my amazement existed at the opposite end of their intentions.

Try and remember back to when you were a child. If, like me, you grew up glued to the television then you will remember what it was like to see those envy inducing toy commercials that made toys look like the best thing in the world. Unimaginably cool looking kids would parade the products gleefully in front of you involving clever editing and set dressing. You just had to have them. The disappointment came when, on the odd occasion, one of these toys would be purchased and you realised that the clever sound effects, music and dazzling white teeth displayed in the advert are not in the box and it’s just you, the toy and a worn carpet. But when you’re a kid you don’t care as your imagination takes hold and there you are, in that commercial revered by all the other children so jealous of your luck and blinded by your smile. Secretly, you know it isn’t as good as when you see someone else playing with it, but you pretend any way.

I was twenty six when first introduced to The Secret and had all but forgotten those feelings of adolescent confusion with the world of advertising. They all came flooding back that day as The Secret is nothing more than an adult version of this money making strategy with the only difference being that vulnerable children are replaced with vulnerable adults with access to cash.

So for those that have no experience of this phenomenon, and I envy you, I will try and paint a picture of what I saw.

Based loosely on the documentary format The Secret DVD involves clearly scripted interviews with Secret Teachers who claim to hold the answers to ALL of your problems. This is intercut with expensive computer graphics and ambiguous history lessons claiming that The Secret has been passed down through generations, mostly by famous people, and has reached you in an expensive digital format to sort your life out.

A number of exceptional men and women discovered the Secret, and went on to become known as the greatest people who ever lived. Among them: Plato, Leonardo, Galileo, Napoleon, Hugo, Beethoven, Lincoln, Edison, Einstein and Carnegie, to name but a few.

Dining out on the accomplishments of over achievers is seemingly not without its advantages, most notably the fact that none of them are alive to confirm or deny it. Now I’m not saying that there’s no truth in this despite the lack of tangible evidence to support these claims. I can’t prove it just as much as they can’t and historically, heroes have a habit of being a crushing disappointment. (See Clint Eastwood turning out to be a Republican or Brad Pitt appearing in a perfume commercial for further reading).

What’s really for sale here is a theory known as the ‘Law of Attraction’. This is exactly as idiotic as it first sounds and has the most sinister subtext coursing through its evil rhetoric. The secret teachers tell us that this law needs to be learned and applied to all aspects of your life to achieve and gain the material things that will complete our lives.

So what is the “Law of Attraction”?

It is the practice of extreme wishful thinking based around the principle that “like attracts like”. For instance, if one thinks only positively about the outcome of any event then based on this law every outcome will be positive. The same applies for a negative approach. The biggest problem with The Secret is how it suggests you should apply this flawed but good natured law to the issues that life can throw at you. Does it concentrate on anything of importance like poverty, famine or war? No but one of the examples that it does offer is the case of a child who needs a sweet new red bike and it states that if he really wants it then he needs to surround himself with positive energy and wish for it, like all the other eight year olds. Then, it will just appear on his doorstep as if the cosmic forces they claim control our world concern themselves with whether some spoilt kid from middle class suburbia has shiny red transportation. It’s like asking you to perform some extreme housekeeping on your innermost thoughts.

If this were really true then surely there would be no more hungry people in the world. In the spirit of “like for like” let’s looks at a provocative example. I’m sure all the starving families in the world spend all day hoping and wishing for food and by this rationale they should cease to be hungry as the universe would surely provide them with some form of cosmic nourishment. The focus is on the overtly capitalist principles of consuming and profit making. The issue here is it’s only applicable within the realms of western life and places the answers to modern problems on that of a material nature. It’s not so much a ‘Law’ of attraction but a ‘Lure’ of distraction. It doesn’t want you to concentrate on anything REAL as there’s no money in it.

Is it not, almost exclusively, singling out those who suffer at the hands of misfortune and casting them as the directors of their own fate? Of course it is. By convincing the vulnerable of this it puts them in a position to offer the only available medicine for an illness that no one knew they had. And anyone can have it, for a price.

Phil Watson.

Coming soon: Part 2