Psst, do you want to hear the Secret?

Last Sunday I listened to a documentary on the CBC Radio One news and public affairs program Sunday Morning about the self-help movement known as The Secret. It was a re-broadcast of that segment. I had heard some of it the first time it was aired, several months ago, but had forgotten about it. It seems to be yet another in a long list of how-to-be-a-success movements that appear periodically. I have no idea if these kinds of movements are a worldwide phenomenon or not, but North Americans sure seem to respond to them. With this particular strategy, if you follow the prescribed formula, you are guaranteed to become rich because they have discovered a scientifically proven method of achieving wealth.

No, really, that’s what they say.

It started with a book, of course, but I can’t remember who wrote it and don’t much care. Predictably, there are follow-up books, web sites, self-declared gurus, retreats, tapes, CD’s, the usual fetish list of goodies to spend money on. But hey, even though it costs money, it’s really an investment because when you’re done, you will end being in the 1% of people who earn 90% of the world’s income (or some such number that was quoted on the air that I probably wrote down wrong, but the details don’t really matter). The beauty of these schemes is that if you don’t become rich, as per the schedule, then it’s because you didn’t really believe enough or weren’t trying hard enough, so you have to keep spending money on more tapes and more retreats and more gurus in the hopes that the magic will eventually stick.

The secret is no secret, actually. The basic beliefs are as follows, as far as I can determine, but I have to admit that I have a hard time listening to this stuff too carefully so I may not have the details exactly right. The science behind the secret is that the state of your mind affects the universal cosmic energy around you, and universal cosmic energy is a powerful force to harness, as we all know. If electrical utility companies could plug into that cosmic power bar, we’d be laughing. So, for example, if you truly believe that you’re going to be rich, but you have to really and truly believe it or the magic doesn’t work; if you truly believe it, then your mind’s positive energy will affect the universal cosmic energy field around you in such a way that the field will produce wealth for you, because that wealth is what you wanted.

So, what you want is what you get. It’s a scientifically proven fact, they say.

There are downsides too, unfortunately. If your mind contains negative thoughts, then those too will be transmitted to the universal cosmic energy field in such a way that it will give you back bad stuff. This works in all aspects of life, not just monetary gain or loss. Negative thoughts may cause the universal cosmic field to give you cancer, or hemorrhoids, or the world’s worst in-laws. There is no end to the damage that you can wreak on yourself. It’s all up to you. If you’re poor, it’s because you didn’t want to NOT be poor badly enough. If you’re hit by a tsunami, your fault. Lightning strikes you in the head, what were you thinking?

They interviewed one guy (sorry, can’t remember the name) who went so far as to say that rape victims may set themselves up as victims by being fearful of rape. Fear, needless to say, is negative. If they were more positive about rape, then the universal cosmic energy field would thwart the mouth-breather away from them and onto some other poor woman whose mind was more negative. But, and this is the really depressing thing, the distortion in the universal cosmic energy field may not even be caused by the rape victim herself. It turns out that if the people around her, her parents, friends, etc., are themselves fearful of rape, thus negative, they may in fact alter that cosmic field in such a way as to attract the rapist to that victim. You can see how important it is to surround yourself with positive thinkers. But the interviewee went on to say that being raped might not even necessarily be a bad thing. Some rape victims go on to become exceptional rape counselors, something that they may not have discovered otherwise. That’s when I turned the radio off.

As I have said before on these pages, I don’t believe that anything happens entirely by accident. Someone always benefits from the evolution of a system, and systems evolve in ways that always benefit someone. It’s never entirely random. We live in an age of culture-wide ignorance of basic science and philosophy. We’ve been trained to be sheep. Politicians, for example, are chosen for those qualities that make them appear television-friendly even though those qualities have little or no bearing on the skills they need to do the job we elect them for. Why are we oblivious to this obvious fact? We are losing the basic human capacity to distinguish between reality and bullshit. And there’s big profit in bullshit, because you don’t ever have to actually make or deliver anything for the money you charge. Snake oil scams are nearly as good as casinos, that way. The profitable reciprocity between mass ignorance and the ability to sell people crap, that’s the Secret.

I believe that the people who hunt for Big Foot in the Rocky Mountain foothills have more credibility than the wackos who believe in Secrets.