Has a book ever borne a more ironic title? In recent weeks it’s
become hard to avoid armchair discussions and more formal analyses
of what is surely the greatest success story in the annals of viral
marketing: a positive-thinking juggernaut known as The Secret. The original DVD went platinum late
last year, some 1.7 million copies selling at around $30, sans paid
advertising. In true viral style, the project then infected
publishing: A hastily written derivative grabbed the No. 1 slot on
Amazon and the New York Times’ best-seller list
for advice books, a lofty station it defends to this day. All told,
at least 5 million copies are in circulation, counting the book and
DVD. Unsurprisingly, assorted sequels and spin-offs are in the
works. Due soon is the Secret Workbook, as well as an
anthology of Secret Success Stories. Another film should
be upon us by August. There is talk of a TV series.
But despite The Secret’s high visibility, and the sheer
volume of verbiage expended on reviews and critiques, journalists
largely missed the forest in the tease here. In truth, The
Secret is less important for the outrageousness of what it
says to us than for the outrageousness of what it says
about us. It is quite simply a colossal cultural wind
sock, encapsulating the zeitgeist in a way that few other recent
events or enterprises have.
JUST TO RECAP: In concept, one might call The Secret
self-fulfilling-prophecy-meets-PMA-on-steroids. It’s anchored in
the so-called Law of Attraction, which, in simplified form — and
it never gets much more complex — posits that what we truly
believe in our hearts and minds will come to us. Good or bad. Or as
one LOA fan site puts it, we are “living magnets.” Early in the
viral campaign for her pet project, Rhonda Byrne, its creator and
producer (and, you might say, its Patient Zero), gave an interview
in which she termed The Secret “knowledge that has been
known by the greatest leaders, discoverers and philosophers — the
greatest men and women in history.” Armed with that knowledge,
Byrne added, “There is not anything any human cannot be, do or
have…not a single thing. No limits whatsoever. It doesn’t matter
where anybody is now — it doesn’t matter if they’re sleeping in a
park, if they’re totally broke, it doesn’t matter if they’re not
well, it doesn’t matter if their relationships are a mess.”
To Byrne, no external circumstances matter. It’s all, and only,
about you.
It’s tempting to play such Elysian pitchmanship for laughs, and
also to wonder how the resulting goulash of competing aspirations
could possibly resolve into a free-market society in which there
must be management and labor, rich and less rich, winners and
also-rans (as we’ll see conspicuously in November of next year,
when all but one of the living magnets now trying to attract the
U.S. presidency will fail). Still, one must finally recognize that
no enterprise reaches a Harry Potter-like level of
cultural saturation feeding solely on low-hanging fruit. The
Secret cannot be dismissed as some loopy fringe movement. Like
it or not, this is today’s America. I’m mindful of
cartoonist Walt Kelly’s famous twist on the Commander Perry quote:
We have met the enemy, and they are us.
Secret-mania overspreads a fertile American landscape
wherein any and all expressions of PMA receive nonstop ambient
nourishment. Consider that between them, Larry King and Oprah
Winfrey, those premier takers of the American pulse, have donated
the equivalent of five hour-long infomercials to The
Secret — so far. Winfrey tearfully framed it as an omnibus
solution to life’s challenges, citing her own career as Exhibit A
in establishing the validity of Byrne’s premise.
HOWEVER, AS SOMEONE WHO HAS extensively studied the broad landscape
of self-help, what I find most significant about The
Secret is that it caps off a progression of thought (or
anti-thought) that’s been gaining traction in American
life for a while now. Long after sales figures are forgotten and
the self-help community has moved on to the next fad, and the next
after that, The Secret will be remembered for
mainstreaming the kinds of solipsistic, “life is whatever
you think it is” mindsets that once were identified with
actual mental pathologies: say, schizophrenia or narcissistic
personality disorder. This spirit of
uber-self-determination is irresistible to two polar but
pivotal American generations: young adults weaned on
self-esteem-based education (“You are special! Never give
up your dreams!”) and the roughly 77 million American Baby Boomers
now approaching retirement pretty much en masse and desperate to
unshackle themselves from everything they’ve been, heretofore.
The Secret provides an unambiguous, unconditional
answer to life’s mysteries, selling a cool, existential worldview
throughout: You reap what you sow — you get what you feel you are
owed — period. If you already enjoy prosperity and
acclaim, it’s because you believed in it, “attracted it,” and thus
are cosmically deserving of it. If you suffer with failure and
disrepute, the same applies: You earned it. No excuses, no
exceptions. In the black-or-white land of The Secret, 9-11
victims somehow invited those 757s into their lives. Further, sick
people are sick because they embraced their illnesses in some
karmic way. Indeed, Bob Proctor, one of the two-dozen self-styled
mentors and “metaphysicians” Byrne showcases in The
Secret, puts it like so: “Disease cannot live in a body that’s
in a healthy emotional state.” (One supposes, then, that the
surreally jaunty Proctor will never die.)
If this unapologetic philosophical hard line has attracted the
ire of some social critics, it is also the real secret, and the
perverse genius, behind The Secret’s mass appeal. In your
garden-variety self-help program, the fine print backs away from
the more extravagant promises of the title or jacket copy; there
are any number of conditions, caveats and disclaimers. Not so here.
“Apply it,” says Byrne simply, and your life “will totally
change.”
NOT ONLY IS THIS THE PERFECT message for its time, but also, in
many ways, it is the only message that America-at-large will accept
(as the canny Barbara Ehrenreich observed in a Harper’s
piece about the demonizing of those who refuse to buy into today’s
culture — or cult — of hope). If The Secret is about
anything at all, it’s about the abandonment of reason and the
inconvenient truths, as it were, of the known physical world. To be
sure, in the broad culture, science and logic have fallen out of
fashion; common sense is declasse nowadays. Statistics on
health-care utilization, for example, leave scant doubt that we’re
a people who increasingly flee orthodox medicine for mind-body
regimens whose own advocates not only refuse to cite clinical
proof, but dismiss the very idea of proof. Today, there are more
total patient-visits to alternative practitioners, as a class, than
to standard family doctors. We consult oracles before oncologists,
shamans instead of shrinks.
In an era of lassitude and indolence, marked by the
coming-of-age of a generation who long ago internalized the notion
that they’re entitled to have their needs met, the lure of
what amounts to wishful thinking is not hard to fathom. The
phenomenal success of The Secret validates my longstanding
suspicion that what self-help-minded Americans crave is not so much
actionable advice as a mechanism for putting off action: a
mechanism that gives them permission not to face the tough
realities of how success really happens (i.e., hard work, careful
planning, scary choices, sheer fortuity, et cetera). Even more than
success, they seek a way of postponing the admission of failure,
with its consequent need for a Plan B. If that day of reckoning can
be endlessly deferred by telling ourselves a pretty story about
limitless possibility and the victories still to come, then we can
see the glass as forever half full.
Just don’t try to drink from it, because there’s nothing
there.
