Thursday, April 12, 2007

Limitless possibilities

At The American Spectator, "The Secret of The Secret's success," on the remarkable sales of first the DVD and now, the book. From the article:
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. ....

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. ....

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. ....
Source: The American Spectator: The Secret of The Secret's Success

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