'The Stars Down to Earth' and 'The Secret'

'The Secret' is the latest mega cash cow to benefit from Oprah Winfrey's Midas Touch. The premise is woven out of pure Oprah feel-goodery. In a nutshell, says its creator Rhonda Byrne, The Secret holds that the universe is governed by the "Law of Attraction": "Like attracts like, and when you think and feel what you want to attract on the inside, the law will use people, circumstances and events to magnetize what you want to you, and magnetize you to it," Byrne told the Associated Press.

In practice the idea amounts to this: If you have negative thoughts, then negative things will happen to you. Conversely, if you have positive thoughts, positive things will happen to you. "Like attracts like," you see.

As the level of abstraction decreases, The Secret's promises get more grandiose: Let's say you want a particular car or lover. By focusing your thoughts on the object of your desire, The Secret says that the Law of Attraction -- which really isn't all that different from the Law of Gravity -- will actually work to bring the car or lover into your possession.

Likewise, banishing thoughts of undesirable things will keep those things out of your life. For example, "if you see people who are overweight, do not observe them, but immediately switch your mind to the picture of you in your perfect body and feel it," Byrne advises. The Secret even comes with a handy little mantra: Ask, Believe, Receive.

This peculiarly American brand of thinking has a long history. And to put it charitably, its claims aren't exactly airtight. This Saturday Night Live skit lays out the more obvious objections to The Secret, and amusingly so:



What a lot of the criticism of The Secret misses -- and which the SNL skit nails, in my opinion -- is the nature of the collective sentiment that's principally being exploited. My suspicion is that The Secret is not primarily tapping into Americans' unswerving desire to to get something for nothing, or the "can do!" spirit supposedly embedded in our national consciousness. Rather, The Secret capitalizes on a deep sense of powerlessness gnawing at the American middle class psyche.

The Stars Down to Earth, Theodor Adorno's brief study of the astrology columns that appeared in the Los Angeles Times in 1952, provides a useful framework for thinking about The Secret. Adorno noticed, for example, that the astrology columns seemed to be

teaching readers not to be afraid of being weak. They are reassured that all their problems will solve themselves even if they feel that they themselves are unable to solve them. They are made to understand -- and in a way rightly -- that the very same powers by which they are threatened, the anonymous totality of the social process, are also those which will somehow take care of them. Thus they are trained to ... concede their own impotence and thus be allowed as a compensation to go on living without too much worrying. This promise, of course, is contingent upon their being "good boys" (or girls) who behave according to given standards...

In a superficial way, The Secret's grandiose promises don't appear to be promoting a sense of impotence at all. On the contrary, isn't the whole point supposed to be that adherents can have whatever they want if they desire it enough?

But keep in mind The Secret's little mantra: Ask, Believe, Receive. The implication is that good things come from a higher force that needs to be impressed by the adherent's faith that ultimately he will receive everything he really desires. The mantra is not something like "believe and take" or "confidence breeds success." The Secret's adherent becomes a recipient of the universe's bounty as a reward for his psychological supplication.

In fact, if mere belief is the key to getting what you want, wouldn't taking extreme or unconventional action to seize the object of one's desire be evidence of a lack of belief? If belief alone is sufficient, then action is redundant at best. Remember: The Law of Attraction -- not the adherent -- is the real actor in the world.

Nor is the Law of Attraction an entirely benevolent master: Its punishments can be just as extravagant as its rewards. "Negative" thinking magnetizes bad things to you -- sometimes really bad things. The Secret makes Bobby McFerrin's sanguine exhortation "don't worry, be happy" sound more like a baleful injunction.

As many have already pointed out, The Secret justifies the privileges of its middle class adherents and reassures them that inequality is really just part of the natural order of things. Ideologically speaking, however, this isn't much different from the standard belief that economic success is simply a function of hard work, responsible decision-making and a little business acumen.

What makes The Secret more than just a new agey regurgitation of the standard justifications for inequality is its role as a pacifier. It acknowledges that free-wheeling capitalism generates more than a delightfully chaotic consumer wonderland bursting with new choices and experiences -- there's an order behind it too; a good order. Adorno argued that popular astrology had the same function:

Astrology cannot be simply interpreted as an expression of dependence but must be also considered as an ideology of dependence, as an attempt to strengthen and somehow justify painful conditions which seem to be more tolerable if an affirmative attitude is taken towards them. Anyhow, the world appears to most people today more as a "system" than ever before, covered by an all-comprising net of organization with no loopholes where the individual could "hide" in face of the ever-present demands and tests of a society ruled by a hierarchical business set-up and coming pretty close to what we called "verwaltete Welt," a world caught by administration.

Whereas the notion that capitalism is synonymous with meritocracy is fragile (collapsing when reality gets in the way, as when middle class folks with health insurance get sick and fall into bankruptcy), the unfalsifiable belief The Secret promotes is far more resilient: That it's all just the result of an anonymous (super)natural force that bestows wealth upon the true believers and punishes unconfident wafflers. It makes sense, then, that at a time when American middle class economic stability crumbles, something like The Secret appears -- to restore hope and remind the middle class that they can't stop believing.