This book has had a cult following amongst the creduloids for years now including a passel of my ex-wife’s dipshit friends. Luckily for the ex, enough of me had rubbed off after fifteen years that she can see through the nonsense. She has called me up to joke with me about The Secret more than once.
Like most self-help books, there is a grain of truth to it. If a collage on your wall will help you with your focus and work ethic, then you will have a greater chance to achieve the goal. Unfortunately, focus and work ethic seems to be innate and most of the folks who buy that book won’t even finish reading the fucking thing before the next shiny object catches their attention. It’s The Celestine Prophesy for a new generation.
:dubious: Color me unconvinced. I’ve always liked Oprah, because I believe her to be sincere, if nothing else–and I’ve always despised Dr. Phil, for leading people to believe he represents actual psychology. Oprah, despite the many times I have watched her show, has never actually made a concrete difference in my life. If Oprah and Dr. Phil were changing lives at such a breathtaking rate equivalent to the magnitude of their popularity, don’t you think we’d have more happy people running around? I don’t see much evidence that the amount of unhappy people in the world is declining by any means.
Regardless, this “energy waves” thing is hella bullshit. Certainly there are people out there who want help… but at the price of their dignity? I’m all for making the world a better place, but NOT at the expense of common sense.
[hijack]I recommend a ‘Books I Hate’ window. Mine did remarkably well: Kevin Trudeau, Silvia Browne, Dr. Laura, James Frey, Doreen Virtue, The Course in Miracles folk, French/Italian/Whatever Women Don’t Get Fat, the LeHayes, Deepak Chopra, that smarmy house flipper guy, Joel Osteen, Jonathan Franzen, the Rich Dad series. They sell like crazy and you’ll never run out of titles. Good times. [/hijack]
I adore that term, and will use it copiously (unfortunately there are plenty of opportunities).
I doubt anyone would be lambasting these people if they had merely turned out a book and DVD advocating valid but non-revolutionary bits of wisdom on how to live a good life. Heck, I myself am starting to study Zen Buddhism, and many of the concepts overlap. So I’m not dissing the idea of telling people how to better achieve what they want, be happy, and have coherent goals.
What is drawing the vitriol is the completely unfounded package wrapped around that stuff - the idea that thinking good thoughts and whatnot works because of some weird pseudoscientific forces such as vibration and laws of attraction. This is not only complete, pulled-out-of-someone’s-ass bullshit, but as don’t ask points out, it actually puts blame on people who experience tragedy, from losing a loved one to getting AIDS to being killed by a tsunami. So, in addition to encouraging credulity and unscientific thinking, this claptrap also makes people feel guilty for tragedies that are utterly beyond their control, because of the conceit that everything is actually within one’s control, if one vibrates “properly.”
Oprah has done a lot of good; principally she got people reading books again. I don’t think it’s fair to slang her personally.
As for ‘the Secret’, the secret is that this is a very old theory which has been rehashed time and again by people looking to make their own selves wealthy. Remember 'The Power of Positive Thinking ’ and ‘Think and Grow Rich’?
She was all agog about an earlier, but recent, proponent of this theory, too, whose name escapes me now. If you check through Amazon, you’ll find a few dozen authors milking this Kool-aid cow.
Absolutely. And the author of the book knows what she’s talking about. There was a blurb in People magazine about her; she used The Secret to cure her vision. She was tired of wearing glasses, so she just started thinking about fixing her eyes and three days later, voila! Vision cured, and she’s never needed glasses since!
I wouldn’t fuck Oprah with your dick to save my mother’s life (a scenario that is, fortunately, extremely unlikely to present itself) but I can sure get on board with the sentiment.
I’d be sick of her anyway—although I never watch the show (no, really), I’m constantly treated to the sight of her big mug, with the giant poodle hair and spray-on face, gazing down on me from the monitors in the gym—but her credulous support for this kind of woo-woo shit just increases the burn.
There is something to positive thinking. Nothing cosmic or even life changing, unless you’re an incredibly negative thinker.
Negative thinking can cause stress. And stress can cause all kinds of health problems. We can’t always get rid of the things that cause us stress, but we can change the way we react to those things. By doing this, I’ve relieved myself of chronic back pain and I only have a fraction of the migraines, I once had.
How do you reach that conclusion? Are you saying you don’t believe that her vision was cured? Or that it was ever bad to begin with? Or are you saying there’s a different explanation for the change? Or what?
Sometimes, I’m sorely tempted to go over to the dark side and peddle some form of snake oil. Especially when buyers of such actively resist education about it.
BTW, one of the features in this month’s “O” magazine is, I shit you not, “Will the Real You Please Stand Up: How to Know What You Want, Think, Love” (emphasis added). If this is indicative of her audience, it’s not surprising they buy The Secret, too.
Sadly, that headline kind of reminds me of my mom. You’d think she’s a critical thinker, since she rejected Catholicism and became an atheist (as am I). Then a couple years ago, she said she’d been talking to a coworker about the historicity of Jesus, and she said to me, “What do we believe about that?” like I’m the atheist pope or something. :smack:
I’ll just chime in long enough to state that I find it amazing how Oprah can spend a whole episode carving a new asshole in dipshit James Frey (of “Million Little Pieces” infamy), but then goes on to tout this!
Not that Frey didn’t deserve to get blackballed for his piece of shite, but it seems especially two-faced to me that Oprah can act so self-righteous about being ‘conned’ by Frey, and then give brazen cons like John Edwards & the promoters of “the Secret” a platform.
Randi wrote/said somewhere that he was on her show once years ago. IIRC, the producer he worked with led him to believe he’d be on solo. However, they did spring some psychic on him. If he had known that and who it was, he could have been prepared. So it was a less than optimal experience for him.
The concept of self-efficacy is both valid and important, and surely people do far better in life when their sense of self-efficacy is well-developed. However, translating this idea into a vague misty theory that confabulates metaphysics with psychology does people a disservice.
She only tore into Frey after she realized the public wanted her to do it. She defended him at first. I’m not an Oprah fan, but I thought that was a surprising and egocentric mistake on her part.
I don’t need to peddle snake oil. I’m going to write PunditLisa’s Guaranteed Weight Loss Program. For 4 payments of only $24.99, you will get a nylon rope, 2 plastic handles and a book. The book will instruct the reader to attach the handles to the rope and then to jump it for one hour a day. And then it’s going to say, “Eat whatever you used to eat, but cut off a third of it and throw it in the trash.”
OK, so the concept of actual vibrations leaving your body sounds like complete horseshit and probably is, but I do believe that how you think influences how you act in a lot of unconscious ways (what do you think of Freud?) that subsequently affect other things, particularly the way other people act toward you. I just had a conversation last night about how your opinion of yourself affects your ability to get dates–even if it doesn’t happen on a conscious level, people find you more attractive when you exude confidence, and leechers are drawn to you if you seem unsure of yourself. Of course that doesn’t mean that it’s your fault if someone uses you or does something awful to you because you put out “the wrong vibrations”, but it does mean that your outlook on life and the way you think about yourself can indirectly affect your ability to achieve your goals. Not having read the book or done much research on the people extolling the system’s virtues, I can’t say for certain how far removed it is from that, but how many of you find what I said above unreasonable?
If she really said that, then you’ve convinced me that she’s full of shit; but OTOH, this is a nation and a world where people justify all sorts of violence and mayhem by appealing to the notion of an invisible man in the clouds, so if someone can do something positive with their lives by hanging a vision board on their wall instead, more power to 'em.
I adore that term, and will use it copiously (unfortunately there are plenty of opportunities).