Slate’s resident Human Guinea Pig, Emily Yoffe, tops several of her previous columns with her own personal trial of The Secret.
I thought the ad campaigns for the movie were brilliant. They made me want to buy! Kudos. Now that I know what it is… meh, no thanks. Pseudo-scientific hokum.
The health claims bother me a lot. A friend was distraught recently because one of his friends had died. He saw it as completely senseless: his friend had been mentally retarded and believed some health claims provided by someone from her church. These health claims included things like “soap is harmful and unnatural”, “deodorant clogs your pores and leads to poor health”, and “you don’t need drugs, God will intervene on your behalf”. She was morbidly obese, and her refusal to use soap when showering or antibiotics when she developed cellulitis led directly to her demise.
The chief thing that bugs me is that it’s recently been proven (as far as science can be trusted) that a positive attitude has no effect on cancer survival, yet The Secret touts people as surviving cancer purely by the strength of their mind.*
I think that, if we had enough data on those cases, we could know exactly why the cancer went into spontaneous remission. It’s not some magical power of the mind appealing to a Universal Intelligence, but usually something as simple as the cancer starving itself for nutrients due to insufficient blood flow to the site it developed in, or bone marrow chancing upon a non-anergic T-cell combination capable of fighting the tumor.
To me, “The Secret” is nothing more than age-old snake-oil being sold to a modern audience: pray and believe, and you will find success in your endeavors.
I have a better recipe: work your ass off, live within your means, use a budget, and save your money, and you will probably find success. Then again, you might get hit by a bus and die. Good luck!
* Yes, a positive attitude helps in myriad ways. It’s been demonstrated to boost the immune system and of course improves one’s quality of life. But as far as diseases in which the immune system is compromised — like anergic T cells which refuse to attack cancer cells, or AIDS — positive attitudes appear to have no statistically-measurable influence on death rates.
Power of Intention
The battle that’s been going on for a while now, though frequently held on different battlefields, with different words and names, is between the people who insist that prayer/positive thought/the power of directed intent can affect both your internal and external surroundings and the people who insist that it’s all hokie nonsense and that we should rely on more empirically proven methods – like soap, proper diet, and the financial juggernaut that is compound interest – to improve our lives.
As is often the case in such struggles, too many people on both sides fail to look for the middle ground.
I think I can say with 100% certainty that prayer and such things cannot guarantee your safety, nor does it really guarantee ANY external affect.
But just because it can’t *guarantee* anything, that doesn’t mean it should be necessarily written off completely. There have been enough studies done (petting a dog can improve blood pressure, objects that have been ‘mentally imprinted’ when dropped into water can change its PH level, etc…) to suggest that there’s a halfway decent chance there’s *something* going on that we can’t quite fathom yet.
What if we said that such things as prayer and positive thought might actually exert some influence on our surroundings, but the influence is frequently so miniscule that it goes unnoticed when surrounded by the other, more powerful influences like the laws of physics? Maybe sometimes that tiny influence *is* enough to be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Maybe the yogi and Tibetan monks who have literally devoted their entire lifetimes to developing focused, present-centered thought might be able to exert more mental influence than your average nuclear American. And maybe science will eventually be able to identify and even explain such seemingly magical/mystical occurrences given time. But there’s also a thousand other commonplace influences, frequently more reliable, that you can also use to improve your environment.
Does that sound like something that most people on both sides could agree on?
If it has an effect…
If something has a real effect, it will be testable. For instance, if I recall correctly, research shows that for diseases which do not compromise the immune system, a positive attitude does have a measurable effect on the health and longevity of patients in general. It was those patients for which the immune system was compromised by the disease, or where the immune system was “blind” to the disease (like some cancers) that there was zero measurable effect.
What ‘The Secret’ proposes is far more extreme than you propose, though. It is pseudo-scientific snake oil that has been sold to the credulous for centuries. In fact, ‘The Secret’ uses a quote from Winston Churchill which he had used in the context of ridiculing proponents of the same type of “hope for it and it will come to you” pop-psychology in vogue as much fifty years ago as it is today.
I agree that there’s a vast universe that we do not know about, but in this tiny little realm of the “known” — like how to make money, the focus of ‘The Secret’ — the methods are well-known, the processes refined, and wishful thinking will only pay off for a tiny minority of those who engage in such thought experiments.
—
Matthew P. Barnson
“…and I was calling on Jesus.”
Yeah, that whole prayer thing just didn’t work for everybody yesterday.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/02/06/tornado.survivors/index.html?eref=rss_topstories
The corollary…
The corollary of magical thinking — that you were spared because you prayed — is that those who died in the tornado didn’t pray. Which probably isn’t true, but all these times when there’s a disaster, people thank their deity of choice for sparing them.
That’s their right, but I’m reminded again of this quote:
http://barnson.org/node/1391
—
Matthew P. Barnson
Good quote
“Treat every man after his own desserts, and who should escape whipping?” -Hamlet
I agree with pretty much
I agree with pretty much everything you said there. Although I’ve never read The Secret, and am therefore hesitant to pass too much judgment, from everything I’ve heard it sounds like its ideals are way too extreme for it to be a valid contribution to actually furthering the research on consciousness-based environmental control.
I would put one addendum on your first sentence though. There is a slippery slope between saying “we can’t say if this is real because we don’t have the tools to test it *now*” and “we can’t test this fully, therfore it’s not real.” Both phrases allow you to proceed with a certain degree of efficient certainty, but the second phrase can often lead to missed opportunities. I’m pretty sure the latter is not what you were implying, but I wanted to tag this on for any third-party readers out there. 🙂
Personally, I’ve always liked the scientists and philosophers who every so often, just for the fun of it, go all Des Cartes and say “Sure, we’re absolutely certain this time-honored theorem is tested and true, but let’s pretend we’re not and test it again just for the hell of it.” The vast majority of the time the result is “Yup. Still true. Duh.” But every so often such thinking leads you to discover the one control variable that the hundreds of scientists before you somehow missed.
Harumph
Speaking as barnson.org’s resident new-age freak, I must say that “The Secret” is the biggest load of bull-honky I’ve ever seen. It’s the latest in a long line of pseudo-spiritual hooey that appeals to the general public’s desire for instant gratification.
Just think happy thoughts and all your troubles will go away! It’s the spiritual equivalent of SlimFast. Which, you may have noticed, doesn’t work.
If you want good things to happen to you, put in some g-dd-mn effort and make good things happen to you. Thinking happy thoughts is only the first step. We new-age freaks call it “acting in accordance”. You can’t pray every day to win the lottery, but never buy a ticket. You can’t pray for a new job, but never send your resume out.
You are the agent of change in your own life, period.
— Ben