Categories: Entertainment

Are you a loser? Can’t remember the last time you accomplished anything you desired? Is your life a pit of desperation and frustration? Then you probably have this book on your bookshelf. I’ve heard about ‘The Secret’ for some time now. The first time I heard about it was on the Sunday news. Naturally the title got me interested, but all the news article said that the book carried that message that positive thinking gets you results. Cool. I’m all for that. An age old message that I’ve known for years, but if someone wants to make a couple bucks selling common sense to Americans, then let them go ahead. God knows they need it. It’s not until I read an online article about ‘The Secret’ that I found out everything about the book.

What the book really says is that you can manipulate reality with your mind, so if you see a fancy car you want, boom, the law of the universe grants it to you. just like that. No investing, no job hunting, nothing but the power of your mind. And as preposterous as that may sound to us rational minded people, millions have been buying in on it. 1.5 million DVDs of the movie have been sold and 1.75 million are in print. It even got endorsed by Oprah - twice. And when that happens, you immediately have a millions of middle aged housewives behind your book. All of this bunkus comes from author Rhonda Byrne, who should be rolling in it right now. Her movie, which she dubbed “the greatest film in history to date,” didn’t do so well in her homeland of Australia.

Enter America, where finding desperate and unhappy people is easier than finding the nearest Starbucks. But what separates this book from countless other self-help books? It’s “Da Vinci Code” design and its title. It promises to reveal some mystical and ancient secret, one that greats like Martin Luther King, Einstein, Beethoven and Newton knew about. But it only panders to middle class material desires, and little on benefiting humanity, as these great men did. But I guess it wouldn’t be such a success if it didn’t push an easy way to get that diamond necklace around your neck or that Lexus in your garage.

Personally, I think this is crap. New Age, pseudospiritual crap. This fodder for the weak-minded only repackages a well-known fact about the power of positive thinking, and this Law of Attraction junk is just something else for people to blame their pathetic little lives on. It’s not bad luck, other people or even God why your life is the way it is. It’s you. You’re the reason you’re life sucks. And until you get off your fat ass and do something about it, it will continue to be so. Well, I’m gonna jump off a building now. The Law of Attraction states that as long as I think “marshmallow filled bounce-a-bout,” I should be ok. Right?