“The Secret” is the latest New Agey scam; there’s an excellent article on this con on Salon:
Worse than “The Secret’s” blame-the-victim idiocy is its baldfaced bullshitting. The titular “secret” of the book is something the authors call the Law of Attraction. They maintain that the universe is governed by the principle that “like attracts like” and that our thoughts are like magnets: Positive thoughts attract positive events and negative thoughts attract negative events. Of course, magnets do exactly the opposite — positively charged magnets attract negatively charged particles — and the rest of “The Secret” has a similar relationship to the truth. Here it is on biblical history: “Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, and Jesus were not only prosperity teachers, but also millionaires themselves, with more affluent lifestyles than many present-day millionaires could conceive of.” And worse than the idiocy and the bullshitting is its anti-intellectualism, because that’s at the root of the other two. Here’s “The Secret” on reading and, um, electricity: “When I discovered ‘The Secret’ I made a decision that I would not watch the news or read newspapers anymore, because it did not make me feel good,” and, “How does it work? Nobody knows. Just like nobody knows how electricity works. I don’t, do you?” And worst of all is the craven consumerist worldview at the heart of “The Secret,” because it’s why the book exists: “[The Secret] is like having the Universe as your catalogue. You flip through it and say, ‘I’d like to have this experience and I’d like to have that product and I’d like to have a person like that.’ It is you placing your order with the Universe. It’s really that easy.” That’s from Dr. Joe Vitale, former Amway executive and contributor to “The Secret,” on Oprah.com.
The main focus of the article, though is on how Oprah Winfrey is destroying her own credibility with the promotion of this nonsense; I never felt she had any credibility before (and heck, she had a negative account with me for advancing the career of that annoying fraud, Dr Phil), so that really doesn’t resonate with me…but the uncompromising dismissal of “The Secret” is worth reading.