Below see an insightful excerpt from Douglas Rushkoff's book, Life INC. (2009), which I am reading these days."The Self is the Source
We're trained in our society to give, but to feel uncomfortable taking or receiving. But if you don't take, you are denying another person from giving."
Three of the women smile and two others half-nod, glazed over. But the younger one in the corner still appears unconvinced by the life coach leading the session.
"What's that really mean, Eileen?" Amy asks. "Greed is good?"
"Well, sure," answers Eileen, a middle-aged and middleweight women in a chocolate-brown pantsuit. She doesn't appear to realize that Amy was quoting from the movie Wall Street. "That's not how they put it, but yes. We have to learn to accept the bounty that life offers. It's the key to seeing self as source. Remember, you make the world around you with your thoughts. If you aren't ready to accept, then how can the universe give you anything you want?"
Eileen's holding today's meeting in her apartment, a nondescript garden condominium outside Grand Rapids, Michigan. I found her while researching former Amway sales representatives for what I thought was going to be a chapter in this book on multilevel marketing networks. But Eileen's not interested in talking about her past failures as a Silver Producer level Amway distributor. She's dedicated to sharing her newest passion, free of charge, with the women who responded to her Internet notice for practitioners of The Secret-the latest and greatest "quantum-based" self-improvement system known to humankind, according to its practitioners and promoters-who are often the very same people.
Most simply, The Secret is a self-help DVD and companion book synthesizing the pitches of a few dozen of today's most prominent self-help gurus. Its creator, an Australian named Rhonda Byrne, claims there's a single truth underlying all the spiritual systems and get-rich-quick schemes of her many peers. It's more ancient than the Bible and has been intentionally hidden from human beings for just as long. The great secret? Positive thinking or, in The Secret's parlance, "The Law of Attraction." Like attracts like. Abundance is a state of mind: Think healthy, and you'll be healthy. Or-more to the point- think rich and you'll get rich.
The Secret is spiritually reconstituted for the "me" generation. As self-contained and utterly artificial as Birkdale Village, The Secret masquerades as a time-honored and diverse set of insights. And like the faux New Urbanist shopping mall, the underlying purpose of The Secret is to make money. Most of the spiritual teachers in The Secret are wealth-seminar leaders who display the book's logo on their ads and websites. The Secret has certainly worked wonders for its marketers: as of this writing, more than two million DVDs have been sold, and the book hit number one on the New York Times Best-Seller list of hardcover advice books.
While positive thinking no doubt has its benefits-from the placebo effect to good old self-confidence-The Secret tries to justify itself not only in the language of pop psychology but also in that of modern physics. According to the book, happy thoughts will do more than affect behavior. The Secret claims that interrelatedness of matter and energy-Einstein's E = mc2 [2= square]-allows people to change reality to their liking by changing the way they think about it. Thought is presumably the energy in this schema, and reality is the matter. For most, however, this potential for quantum transmutation is limited to attracting more marriage prospects into their bedrooms, or money into their personal bank accounts.
Eileen puts the law of attraction into practice on pretty much every physical surface of her home. Handwritten signs and Post-its proclaim affirmations such as "THE UNIVERSE ADORES YOU" and "YOUR MAN IS ON HIS WAY." A $10 million check from Eileen's bank account, written to Eileen, is stuck to her refrigerator under a green "S" magnet-most likely the closest one could find to a dollar sign. Over her gas fireplace hangs a collage of images she has clipped from catalogs and magazines representing the things she is in the process of attracting to herself. Female models smile as they drive expensive cars, frolic in the wavers with muscular male models pretending to be surfers, or sit with baby models under trees. The classic cultic goals: wealth, sex, fertility. In what might easily be a coincidence of simply the ethnographic bias of Eileen's favorite magazines, none of the pictures contains any black people, even though Eileen herself is African-American.
"Vision walls really work," Eileen assures her group. "There was once a man who wanted a multimillion-dollar mansion. He made a vision board, and kept it even after he made his million. One day, he was looking at it hanging in this bedroom, and he realized he was living in the exact house he had clipped!"
"Then there was the woman who really wanted to get married," chimes in Sharon, thirty-something unemployed former sales rep (she never told me of what) and recent convert to The Secret. "She started buying wedding magazines and clipping pictures of rings, flowers, dresses. She started acting like she was married already. And not only did she get married, the ring her fiancé proposed to her with was the exact same as the one she'd clipped for her board."
Think it, clip it, get it. In a process that's one step more pathetic than working to get the things they see in advertisements, practitioners of The Secret put the ads up on their walls and then wish really hard for what's in them. They turn the pictures in ads into idols to be worshipped [sic]. And to prove to themselves that they believe in the system enough to get it to really work for them, they must enlist others in The Secret as well. When not enlisting newcomers, they must meet regularly with other believers to keep the buzz of the belief alive. To stay psyched, so The Secret can work its positive magic.
That's the real reason for meetings like Eileen's: to proselytize The Secret-spreading the new word while supporting one another in buying more of the featured teachers' books and courses. It's a win-win for all concerned that mirrors the relationship of a corporation to its chartering monarch. Top-shelf self-help gurus-Men Are from Mars, Women are from Venus author John Gray, Chicken Soup founder Jack Canfield, Conversations with God creator Neale Donald Walsch-get new life pumped into their waning careers, while the new self-help brand gains instant credibility from their participation. As if in full disclosure, they are all willing to teaching the fine arts of logrolling and bootstrapping to anyone who will listen and pay. Secret is as Secret does.
While The Secret isn't itself a multilevel marketing scheme (or MLM), it has become the sales pitch and rationale for many others. Three of The Secret's best-known officially sanctioned self-help gurus, Canfield, Bob Proctor, and Michael Beckwith, teamed up on a Secret-inspired get-rich MLM called the Science of Getting Rich. For $1,995, anyone can join. The only prerequisite to getting rich this way is that you have to really want it enough to get all your friends to want it, too.
"Kids, when they want something, harp on it, focus on it, and obsess over it until they get it," Eileen explains. "A child whines, 'But you promised!' " The women laugh. "Kids have the freedom to want what they want. And that's what the vision board reminds you. To really want means to be able to fully visualize and then through that, to really live."
"What if you don't get what you want?" The quiet one in the corner-the one in her twenties who, at least by outward appearances, would have the least trouble attracting a mate or landing a job-has finally spoken up. "If you don't get what you want, is that because you didn't attract it?"
"Right, Amy," says Eileen, nodding. "At least not yet." Eileen claims to be a graduate of the University of Michigan Business School's "Life Coach" program. No such program exists, but she does have an undergraduate diploma hanging in her bedroom office. If she really had attended a Life Coaching program, this is probably the kind of moment she would have trained for.
"So, if you're a mom in Iraq with a starving baby," Amy goes on, pursuing her line of questioning, "and you just can't get out, does that mean you're not wishing hard enough?"
"We get what we want," Eileen says. "So let's all think good thoughts."
"But what about the Holocaust?" Sooner or let it had to get there.
"I can't really answer that," Eileen says. "But I know there were people in the Holocaust who did want to survive and they lived."
"Just like there are people with cancer who lived because they really wanted to," adds Sharon.
"How? By putting pictures on the wall of people who are healthy?" Amy asks.
"That's part of it." Eileen is fumbling with her papers now, trying to move to her next planned part of the meeting. "They took responsibility for their disease, and visualized a way beyond it."
"And the ones who didn't live? They didn't want to survive badly enough?"
"Look, it's not all those other people you should be worrying about right now. You're here to make your life better. Start with yourself. The rest will follow. We attract what we are. The self is the source."
Amy's concern for others may be quaint, even well intentioned-but in the logic of The Secret, it's just an obstacle to manifesting her true self and attracting the partner, health, and wealth she deserves. Updating the rationale of the American Calvinists, who believed that wealth was an indication of God's approval, The Secret's practitioners equate persona success with having achieved scientific and spiritual harmony with the greater universe. All it takes is being enthusiastic and clear enough to manifest it-to attract all this good stuff to one's self.
The Secret isn't a fringe cult, but a mainstream global phenomenon. Its teachers show up regularly on Oprah's schedule right between Barack Obama and Michael Moore. That's because the philosophy is not an aberration at all, but the culmination of several centuries' dedication to promoting the self over pretty much everyone and everything else. The Secret simply gives people permission to be as selfish as they can tolerate, and to internalize the language and symbols of advertising into one's life as core guiding principles.
The self-absorption and self-interest dominating our values today is not mere happenstance, but the result of a century of public-relations campaigns, advertising, and social engineering waged against collective action, altruism, and even good government. Just as we were disconnected from place and reconnected instead to a map biased toward corporate interests, we have been disconnected from one another and led to behave instead as individuals and though corporatist ideals.
The rise of the self went hand in hand with the rise of the chartered corporation and the central authorities it anchored. Only a world steeped in this false notion of a wholly sovereign individual could have generated the bourgeois merchant class of self-made men threatening the static power of the aristocracy. Likewise, the subsequent elevation of chartered corporations was depended on highly individualized laborers and, eventually, customers who competed with one another for wages and riches. The more disconnected people became from one another, the more easily they could be manipulated. Unions of workers and functioning communities of citizens threaten the power of corporations, while individuals out for their own interests behave more like corporations themselves. The social concerns that make collective human behavior multifaceted and complex get smoothed out as people take actions directed by the much simpler calculus of the market. This makes people entirely more predictable, better targets for advertising, increasingly more isolated from one another, as well as more dependent on central authorities to create both value and meaning.
It's not as if a king conspired with the head of a chartered corporation to concoct the notion of individuality. (It wasn't until the heyday of public relations in the 1920s that anyone consciously tried to promote individual freedom as a cynical means of social control.) But the elevation of individual personhood to a literary and social ideal took place as part of the same wave of rationalism that brought to us chartered corporations, colonialism, and the Industrial Age. This was a new framework for how society could work and grow, funded and promoted by those who were growing rich and powerful by using it. We have to understand at least the very basics of how this notion, individuality, was invented in order to dismantle its inappropriate and automatic application today." (Life INC. (2009) by Douglas Rushkoff, pg. 84-89)
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