The Secret's Out: A Review of THE SECRET by Rhonda Byrne

I just can't pile up enough superlatives about the new book The Secret!  Have you read it yet?  Have you seen the movie?  Have you heard Oprah fawning about it?  When I checked Amazon today, it held the #2 spot, just trailing the boy wizard.  Millions of people are reading this book, so I just had to check it out.

Here are my superlatives. 

The Secret: Most Egregious and Self-Centered Pap of the 21st Century Thus Far?

The Secret: Dumbest Pseudo-Science Since Phrenology?

or how about:

The Secret: Most Pernicious and Socially Dangerous Book Since Mein Kampf?

I mean that last one in all seriousness. 

For those of you who have not succumbed to cultural buzz and read the book (and you might want to, if only because it's even more deliciously awful than the snarkiest of reviews would lead you to believe), the basic premise is this: your thoughts are a magnet. When you are thinking thoughts of health and wealth, you will find yourself rolling in money and enjoying a perfect body.  You can use this "natural law" -- a law that Byrne says is as reliable and impersonal as the law of gravity -- to attract all good things to yourself: success, loving relationships, pools of money, and whatever else you desire.  The book includes (in fact, is comprised mostly of) testimonials from bigwigs who say the strategy has worked for them.  Jack Canfield, of Chicken Soup for the Soul fame, brags of having a $4.5 million house and a "wife to die for."  And so on.  The book promises the universe to those who will only be brave enough to put its "secret" into action.

If it only stopped there, my main criticism would merely be: what's so secret about that?  In graduate school, studying the New Thought movement, I learned that this power-of-positive-thinking shtick is as old as the hills.  (Excuse me, mountains.  Now go move them with your thoughts.) Russell Conwell told thousands of audiences in the late 19th century that everything they desired, including "acres of diamonds," could be found within.  They had only to start tapping into their own power.  Many other teachers coalesced around similar ideas, often claiming that their teachings were based in science and were demonstrable and replicable, like any bona fide scientific experiment.

If The Secret stopped there, we could all just ignore it and put Rhonda Byrne's creation down to a reincarnation of Phineas Quimby, this time with stylish hair and an Australian accent.  But she doesn't stop there, and neither should we.

The logical reverse of extreme positive thinking -- which asserts your responsibility for every good thing that happens in your life -- is that every nasty thing that ever happens to you is, correspondingly, entirely your fault.  Byrne is explicitly clear that you brought misfortune on yourself with your negative thoughts.  You summoned that colon cancer to yourself more surely than Molly Weasley's accio charm.  You brought more debt on yourself by thinking only negative, anxious thoughts about the debt you already had.  You conjured your loser boyfriend, your boring job, your obnoxious neighbor.  

In a startling claim, she asserts that if you're fat, it has nothing to do with the food you eat and everything to do with the "fat" thoughts you think all the time.  You must avoid those thoughts!  To do so, be sure -- Oprah, are you listening to this? -- be sure never to even look at a fat person. "If you see people who are overweight," says the model-svelte Byrne, "do not observe them, but immediately switch your mind to the picture of you in your perfect body and feel it."  In other words, if you look at a fat person, you will catch Fatkemia!  It is highly contagious!

By this logic, I should have ignored the guy in a wheelchair I saw in the airport last night, instead of sharing a smile and some small talk.  I should have made him feel invisible!  What was I thinking?  Now I will become paralyzed too.  Damn.  And I wasn't even in the war.

Speaking of wars, famines, natural disasters . . . if you are a victim of any of those things, that is also entirely your fault.  You summoned the famine to yourself because you were afraid of starving, see?  And 9/11 victims  must have been so worried about terrorism that they became vulnerable to terrorist attack.  Byrne says flat out that people who perish in large-scale tragedies had it coming because they were participating in negative thinking on a massive human scale.  So Jews in the 1930s were targeted not because of other people's racism, but because of their own pessimism and oy-my-aching-pogrom mentality.  Consider, for example, these quotes from Holocaust victim Anne Frank:

• "Everyone has inside of him a piece of good news. The good news is that you don't know how great you can be! How much you can love! What you can accomplish! And what your potential is!"
•  
• "I keep my ideals, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart."

 

Or this nail in the coffin:

• "I don't think of all the misery but of the beauty that still remains."

You can see how Anne was sooooooo asking for it.  Such powerfully negative thoughts will always lead one directly to the concentration camp; do not pass go.

So those are my "negative thoughts" on this offensive, pernicious, egregious book.  Here's hoping that I am not therefore summoning other offensive, pernicious, egregious books to my doorstep by calling a spade a spade. 

And I haven't even tackled the underlying premise that the book is all about me me me.  I don't know that I've ever read such a selfish manifesto.  Byrne elevates the reader to divinity:

"You are God in a physical body. You are Spirit in the flesh. You are Eternal Life expressing itself as You. You are a cosmic being. You are all power. You are all wisdom. You are all intelligence. You are perfection. You are magnificence. You are the creator, and you are creating the creation of You on this planet."

Well, I'm voting with all my cosmic wisdom, intelligence and power to say: THIS BOOK BLOWS.  It would be laughable but for the millions lining up to pay good money for this subtly menacing pabulum. 

Comments

[Carrie K.]

Thanks for the review - I saw the book on the shelf at B&N and wondered what it was. Now I know.

[Cameron Conant]

Jana,

What a delightful review. People don't remember what happened two years ago, let alone anything before that, so it's so nice to read something that puts movements and ideas into some historical context. I also loved the Anne Frank example---she wasn't exactly Debbie Downer, was she? Yet somehow those Nazis didn't just disappear. Clearly there is some benefit to positive thinking---studies show people perform better on tests after thinking positive thoughts---but minor claims don't make a non-fiction bestseller. No, we need something with sizzle, something that's going to deliver more than a few percentage points on a test. Well, I suppose this author's done just that.

Cameron

[Lori Smith]

Thanks for the great review, Jana. I'm so glad you read this so I don't have to! I do think these thoughts have crept into the church and the culture at large more than most of us realize.

[Jeffrey Needle]

Well, I guess I don't need to read this book . Thanks, Jana, for the generally good review. But shall I be the only one to point out that the phrase "comprised mostly of" is grammatically wrong? Should be "composed mostly of." (Ducking...)

[Deborah]

During the Larry King segment on this book, King asked his guest if Jessica Lunsford (the young girl who was raped and killed) had attracted this to herself. The response: yes ("at some level"). I watched this while in the midst of teaching a unit on Elie Wiesel's *Night,* which grapples with the complicated questions of evil, god, dignity, choices, and destiny in much harsher (and braver) terms.

From his preface:

"There are those who tell me that I survived in order to write this text. I am not convinced. I don’t know how I survived; I was weak, rather shy; I did nothing to save myself. A miracle? Certainly not. If heaven could or would perform a miracle for me, why not for others more deserving than myself? It was nothing more than chance. However, having survived, I needed to give some meaning to my survival. Was it to protect that meaning that I set to paper an experience in which nothing made any sense?

In retrospect I must confess that I do not know, or no longer know, what I wanted to achieve with my words. I only know that without this testimony, my life as a writer—or my life, period—would not have become what it is: that of a witness who believes he has a moral obligation to try to prevent the enemy from enjoying one last victory by allowing his crimes to be erased from human memory."

[Johnna Cornett]

Jana, what a great review--you have really clarified this issue!

[Jana]

Wow, that Wiesel quote really puts it all in perspective, doesn't it? Thanks for posting that. Ugh, I had not known she said that about a rape victim. That certainly puts a new spin on the old misogynist chestnut that rape victims are asking for it!

Phil showed me last night that on a recent episode of Saturday Night Live, they did a spoof of the Oprah segment in which Rhonda Byrne appeared. Amy Pohler totally nailed the part, Aussie accent and all. The funniest part was where they had a "live from Darfur" guest "via satellite" and then blamed all of Darfur's problems on his negative thoughts.

And Jeff, thanks for letting me know about the composed/comprised thing. The sad thing is that I have made that same mistake before and been corrected before. But did I learn? NO! Must be all my negativity. :-)

[NeedlessThinker]

Wow. I knew this book sounded like trash when my step-mom started blathering about it a few months ago and I smiled and nodded my head, but *wow*. That is... wow, that is AWFUL.

It must me all my fault that my car engine malfunctioned last week and SET THE CAR ON FIRE leaving me without transportation and more finanacially desitute than I was before. Must be all those hours I spent playing world of warcraft and thinking of fireballs. Transferred to my car and all. Damn, all my fault.

[Calista McKnight]

Hi Jana,

I couldn't agree more with you about The Secret. Your quotes of Anne Frank really point out the lunacy of The Secret's philosophy and the preposterous claim that the Jews brought about the Holocaust through their own collective thinking.

I actually use the following Russell Conwell quote in my signature on my blog to point out that even Conwell himself believed that nothing is ever achieved without taking action:

"If drudgery is not found somewhere in a book or course, it isn't worth reading. Of all great works nine tenths must be drudgery."

Also, last week 3 persuasion experts as well as Pastor Bob Beverly (who knew Norman Vincent Peale personally) did a 2 hour free teleseminar on the lies and distortions found in The Secret.

One of the persuasion experts actually referred to The Secret as THE philosophy of Mein Kampf due to its exclusionary nature (i.e., ignore people and things which are not consistent with your views and beliefs).

I highly recommend the free recording to you and your readers. It's available at the following location: http://www.thetruthisthesecret.com/

I hope you don't mind, but I've also linked to your review of The Secret on my own website. I'm keeping a list of alternative views since so much of what's out there is pro-Secret. Your reference to Anne Frank is spot on.

[Jean Visser]

I am in total agreement with your final evaluation: "THIS BOOK BLOWS." I read it only because I have been bombarded with enthusiastic comments from friends who are true believers of The Secret (and Oprah) and I wanted to be able to converse with them intelligently about this. My goodness, what a horribly selfish concept for living. What happens if we are all ordering the same thing from the "catalog of the Universe" (even though someone is quoted in the book as saying we won't)? I guess the one with the most perfect thought wins the bazillion dollar lottery that everyone has bought a ticket for. Oh--I did learn something in this book that I never, ever knew: Jesus was a prosperity teacher and a millionaire "with a more afffluent lifestyle than many present-day millionaires could conceive of." How did I ever miss that?

Your review is wonderfully written! I must read more of your stuff!

[Diane]

Excellent review. The book's only been in my peripheral vision at bookstores (cool cover....) but I hadn't picked it up. I'd started reading Jack Canfield's The Success Principles awhile back and was put off at the very beginning by the "Surround yourself with successful people." Sounds like this goes even further. Ah, the prosperity gospel.... I'm looking forward to exploring more of your reviews.

[Dapoppins]

New Age Faith Revisited?
Karma Remade?
Humanism to the "enth" degree?
Thanks for the fantastic review. I saw the part of the Oprah thing and knew this was more of the ALL ME not GOD dogma so loved by so many. But you put it in such an intelligent frame...!

[Antique]

Hi. It is pleasant here very much to me. I shall advise to the friends. I am sorry for my English. I only learn this language and me while difficultly to communicate.
Thanks to you.

[Rafael Nadal]

This is great column. Thank you for writing it.

[law of attraction]

I’m so glad that I have found your post. I have been unsure of this topic for some time and you have enabled me to understand it a whole lot better. I really appreciate it. I was reading a post a while ago that helped me in the same way that yours has.

[law of attraction social network]

I do not normally leave any comments on posts that I read, but I wanted to tell you that you wrote very nicely.

Well Done and Best Of Luck!

[Joan Soos]

A friend of mine recommended this book/DVD to help family member deal with depression. (Thought it would be good - the power of positive thinking). I agree with your review. We were only able to sit thru half of it. My kid's comment..."tell your friend we only saw half of the DVD, because everyone on it was a mental case."

[E.G. Lindberg]

Reading "Flunking Sainthood" sent me searching in late 2011 for referenced your column on "The Secret" Thank you! Yes, me, me, me. Just like "The Celestine Prophecy"; he left his wife, his job, etc, and spun out. He didn't have to help others, if they were too dumb to figure it out it wasn't his problem. Big on positive thought, not big on compassion.