One of the most successful DVD releases in recent years, at least here in Brazil, has been The Secret (2006), a film purporting to show a link between positive thinking and material wealth. (I apologise if this is an over-simplification, but time is money... especially if you think positively about it, apparently.) Using the “Law of Attraction” as a guiding principle, the film claims (without presenting concrete evidence, it must be noted) that some of the most successful figures in human history knew about and used “The Secret” (ie the “Law of Attraction”) in order to fulfill their often momentous ambitions. The film, partly a series of dramatisations, partly interviews with various supposed present day beneficiaries of the phenomenon, reports extraordinary advances in material wealth and career prospects after the featured individuals got wind of the previously classified formula. Well into the second half of 2007, the related book is still at the top of the best-sellers list here in Brazil, and I suspect this success has been repeated worldwide.
I was first introduced to “The Secret” by my acupuncturist, B. Like a pair of low-brow Parisien café philosophers, our monthly, needle-strewn sessions commonly involve a frank exchange of some pretty out-there opinions, B intricately interlacing strand after strand of bold, esoteric thinking, until what we’re left with is a bloody great confusing knot that life seems too short to attempt to unravel. His psychedelic, new age mentalising has become the mind-bending highlight of many a dull month, his uncompromising inner contortionism often pounding me into a bewildered, silent stupor.
One of the factors that turned me into something of a “The Secret Skeptic” was that, of all the fabulously successful interviewees extolling the almost supernatural power of the “Law of Attraction”, as far as I could fathom, none of them were former or acting TEFL teachers. Nobody was filmed saying, “I was a TEFL teacher living in penury in rented accommodation and eating baked beans out of the can when somebody told me “The Secret” and, almost overnight, I was transformed into Britain’s forty-ninth richest person, with self-esteem and everything...” On the contrary, they all appeared to me to be people who already had some kind of Big Life Project bubbling away in the cauldron, and who had simply found a way to cleverly market and sell their wares. One guy had written a book and was in the process of trying to find a publisher, when he'd had the brainwave of trying to get a magazine to serialise it. Lo and behold, he became impossibly rich. This, to me, is less about the power of the “Law of Attraction” and more about the power of “Having A Good Idea”.
For those fans who find “The Secret” inspirational, please don’t think I wish to pooh-pooh it. I genuinely believe that positive thinking is vital, showing marked benefits for health and a reduced tendency to experience damaging negative emotions such as anger, resentment and hatred (difficult in TEFL, but something to aspire to nonetheless. Check out this great video for more on this.) However, I do feel that it can be all too convenient, not to mention rather reckless, to fill peoples’ minds with facile answers to life’s complexities that are, judging by the film’s premise, based on some fairly flabby pseudo-science.
As a footnote, in the immediate aftermath of “The Secret’s” release, B became an apostle of the “Law of Attraction”, buying, watching repeatedly and lending out the DVD with zealous abandon. Not unmoved by his infectious enthusiasm, I also watched the film more than once. Perhaps confident of the riches that were inevitably soon to materialise, B traded his car in for a brand new, more expensive model. Apart from that, a year on, he remains the same struggling, thinking man's acupuncturist, and I persist as a striving, if philosophical, TEFL teacher.
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