Excerpt from a letter to Mom (Friday, March 2, 2007)
Once again, the lemmings are out in full force.
Every year, it seems, a “new”, gotta-have-it self-help book is foisted upon the limitlessly gullible public. The hype for the latest entry is blitheringly over the top. Today Simon & Schuster announced that it had placed the biggest reorder in its history: 2,000,000 more copies of The Secret, by Rhonda Byrne, bringing the total number in print to an astounding 3,750,000. The newly rich author offers up the usual, endlessly recycled advice about losing weight and getting rich. She spices it up with some new terminology and a gimmicky marketing plan that brings to mind The DaVinci Code. But the title is the real grabber: THE Secret. Not just any secret. Like many of the pop-psychology gurus before her, Byrne claims to have the final word on the subject. It’s as though readers of self-help books don’t remember what they read.
Less than a month ago, there were no copies of the book in LINKcat, the online catalog shared by Middleton and 40 other public libraries. Today I noted that there are now 17 copies with 375 holds placed on them. Both numbers will increase significantly. By the time the hype for The Secret reaches its peak, LINK libraries will have purchased at least 100 copies of the book, and the holds list will be approaching 1,000, which is usually territory reserved for John Grisham. Consequently, a lot of people will need to wait to learn what all the fuss is about. The impatient ones will buy their own copy, only to donate it to the library a few months later, once the book starts to collect dust.
The Secret’s marketing campaign borrows heavily from The DaVinci Code,
Oprah Winfrey can take credit for the frenzied demand. On February 8th I would guess, based on the number of holds placed on the book that day, she devoted the first of two full shows to The Secret. As a result, her many devoted fans rushed to their bookstores and libraries for a copy.
In the current issue, Newsweek weighs in heavily on this latest publishing phenomenon with a 6-page article. And it isn’t even the cover story. The reporter takes a decidedly wry view of the proceedings. He opens by noting that women who want to lose weight can chose from two recently announced options. The first bit of advice comes from the American Heart Association: eat more vegetables and exercise for one hour a day. The other is from Rhonda Byrne: don’t look at fat people. It part of what she calls the “law of attraction”, i.e., thoughts, good or bad, attract more of what they’re about. In other words, you don’t want to have thoughts about fat people – or anyone else who doesn’t fit an ideal picture of yourself.
This is how she phrases it in her book. If you see people who are overweight, do not observe them, but immediately switch your mind to the picture of you in your perfect body and feel it.
Taking this advice to its self-indulgent extreme, I assume that Byrne would counsel people who want to be rich to avoid looking at poor people. People who want to be become more beautiful would need to avoid everyone who isn’t absolutely ravishing.
What would Jesus do, as the question is so often asked nowadays?
Weep?
At a minimum, I think even he would roll his eyes in disbelief.
The reporter supplies a revealing quote from Sara Nelson, the editor of Publishers Weekly magazine. “Nobody ever went broke overestimating the desperate unhappiness of the American public.”
A 90-minute DVD accompanies the book. One dramatization shows a woman admiring a necklace in a jewelry store display window. Jump cut and – voila! – she’s wearing the dang thing. In another vignette, a boy pictures himself riding a new bicycle. Poof! It’s at the front door of his house.
Apparently, according to Byrne, wishing will make it so. How Jiminy Cricket! Actually, she has her own phraseology: Ask, Believe, Receive. It’s all in the power of visualization.
It’s a contemptible philosophy when applied solely in the acquisition of materials goods. Even one of the participants in the DVD, a “metaphysician” (one who studies what is outside objective experience), confessed that he felt uncomfortable with the result. “If I were the producer, I would have addressed more about serving others.”
It seems, though, that there are millions of people who want the book for more self-serving reasons.
In her effusive promotion, Oprah proclaimed that she had been living her life according to the law of attraction all along; she just didn’t know it. So do most people, in one way or another. For example, during the library’s two building projects, I went through an Ask-Believe-Receive process. I visualized what I wanted the results to be, but it’s not as though I walked to work one day in 1990 and – there it was!! -- a brand-new library, ready for business – or that 14 year later, an unfinished basement suddenly transformed itself into an attractive quiet space that includes a computer lab and study rooms. I always had a clear picture of what the result was going to be, but it took a lot of hard work on the part of a lot of people to get there. Just wishing it were so would have got me fired.
How wacko is Byrne?
She believes that if you don’t think you’ll get fat from eating food, you can eat as much as you want and still maintain a perfect weight. (Does that mean a junkie can shoot up as much as he wants and not OD, as long he stayed focused on the intense high he craves?)
When asked about a massacre of Rwandans, she blamed the victims for having negatives thoughts about their situation. (OK, so she’s not a diplomat.)
I suppose the saddest thing of all is how many people still believe the kind of tripe she peddles. The appropriate response on February 8th would have been for the Oprah studio audience to laugh Byrne off the stage.
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