TWO
The Years of
Magical Thinking
Exhortations to think positively—to see the glass half full, even when it lies shattered on the floor—are not restricted to the pink ribbon culture of breast cancer. A few years after my treatment, I ventured out into another realm of personal calamity—the world of laid-off white-collar workers. At the networking groups, boot camps, and motivational sessions available to the unemployed, I found unanimous advice to abjure anger and “negativity” in favor of an upbeat, even grateful approach to one’s immediate crisis. People who had been laid off from their jobs and were spiraling down toward poverty were told to see their condition as an “opportunity” to be embraced, just as breast cancer is often depicted as a “gift.” Here, too, the promised outcome was a kind of “cure”: by being positive, a person might not only feel better during his or her job search, but actually bring it to a faster, happier, conclusion.
In fact, there is no kind of problem or obstacle for which positive thinking or a positive attitude has not been proposed as a cure. Trying to lose weight? “Once you have made up your mind to lose weight,” a site devoted to “The Positive Weight Loss Approach” tells us, “you should make that commitment and go into it with a positive attitude. . . . Think like a winner, and not a loser.” Having trouble finding a mate? Nothing is more attractive to potential suitors than a positive attitude or more repellant than a negative one. A Web site devoted to dating tips (one of many) advises people engaged in Internet dating: “Write a profile or message with a negative attitude and you are bound to send potential suitors packing. A positive attitude on the other hand is attractive to virtually everyone.” Similarly, “the best blind date tips boil down to two basic pieces of advice,” we learn from another Web site. “Have a positive attitude, and keep an open mind.” Women in particular should radiate positivity, not mentioning, for example, that their last boyfriend was a jerk or that they’re dissatisfied with their weight. “You should remain positive at all times,” counsels yet another site. “You should avoid complaining too much, seeing the negative in things, and allowing all this negativity to show. While it is important that you are yourself, and should remain true to that, being negative is never a way to go when it comes to socialization [meaning, perhaps, socializing].”
Need money? Wealth is one of the principal goals of positive thinking, and something we will return to again and again in this book. There are hundreds of self-help books expounding on how positive thinking can “attract” money—a method supposedly so reliable that you are encouraged to begin spending it now. Why has wealth eluded you so far? Practical problems like low wages, unemployment, and medical bills are mentioned only as potential “excuses.” The real obstacle lies in your mind, which may harbor a subconscious revulsion for “filthy lucre” or a deeply buried resentment of the rich. A friend of mine, a chronically underemployed photographer, once engaged a “life coach” to improve his finances and was told to overcome his negative feelings about wealth and to always carry a twenty-dollar bill in his wallet “to attract more money.”
Positive thoughts are even solicited for others, much like prayers. On an Internet site for teachers, a woman asks colleagues to “please think positive thoughts for my son-in-law,” who had just been diagnosed with Stage IV brain cancer. Appearing on CNN, the father of a soldier missing in action in Iraq told viewers: “I would wish everybody out there to give your positive thoughts on this issue and to help us through this. And if everybody gives us their prayers and their positive thoughts, this stuff is doable. . . . I know the military are doing all they can to do whatever they can, and the positive thoughts are very important right now.” 1 Positive thoughts notwithstanding, the soldier’s body was found in the Euphrates River one week later.
Like a perpetually flashing neon sign in the background, like an inescapable jingle, the injunction to be positive is so ubiquitous that it’s impossible to identify a single source. Oprah routinely trumpets the triumph of attitude over circumstance. A Google search for “positive thinking” turns up 1.92 million entries. At the Learning Annex, which offers how-to classes in cities like New York and Los Angeles, you’ll find a smorgasbord of workshops on how to succeed in life by overcoming pessimism, accessing your inner powers, and harnessing the power of thought. A whole coaching industry has grown up since the mid-1990s, heavily marketed on the Internet, to help people improve their attitudes and hence, supposedly, their lives. For a fee on a par with what a therapist might receive, an unlicensed career or life coach can help you defeat the “negative self-talk”—that is, pessimistic thoughts—that impedes your progress.
Within America today, a positive outlook is not always entirely voluntary: those who do not reach out to embrace the ideology of positive thinking may find it imposed on them. Workplaces make conscious efforts to instill a positive outlook, with employers bringing in motivational speakers or distributing free copies of self-help books like the 2001 paperback mega–best seller Who Moved My Cheese?, which counsels an uncomplaining response to layoffs. Nursing homes famously brim over with artificial cheerfulness. As one resident complained: “The diminutives! The endearments! The idotic we’s. Hello, dear, how are we doing today? What’s your name, dear? Eve? Shall we go into the dining room, Eve? Hi, hon, sorry to take so long. Don’t we look nice today!” 2 Even the academy, which one might think would be a safe haven for cranky misanthropes, is seeing the inroads of positive thinking. In early 2007, the administration of Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, alarmed by a marketing study finding the faculty “prideless,” brought in a motivational speaker to convince the glum professors that “a positive attitude is vital for improving customer satisfaction,” the “customers” being the students. It should be noted that only 10 percent of the faculty bothered to attend the session. 3
But positive thinking is not just a diffuse cultural consensus, spread by contagion. It has its ideologues, spokespeople, preachers, and salespersons—authors of self-help books, motivational speakers, coaches, and trainers. In 2007, I ventured into one of their great annual gatherings, a convention of the National Speakers Association, where members of the latter occupational groups came together for four days to share techniques, boast of their successes, and troll for new business opportunities. The setting, a waterfront hotel in downtown San Diego, was pleasantly touristic, the internal ambience engineered for a maximally positive effect. A plenary session in the main ballroom began with a ten-minute slide show of calendar-style photos—waterfalls, mountains, and wildflowers—accompanied by soothing music. Then a middle-aged blond woman in an Indian-type tunic came out and led the 1,700-member audience in “vocal toning.” “Aaaah,” she said, “aaah, aaah, aaah,” inviting us to stand and chant along with her. Everyone joined in, obediently but not enthusiastically, suggesting some prior experience with this sort of exercise.
It was New Age meets middle-American business culture. You could pick up some crystals at the exhibition booths or attend a session on how to market your Web site. You could hone your meditation skills or get tips on finding a speakers agency. You could delve into “ancient wisdom”—the Upanishads, the Kabala, Freemasonry, and so on—or you could purchase a wheeled suitcase personalized with your name and Web site in large letters, the better to market yourself while strolling through airports. There was nothing remotely cultlike about the crowd, no visible signs of fanaticism or inner derangement. Business casual prevailed and, among the men, shaved heads greatly outnumbered ponytails.
The irrational exuberance, such as it was, all came from the podium. First up, among the keynote speakers, was the slender, energetic Sue Morter, described in the program as the head of a “multi-disciplined wellness center in Indianapolis.” When the initial applause she receives “doesn’t do it” for her, she orders the audience to stand and engage in a few minutes of rhythmic clapping to music. Thus primed, we are treated to a fifty-minute discourse, delivered without notes, on the “infinite power” we can achieve by resonating in tune with the universe, which turns out to have a frequency of ten cycles per second. When we are out of resonance, “we tend to overanalyze, plan, and have negative thoughts.” The alternative to all this thinking and planning is to “be in the Yes!” When she comes to the end, Morter has the audience stand again. “Squeeze your hands together, think the thought Yes. Put your feet firmly on the planet. Think the thought Yes.”
Best known among the keynoters was Joe (“Mr. Fire”) Vitale, introduced as “the guru himself,” who claims doctorates in both metaphysical science and marketing. Vitale, who looks like a slightly elongated Danny DeVito, offers the theme of “inspired marketing,” and also love. “You are just incredible,” he begins. “I love all of you. You are fantastic.” He admits to being a “disciple of P. T. Barnum” and recounts some of the pranks he has used to gain attention—like a tongue-in-cheek press release accusing Britney Spears of plagiarizing his “hypnotic marketing” techniques. Love seems to be among these techniques, since he recommends increasing one’s business by looking over one’s mailing list and “loving each name.” He plugs his most recent book, Zero Limits: The Secret Hawaiian System for Wealth, Health, Power, and More, which explains how a doctor cured inmates in an asylum for the criminally insane without even seeing them, by simply studying their records and working to overcome his negative thoughts about them. Again, there is a jubilant finale: “Say ‘I love you’ in your head at all times so that we can heal all that needs to be healed.”
The audience absorbs all this soberly, taking notes, nodding occasionally, laughing at the expected points. As far as I can judge, most of the attendees have not published books or ever addressed an audience as large as the National Speakers Association provides. Random conversations suggest that the majority are only wannabe speakers—coaches or trainers who aspire to larger audiences and fees. Many come from health-related fields, especially of the “holistic” or alternative variety; some are coaches for businesspeople, like the ones I had encountered instructing laid-off white-collar workers; a few are members of the clergy, seeking to expand their careers. Hence the predominance of workshops on nuts-and-bolts themes: how to work with speakers bureaus, acquire bookings, organize your office, market your “products” (DVDs and inspirational tapes). Not everyone will make it, as one workshop leader warns in her PowerPoint presentation, with a kind of realism that seems sorely out of place. Some, she says, will go into a “death spiral,” spending more and more to market their Web sites and their products, and “then—nothing.” But clearly there is money to be made. In one workshop, Chris Widener, a forty-one-year-old motivational speaker who began as a minister, tells the story of his unpromising youth—he had been “out of control” at the age of thirteen—culminating in his present affluence: “Three and a half years ago, I bought my dream house in the Cascade Mountains. It has a weight-lifting room, a wine cellar, and a steam bath. . . . My life is what I would consider the definition of success.”
As fresh people advance in their speaking careers, what will be their message, the content of their speeches? No one ever answered this question or, as far as I know, raised it at the NSA convention, I think because the answer is obvious: they will give speeches much like those given here, insisting that the only barriers to health and prosperity lie within oneself. If you want to improve your life—both materially and subjectively—you need to upgrade your attitude, revise your emotional responses, and focus your mind. One could think of other possible means of self-improvement—through education, for example, to acquire new “hard” skills, or by working for social changes that would benefit all. But in the world of positive thinking, the challenges are all interior and easily overcome through an effort of the will. This is no doubt what freshly minted speakers will tell the audiences they manage to find: I too was once lost and overcome by self-doubt, but then I found the key to success, and look at me now! Some listeners will learn by example that there is a career to be made proselytizing for positive thinking and will end up doing so themselves, becoming new missionaries for the cult of cheerfulness.
The Menace of Negative People
The promise of positivity is that it will improve your life in concrete, material ways. In one simple, practical sense, this is probably true. If you are “nice,” people will be more inclined to like you than if you are chronically grumpy, critical, and out of sorts. Much of the behavioral advice offered by the gurus, on their Web sites and in their books, is innocuous. “Smile,” advises one success-oriented positive-thinking site. “Greet coworkers.” The rewards for exuding a positive manner are all the greater in a culture that expects no less. Where cheerfulness is the norm, crankiness can seem perverse. Who would want to date or hire a “negative” person? What could be wrong with him or her? The trick, if you want to get ahead, is to simulate a positive outlook, no matter how you might actually be feeling.
The first great text on how to act in a positive way was Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, originally published in 1936 and still in print. Carnegie—who was born Carnagey but changed his name apparently to match that of the industrialist Andrew Carnegie—did not assume that his readers felt happy, only that they could manipulate others by putting on a successful act: “You don’t feel like smiling? Then what? Two things. First, force yourself to smile. If you are alone, force yourself to whistle or hum a tune or sing.” You could “force” yourself to act in a positive manner, or you could be trained: “Many companies train their telephone operators to greet all callers in a tone of voice that radiates interest and enthusiasm.” The operator doesn’t have to feel this enthusiasm; she only has to “radiate” it. The peak achievement, in How to Win Friends, is to learn how to fake sincerity: “A show of interest, as with every other principle of human relationships, must be sincere.” 4 How do you put on a “show” of sincerity? This is not explained, but it is hard to imagine succeeding at it without developing some degree of skill as an actor. In a famous study in the 1980s, sociologist Arlie Hochschild found that flight attendants became stressed and emotionally depleted by the requirement that they be cheerful to passengers at all times. 5 “They lost touch with their own emotions,” Hochschild told me in an interview.
As the twentieth century wore on, the relevance of Carnegie’s advice only increased. More and more middle-class people were not farmers or small business owners but employees of large corporations, where the objects of their labor were likely to be not physical objects, like railroad tracks or deposits of ore, but other people. The salesman worked on his customers; the manager worked on his subordinates and coworkers. Writing in 1956, sociologist William H. Whyte viewed this development with grave misgivings, as a step toward the kind of spirit-crushing collectivization that prevailed in the Soviet Union: “Organizational life being what it is, out of sheer necessity, [a man] must spend most of his working hours in one group or another.” There were “the people at the conference table, the workshop, the seminar, the skull session, the after-hours discussion group, the project team.” In this thickly peopled setting, the “soft skills” of interpersonal relations came to count for more than knowledge and experience in getting the job done. Carnegie had observed that “even in such technical lines as engineering, about 15 percent of one’s financial success is due to one’s technical knowledge and about 85 percent is due to skill in human engineering.” 6
Today, hardly anyone needs to be reminded of the importance of interpersonal skills. Most of us work with people, on people, and around people. We have become the emotional wallpaper in other people’s lives, less individuals with our own quirks and needs than dependable sources of smiles and optimism. “Ninety-nine out of every 100 people report that they want to be around more positive people,” asserts the 2004 self-help book How Full Is Your Bucket? Positive Strategies for Work and Life. 7 The choice seems obvious—critical and challenging people or smiling yes-sayers? And the more entrenched the cult of cheerfulness becomes, the more advisable it is to conform, because your coworkers will expect nothing less. According to human resources consultant Gary S. Topchik, “the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that U.S. companies lose $3 billion a year to the effects of negative attitudes and behaviors at work” through, among other things, lateness, rudeness, errors, and high turnover. 8 Except in clear-cut cases of racial, gender, age, or religious discrimination, Americans can be fired for anything, such as failing to generate positive vibes. A computer technician in Minneapolis told me he lost one job for uttering a stray remark that was never identified for him but taken as evidence of sarcasm and a “negative attitude.” Julie, a reader of my Web site who lives in Austin, Texas, wrote to tell me of her experience working at a call center for Home Depot:
I worked there for about a month when my boss pulled me into a small room and told me I “obviously wasn’t happy enough to be there.” Sure, I was sleep deprived from working five other jobs to pay for private health insurance that topped $300 a month and student loans that kicked in at $410 a month, but I can’t recall saying anything to anyone outside the lines of “I’m happy to have a job.” Plus, I didn’t realize anyone had to be happy to work in a call center. My friend who works in one refers to it [having to simulate happiness] as the kind of feeling you might get from getting a hand job when your soul is dying.
What has changed, in the last few years, is that the advice to at least act in a positive way has taken on a harsher edge. The penalty for nonconformity is going up, from the possibility of job loss and failure to social shunning and complete isolation. In his 2005 best seller, Secrets of the Millionaire Mind, T. Harv Eker, founder of “Peak Potentials Training,” advises that negative people have to go, even, presumably, the ones that you live with: “Identify a situation or a person who is a downer in your life. Remove yourself from that situation or association. If it’s family, choose to be around them less.” 9 In fact, this advice has become a staple of the self-help literature, of both the secular and Christian varieties. “GET RID OF NEGATIVE PEOPLE IN YOUR LIFE,” writes motivational speaker and coach Jeffrey Gitomer. “They waste your time and bring you down. If you can’t get rid of them (like a spouse or a boss), reduce your time with them.” 10 And if that isn’t clear enough, J. P. Maroney, a motivational speaker who styles himself “the Pitbull of Business,” announces:
Negative People SUCK!
That may sound harsh, but the fact is that negative people do suck. They suck the energy out of positive people like you and me. They suck the energy and life out of a good company, a good team, a good relationship. . . . Avoid them at all cost. If you have to cut ties with people you’ve known for a long time because they’re actually a negative drain on you, then so be it. Trust me, you’re better off without them. 11
What would it mean in practice to eliminate all the “negative people” from one’s life? It might be a good move to separate from a chronically carping spouse, but it is not so easy to abandon the whiny toddler, the colicky infant, or the sullen teenager. And at the workplace, while it’s probably advisable to detect and terminate those who show signs of becoming mass killers, there are other annoying people who might actually have something useful to say: the financial officer who keeps worrying about the bank’s subprime mortgage exposure or the auto executive who questions the company’s overinvestment in SUVs and trucks. Purge everyone who “brings you down,” and you risk being very lonely or, what is worse, cut off from reality. The challenge of family life, or group life of any kind, is to keep gauging the moods of others, accommodating to their insights, and offering comfort when needed.
But in the world of positive thinking other people are not there to be nurtured or to provide unwelcome reality checks. They are there only to nourish, praise, and affirm. Harsh as this dictum sounds, many ordinary people adopt it as their creed, displaying wall plaques or bumper stickers showing the word “Whining” with a cancel sign through it. There seems to be a massive empathy deficit, which people respond to by withdrawing their own. No one has the time or patience for anyone else’s problems.
In mid-2006, a Kansas City pastor put the growing ban on “negativity” into practice, announcing that his church would now be “complaint free.” Also, there would be no criticizing, gossiping, or sarcasm. To reprogram the congregation, the Reverend Will Bowen distributed purple silicone bracelets that were to be worn as reminders. The goal? Twenty-one complaint-free days, after which the complaining habit would presumably be broken. If the wearer broke down and complained about something, then the bracelet was to be transferred to the other wrist. This bold attack on negativity brought Bowen a spread in People magazine and a spot on the Oprah Winfrey Show. Within a few months, his church had given out 4.5 million purple bracelets to people in over eighty countries. He envisions a complaint-free world and boasts that his bracelets have been distributed within schools, prisons, and homeless shelters. There is no word yet on how successful they have been in the latter two settings.
So the claim that acting in a positive way leads to success becomes self-fulfilling, at least in the negative sense that not doing so can lead to more profound forms of failure, such as rejection by employers or even one’s fellow worshipers. When the gurus advise dropping “negative” people, they are also issuing a warning: smile and be agreeable, go with the flow—or prepare to be ostracized.
It is not enough, though, to cull the negative people from one’s immediate circle of contacts; information about the larger human world must be carefully censored. All the motivators and gurus of positivity agree that it is a mistake to read newspapers or watch the news. An article from an online dating magazine offers, among various tips for developing a positive attitude: “Step 5: Stop Watching the News. Murder. Rape. Fraud. War. Daily news is often filled with nothing but negative stories and when you make reading such material a part of your daily lifestyle, you begin to be directly affected by that environmental factor.”
Jeffrey Gitomer goes further, advising a retreat into one’s personal efforts to achieve positive thinking: “All news is negative. Constant exposure to negative news can’t possibly have a positive impact on your life. The Internet will give you all the news you need in about a minute and a half. That will free up time that you can devote to yourself and your positive attitude.” 12
Why is all news “negative”? Judy Braley, identified as an author and attorney, attributes the excess of bad news to the inadequate spread of positive thinking among the world’s population:
The great majority of the population of this world does not live life from the space of a positive attitude. In fact, I believe the majority of the population of this world lives from a place of pain, and that people who live from pain only know how to spread more negativity and pain. For me, this explains many of the atrocities of our world and the reason why we are bombarded with negativity all the time. 13
At the NSA convention, I found myself talking to a tall man whose shaved head, unsmiling face, and stiff bearing suggested a military background. I asked him whether, as a coach, he felt people needed a lot of pumping up because they were chronically depressed. No, was his answer, sometimes they’re just lazy. But he went on to admit that he, too, got depressed when he read about the war in Iraq, so he now scrupulously avoids the news. “What about the need to be informed in order to be a responsible citizen?” I asked. He gave me a long look and then suggested, sagely enough, that this is what I should work on motivating people to do.
For those who need more than the ninety-second daily updates permitted by Gitomer, there are at least two Web sites offering nothing but “positive news.” One of them, Good News Blog, explains that “with ample media attention going out to the cruel, the horrible, the perverted, the twisted, it is easy to become convinced that human beings are going down the drain. ‘Good News’ was going to show site visitors that bad news is news simply because it is rare and unique.” Among this site’s recent top news stories were “Adoptee Reunited with Mother via Webcam Reality Show,” “Students Help Nurse Rescued Horses Back to Good Health,” and “Parrot Saves Girl’s Life with Warning.” At [http://happynews.com] happynews.com, there was a surprising abundance of international stories, although not a word about Darfur, Congo, Gaza, Iraq, or Afghanistan. Instead, in a sampling of a day’s offerings, I found “Seven-Month-Old from Nepal Receives Life-Saving Surgery,” “100th Anniversary of the US-Canada Boundary Waters Treaty,” “Many Americans Making Selfless Resolutions,” and “Childhood Sweethearts Attempt Romantic Adventure.”
This retreat from the real drama and tragedy of human events is suggestive of a deep helplessness at the core of positive thinking. Why not follow the news? Because, as my informant at the NSA meeting told me, “You can’t do anything about it.” Braley similarly dismisses reports of disasters: “That’s negative news that can cause you emotional sadness, but that you can’t do anything about.” The possibilities of contributing to relief funds, joining an antiwar movement, or lobbying for more humane government policies are not even considered. But at the very least there seems to be an acknowledgment here that no amount of attitude adjustment can make good news out of headlines beginning with “Civilian casualties mount . . .” or “Famine spreads . . .”
Of course, if the powers of mind were truly “infinite,” one would not have to eliminate negative people from one’s life either; one could, for example, simply choose to interpret their behavior in a positive way—maybe he’s criticizing me for my own good, maybe she’s being sullen because she likes me so much and I haven’t been attentive, and so on. The advice that you must change your environment—for example, by eliminating negative people and news—is an admission that there may in fact be a “real world” out there that is utterly unaffected by our wishes. In the face of this terrifying possibility, the only “positive” response is to withdraw into one’s own carefully constructed world of constant approval and affirmation, nice news, and smiling people.
The Law of Attraction
If ostracism is the stick threatening the recalcitrant, there is also an infinitely compelling carrot: think positively, and positive things will come to you. You can have anything, anything at all, by focusing your mind on it—limitless wealth and success, loving relationships, a coveted table at the restaurant of your choice. The universe exists to do your bidding, if only you can learn to harness the power of your desires. Visualize what you want and it will be “attracted” to you. “Ask, believe, and receive,” or “Name it and claim it.”
This astonishingly good news has been available in the United States for over a century, but it hit the international media with renewed force in late 2006, with the runaway success of a book and DVD entitled The Secret. Within a few months of publication, 3.8 million copies were in print, with the book hitting the top of both the USA Today and New York Times best seller lists. It helped that the book was itself a beautiful object, printed on glossy paper and covered in what looked like a medieval manuscript adorned with a red seal, vaguely evoking that other bestseller The Da Vinci Code. It helped also that the author, an Australian TV producer named Rhonda Byrne, or her surrogates won admiring interviews on Oprah, the Ellen DeGeneres Show, and Larry King Live. But The Secret relied mostly on word-of-mouth, spreading “like the Norwalk virus through Pilates classes, get-rich-quick websites and personal motivation blogs,” as the Ottawa Citizen reported. 14 I met one fan, a young African American woman, in the bleak cafeteria of the community college she attends, where she confided that it was now her secret.
Despite its generally respectful media reception, The Secret attracted—no doubt unintentionally, in this case—both shock and ridicule from Enlightenment circles. The critics barely knew where to begin. In the DVD, a woman admires a necklace in a store window and is next shown wearing it around her neck, simply through her conscious efforts to “attract” it. In the book, Byrne, who struggled with her weight for decades, asserts that food does not make you fat—only the thought that food could make you fat actually results in weight gain. She also tells the story of a woman who “attracted” her perfect partner by pretending he was already with her: she left a space for him in her garage and cleared out her closets to make room for his clothes, and, lo, he came into her life. 15 Byrne herself claims to have used “the secret” to improve her eyesight and to no longer need glasses. Overwhelmed by all this magic, Newsweek could only marvel at the book’s “explicit claim . . . that you can manipulate objective physical reality—the numbers in a lottery drawing, the actions of other people who may not even know you exist—through your thoughts and feelings.” 16
But Byrne was not saying anything new or original. In fact, she had merely packaged the insights of twenty-seven inspirational thinkers, most of them still living and many of them—like Jack Canfield, a coauthor of Chicken Soup for the Soul—already well known. About half the space in the book is taken up by quotes from these gurus, who are generously acknowledged as “featured co-authors” and listed with brief bios at the end. Among them are a “feng shui master,” the president of a company selling “inspirational gifts,” a share trader, and two physicists. But the great majority of her “co-authors” are people who style themselves as “coaches” and motivational speakers, including Joe Vitale, whose all-encompassing love I had experienced at the NSA meeting. The “secret” had hardly been kept under wraps; it was the collective wisdom of the coaching profession. My own first exposure to the mind-over-matter philosophy of The Secret had come three years before that book’s publication, from a less than successful career coach in Atlanta, who taught that one’s external conditions, such as failure and unemployment, are projections of one’s “inner sense of well-being.”
The notion that people other than athletes might need something called “coaching” arose in the 1980s when corporations began to hire actual sports coaches as speakers at corporate gatherings. Many salesmen and managers had played sports in school and were easily roused by speakers invoking crucial moments on the gridiron. In the late 1980s, John Whitmore, a former car racer and sports coach, carried coaching off the playing fields and into the executive offices, where its goal became to enhance “performance” in the abstract, including the kind that can be achieved while sitting at a desk. People who might formerly have called themselves “consultants” began to call themselves “coaches” and to set up shop to instill ordinary people, usually white-collar corporate employees, with a “winning” or positive attitude. One of the things the new coaches brought from the old world of sports coaching was the idea of visualizing victory, or at least a credible performance, before the game, just as Byrne and her confederates urge people to visualize the outcomes they desire.
Sports was only one source of the new wisdom, which had been bubbling up for years from the world of self-help gurus and “spiritual teachers,” most of them not referenced by Byrne. For example, there was the 2004 docudrama What the Bleep Do We Know?, produced by a New Age sect led by a Tacoma woman named JZ Knight, who channels a 35,000-year-old warrior spirit named Ramtha. In the film, actor Marlee Matlin gives up Xanax for a spiritual appreciation of life’s limitless possibilities. At the Ramtha School of Enlightenment, students write down their goals, post them on a wall, and attempt to realize them through strenuous forms of “meditation” involving high-decibel rock music. On the more businesslike side, “success coach” Mike Hernacki published his book The Ultimate Secret to Getting Absolutely Everything You Want in 1982; the genre continued with, among others, Michael J. Losier’s 2006 book, Law of Attraction: The Science of Attracting More of What You Want and Less of What You Don’t. T. Harv Eker’s Secrets of the Millionaire Mind explains that “the universe, which is another way of saying ‘higher power,’ is akin to a big mail order department,” an image also employed by Vitale. 17 If you send in your orders clearly and unambiguously, fulfillment is guaranteed in a timely fashion.
What attracts the coaching profession to these mystical powers? Well, there’s not much else for them to impart to their coachees. “Career coaches” may teach their clients how to write résumés and deliver the self-advertisements known as “elevator speeches,” but they don’t have anything else by way of concrete skills to offer. Neither they nor more generic “success coaches” will help you throw a javelin farther, upgrade your computer skills, or manage the flow of information through a large department. All they can do is work on your attitude and expectations, so it helps to start with the metaphysical premise that success is guaranteed through some kind of attitudinal intervention. And if success does not follow, if you remain strapped for funds or stuck in an unpromising job, it’s not the coach’s fault, it’s yours. You just didn’t try hard enough and obviously need more work.
The metaphysics found in the coaching industry and books like The Secret bears an unmistakable resemblance to traditional folk forms of magic, in particular “sympathetic magic,” which operates on the principle that like attracts like. A fetish or talisman—or, in the case of “black magic,” something like a pinpricked voodoo doll—is thought to bring about some desired outcome. In the case of positive thinking, the positive thought, or mental image of the desired outcome, serves as a kind of internal fetish to hold in your mind. As religious historian Catherine Albanese explains, “In material magic, symbolic behavior involves the use of artifacts and stylized accoutrements, in ritual, or ceremonial, magic,” while in “mental magic,” of the positive-thinking variety, “the field is internalized, and the central ritual becomes some form of meditation or guided visualization.” 18
Sometimes, though, an actual physical fetish may be required. John Assaraf, an entrepreneur and coach featured in The Secret, explains the use of “vision boards”:
Many years ago, I looked at another way to represent some of the materialistic things I wanted to achieve in my life, whether it was a car or a house or anything. And so I started cutting out pictures of things that I wanted. And I put those vision boards up. And every day for probably about just two to three minutes, I would sit in [sic] my desk and I would look at my board and I’d close my eyes. And I’d see myself having the dream car and the dream home and the money in the bank that I wanted and the money that I wanted to have for charity. 19
The link to older, seemingly more “primitive” forms of magic is unabashed in one Web site’s instructions for creating a kind of vision board:
Leaving the four corners of the card (posterboard) blank, decorate the rest of the face with glitter, ribbons, magical symbols, herbs, or any other items linked with the attributes of prosperity. Next, take the dollar bill and cut off the four corners. Glue the bill’s triangular corners to the four corners of your card. This is sympathetic magic—one must have money to attract money. Then either on the back of the card or on a separate piece of paper, write out these instructions for using the talisman:
This is a talisman of prosperity. Place it where you will see it every day, preferably in a bedroom.
At least once a day hold it to your heart and spend several minutes reciting the chant: talisman of prosperity, All good things come to me.
Notice the magic begin. 20
Homemade talismans aside, most coaches would be chagrined by any association with magic. What gives positive thinking some purchase on mainstream credibility is its claim to be based firmly on science. Why do positive thoughts attract positive outcomes? Because of the “law of attraction,” which operates as reliably as the law of gravity. Bob Doyle, one of the “featured co-authors” of The Secret and founder of the “Wealth Beyond Reason” training system, asserts on his Web site: “Contrary to mainstream thinking, the Law of Attraction is NOT a ‘new-age’ concept. It is a scientific principle that absolutely is at work in your life right now.” The claims of a scientific basis undoubtedly help account for positive thinking’s huge popularity in the business world, which might be more skittish about an ideology derived entirely from, say, spirit channeling or Rosicrucianism. And science probably helped attract major media attention to The Secret and its spokespeople, a panel of whom were introduced by the poker-faced Larry King with these words: “Tonight, unhappy with your love, your job, your life, not enough money? Use your head. You can think yourself into a lot better you. Positive thoughts can transform, can attract the good things you know you want. Sound far-fetched? Think again. It’s supported by science.”
Coaches and self-help gurus have struggled for years to find a force that could draw the desired results to the person who desires them or a necklace in a store window to an admirer’s neck. In his 1982 book, Hernacki settled on the familiar force of gravity, offering the equation linking the mass of two objects to their acceleration. But even those whose science educations stopped at ninth grade might notice some problems with this. One, thoughts are not objects with mass; they are patterns of neuronal firing within the brain. Two, if they were exerting some sort of gravitational force on material objects around them, it would be difficult to take off one’s hat.
In an alternative formulation offered by Michael J. Losier, the immaterial nature of thoughts is acknowledged; they become “vibrations.” “In the vibrational world,” he writes, “there are two kinds of vibrations, positive (+) and negative (-). Every mood or feeling causes you to emit, send-out or offer a vibration, whether positive or negative.” 21 But thoughts are not “vibrations,” and known vibrations, such as sound waves, are characterized by amplitude and frequency. There is no such thing as a “positive” or “negative” vibration.
Magnetism is another force that has long lured positive thinkers, going back to the 1937—and still briskly selling—Think and Grow Rich!, which declared that “thoughts, like magnets, attract to us the forces, the people, the circumstances of life which harmonize with [them].” Hence the need to “magnetize our minds with intense DESIRE for riches.” 22 Now, as patterns of neuronal firing that produce electrical activity in the brain, thoughts do indeed generate a magnetic field, but it is a pathetically weak one. As Scientific American columnist Michael Shermer observes, “The brain’s magnetic field of 10 [to the minus 15th power] tesla quickly dissipates from the skull and is promptly swamped by other magnetic sources, not to mention the earth’s magnetic field of 10 [to the minus 5th power] tesla, which overpowers it by 10 orders of magnitude!” Ten orders of magnitude—or a ratio of 10,000,000,000 to one. As everyone knows, ordinary magnets are not attracted or repelled by our heads, nor are our heads attracted to our refrigerators. 23
There does exist one way for mental activity to affect the physical world, but only with the intervention of a great deal of technology Using biofeedback techniques, a person can learn, through pure trial and error, to generate brain electrical activity that can move a cursor on a computer screen. The person doing this must be wearing an electrode-studded cap, or electroencephalograph, to detect the electrical signals from inside the head, which are then amplified and sent to an interface with the computer, usually for the purpose of aiding a severely paralyzed person to communicate. No “mind over matter” forces are involved, except metaphorically, if the technology is taken as representing our collective “mind.” A technologically unassisted person cannot move a computer cursor by thought alone, much less move money into his or her bank account.
Into this explanatory void came quantum physics, or at least a highly filtered and redacted version thereof. Byrne cites quantum physics in The Secret, as does the 2004 film What the Bleep Do We Know?, and today no cutting-edge coach neglects it. The great promise of quantum physics, to New Age thinkers and the philosophically opportunistic generally, is that it seems to release humans from the dull tethers of determinism. Anything, they imagine, can happen at the level of subatomic particles, where the familiar laws of Newtonian physics do not prevail, so why not in our own lives? Insofar as I can follow the reasoning, two features of quantum physics seem to offer us limitless freedom. One is the wave/ particle duality of matter, which means that waves, like light, are also particles (photons) and that subatomic particles, like electrons, can also be understood as waves—that is, described by a wave equation. In the loony extrapolation favored by positive thinkers, whole humans are also waves or vibrations. “This is what we be,” NSA speaker Sue Morter announced, wriggling her fingers to suggest a vibration, “a flickering,” and as vibrations we presumably have a lot more freedom of motion than we do as gravity-bound, 150-or-so-pound creatures made of carbon, oxygen, and so forth.
Another, even more commonly abused notion from quantum physics is the uncertainty principle, which simply asserts that we cannot know both the momentum and position of a subatomic particle. In the more familiar formulation, we usually say that the act of measuring something at the quantum level affects what is being measured, since to measure the coordinates of a particle like an electron is to pin it down into a particular quantum state—putting it through a process known as “quantum collapse.” In the fanciful interpretation of a New Agey physicist cited by Rhonda Byrne, “the mind is actually shaping the very thing that is being perceived.” 24 From there it is apparently a short leap to the idea that we are at all times creating the entire universe with our minds. As one life coach has written: “We are Creators of the Universe. . . . With quantum physics, science is leaving behind the notion that human beings are powerless victims and moving toward an understanding that we are fully empowered creators of our lives and of our world.” 25
In the words of Nobel physicist Murray Gell-Mann, this is so much “quantum flapdoodle.” For one thing, quantum effects come into play at a level vastly smaller than our bodies, our nerve cells, and even the molecules involved in the conduction of neuronal impulses. Responding to What the Bleep Do We Know?, which heavily invokes quantum physics to explain the law of attraction, the estimable Michael Shermer notes that “for a system to be described quantum-mechanically, its typical mass (m), speed (v) and distance (d) must be on the order of Planck’s constant (h) [6.626 × 10?34 joule-seconds],” which is far beyond tiny. He cites a physicist’s calculations “that the mass of neural transmitter molecules and their speed across the distance of the synapse are about two orders of magnitude too large for quantum effects to be influential.” 26 In other words, even our thought processes seem to be stuck in the deterministic prison of classical Newtonian physics.
As for the mind’s supposed power to shape the universe: if anything, quantum physics contains a humbling reminder of the limits of the human mind and imagination. The fact that very small things like electrons and photons can act like both waves and particles does not mean that they are free to do anything or, of course, that we can morph into waves ourselves. Sadly, what it means is that we cannot envision these tiny things, at least not with images derived from the everyday, nonquantum world. Nor does the uncertainty principle mean that “the mind is shaping the very thing that is being perceived,” only that there are limits to what we can ever find out about, say, a quantum-level particle. Where is it “really” and how fast is it going? We cannot know. When contacted by Newsweek, even the mystically oriented physicists enlisted by Byrne in The Secret backed off from the notion of any physical force through which the mind can fulfill its desires.
But no such qualms dampened the celebration of quantum physics, or perhaps I should say “quantum physics,” at the gathering of the NSA conference in San Diego. Sue Morter fairly bounded around the stage as she asserted that “your reality is simply determined by whatever frequency [of energy] you choose to dive into.” Unfortunately, she added, “we’ve been raised in Newtonian thought,” so it can be hard to grasp quantum physics. How much Morter, a chiropractor by profession, grasped was unclear; quite apart from the notion that we are vibrations choosing our own frequency, she made small annoying errors such as describing “the cloud of electrons around an atom.” (Electrons are part of the atom, orbiting around its nucleus.) But the good news is that “science has shown without a shadow of a doubt” that we create our own reality. Somehow, the fact that particles can act like waves and vice versa means that “whatever you decide is true, is true”—an exceedingly hard proposition to debate.
After Morter’s presentation, I went to a workshop entitled “The Final Frontier: Your Unlimited Mind!,” led by Rebecca Nagy, a “wedding preacher” from Charlotte, North Carolina, who described herself as a member of the “quantum spiritual world.” We started by repeating after her, “I am a co-creator,” with the prefix “co” as an apparent nod to some other, more traditional form of creator. Slide after slide went by, showing what appeared to be planets with moons—or electrons?—in orbit around them or announcing that “human beings are both receivers and transmitters of quantum (LIGHT ENERGY) signals.” At one point Nagy called for two volunteers to come to the front of the room to help illustrate the unlimited powers of mind. One of them was given two dousing rods to hold and told to think of someone she loves. But no matter how much Nagy fiddled with the position of the rods, nothing happened, leading her to say, “No judgment here! Can we agree on that? No judgment here!” Finally, after several more minutes of repositioning, she mumbled, “It ain’t working,” and suggested that this could be “because we’re in a hotel.”
I began to make it my business to see what other conference goers thought of the inescapable pseudoscientific flapdoodle. They were an outgoing lot, easy to strike up conversations with, and it seemed to me that my doubts about the invocation of quantum physics might get us past the level of “How are you enjoying the conference?” to either some common ground or a grave intellectual rupture. Several modestly admitted that it went right over their heads, but no one displayed the slightest skepticism. In one workshop, I found myself sitting next to a woman who introduced herself as a business professor. When I told her that I worried about all the references to quantum physics, she said, “You’re supposed to be shaken up here.” No, I said, I was worried about what it had to do with actual physics. “It’s what I’m here for,” she countered blandly. When I could come up with nothing more than a “Huh?” she explained that quantum physics is “what’s going to affect the global economy.”
I did find one cynic—a workshop leader who had introduced himself as a “leadership coach” and “quantum physicist,” though actually he claimed only a master’s degree in nuclear physics. When I cornered him after the workshop, he allowed as how “there is some crap” but insisted that quantum physics and New Age thinking “overlap a lot.” When I pushed harder, he told me that it wouldn’t do any good to challenge the ongoing abuse of quantum physics, because “thousands of people believe it.” But the most startling response I got to my quibbling came from an expensively dressed life coach from Southern California. After I summarized my discomfort with all the fake quantum physics in a couple of sentences, she gave me a kindly therapeutic look and asked, “You mean it doesn’t work for you?”
I felt at that moment, and for the first time in this friendly crowd, absolutely alone. If science is something you can accept or reject on the basis of personal tastes, then what kind of reality did she and I share? If it “worked for me” to say that the sun rises in the west, would she be willing to go along with that, accepting it as my particular take on things? Maybe I should have been impressed that these positive thinkers bothered to appeal to science at all, whether to “vibrations” or quantum physics, and in however degraded a form. To base a belief or worldview on science or what passes for science is to reach out to the nonbelievers and the uninitiated, to say that they too can come to the same conclusions if they make the same systematic observations and inferences. The alternative is to base one’s worldview on revelation or mystical insight, and these are things that cannot be reliably shared with others. In other words, there’s something deeply sociable about science; it rests entirely on observations that can be shared with and repeated by others. But in a world where “everything you decide is true, is true,” what kind of connection between people can there be? Science, as well as most ordinary human interaction, depends on the assumption that there are conscious beings other than ourselves and that we share the same physical world, with all its surprises, sharp edges, and dangers.
But it is not clear that there are other people in the universe as imagined by the positive thinkers or, if there are, that they matter. What if they want the same things that we do, like that necklace, or what if they hope for entirely different outcomes to, say, an election or a football game? In The Secret Byrne tells the story of Colin, a ten-year-old boy who was initially dismayed by the long waits for rides at Disney World. He had seen Byrne’s movie, however, and knew it was enough to think the thought “Tomorrow I’d love to go on all the big rides and never have to wait in line.” Presto, the next morning his family was chosen to be Disney’s “First Family” for the day, putting them first in line and leaving “hundreds of families” behind them. 27 What about all those other children, condemned to wait because Colin was empowered by The Secret? Or, in the case of the suitor who was magically drawn to the woman who cleared out her closets and garage to make room for him, was this what he wanted for himself or was he only a pawn in her fantasy?
It was this latter possibility that finally provoked a reaction from Larry King the night he hosted a panel of The Secret’s “teachers.” One of them said, “I’ve been master planning my life and one of the things that I actually dreamed of doing is sitting here facing you, saying what I’m about to say. So I know that it [the law of attraction] works.” That was too much for King, who was suddenly offended by the idea of being an object of “attraction” in someone else’s life. “If one of you have a vision board with my picture on it,” he snapped, “I’ll go to break.” This was an odd situation for a famous talk show host—having to insist that he, Larry King, was not just an image on someone else’s vision board but an independent being with a will of his own.
It’s a glorious universe the positive thinkers have come up with, a vast, shimmering aurora borealis in which desires mingle freely with their realizations. Everything is perfect here, or as perfect as you want to make it. Dreams go out and fulfill themselves; wishes need only to be articulated. It’s just a god-awful lonely place.