Self-Help Review 13: The Secret

Self-Help Review:
The Secret
By Rhonda Byrne
2006

In 1956 a man named Earl Nightingale recorded a "pep talk" for the sales staff at the insurance agency that he owned to listen to. He gave this talk to them many times, but as he was leaving for a vacation they still wanted to hear his inspiring message in his absence. After giving copies of this recording to his staff, a certain staff member named Lloyd Conant came to Nightingale with a business proposition. The recording was so good and touched the staff so much that money could be made by selling copies of it to the public. Conant suggested that the two get some funds together, sell the record, and form a company. Nightingale agreed, and the recording went on to become the first spoken recording to ever reach gold status and sell over a million copies. With this recording, they would become the world's largest produces and publishers of Self-Help audio programs, and anyone with even a passing interest in Self-Help will be familiar with the unavoidable "Nightingale-Conant" company name. So what was so goddamn great about this pep talk? In it, Nightingale let the listener in on a little secret that he discovered. The strange thing was, that this "secret" has been mentioned in every single religious text that he read, and the wisest men who ever walked the Earth had some knowledge of it. Thus it was titled "The Strangest Secret." What was this secret? It was simply: "you become what you think about."

This recording was a huge success when it came out, but the thing is, Nightingale was really just going over old shit. He acknowledged that, but he was able to simplify it to a single sentence and describe it in such a dumbed-down way that any schmuck off the street could get it. That was part of the appeal. The biggest appeal of it was that it was one record with a relatively short running time, and it could thus be popped on the turntable for repeated listening's whenever someone needed a boost of inspiration. This was much more convenient than going through all the books that came out 50 years earlier, and which delivered the same exact message. Even the short "As A Man Thinketh" couldn't compete with a record, and there was the added bonus that people forget things alarmingly fast, especially trendy, New Age bullshit things.

Fast-forward to 2006, and an Australian broad named Rhonda Byrne who's hit hard times. She's working in the TV industry, and is given the book "The Science Of Getting Rich" by Wallace Wattles by her daughter as a gift. As a way of "Getting Rich," she takes the philosophy of the book, simplifies it, and then travels to the U.S. to find those in the Self-Help industry who she can film talking about this "secret knowledge" that she discovered. Everyone hammers away at the point that this secret is the most powerful force in the universe, and all the greatest minds in history knew about it. These minds included Beethoven, Shakespeare, Einstein, and Plato. Because those she filmed also knew of the secret, people such as John Gray and Jack Canfield (of the "Mars and Venus" and "Chicken Soup" books, respectively) assume that their shimmering minds can sit comfortably alongside those above-mentioned geniuses. What is this secret which all the geniuses of the world have known? "The Law Of Attraction" or, put another way, "you become what you think about."

The film version of "The Secret" has been a huge success, and all of the benefits of Nightingale's "The Strangest Secret" are present for this film, because now people can simply pop a DVD in the player and have their enlightenment delivered to them in an hour with quick editing, pretty pictures, and an atmospheric soundtrack with a hint of techno. I have not seen the film, but I did watch a few minutes of it on YouTube, and I must say, I was impressed. More than a few critics have mentioned "The Da Vinci Code" as a source of inspiration for it, and the images used do look like Byrne was shamelessly capitalizing on the success of that book and film to give shape to her own. You see ancient men running around with scrolls in their hands, frantically trying to keep The Secret a secret, and the music and editing are very well done. However, I did not watch the entire film, nor do I intend to. This is a book review, and therefore I will focus on what was in the book version, which is, admittedly, the lesser version.

Desperately trying to capture the sexiness of the film, the book takes on the same ancient feel, with pages that contain images that look like they came from the notebooks of Renaissance artists in the background. Also, the film apparently relied heavily on other people talking about The Secret, and half of the book is made up of other people's quotations, to the extent that Byrne's name on the cover is misleading. It would more rightly say "Rhonda Byrne, Editor," since her job in this affair was quoting other people and summarizing what was just said. Each chapter, regardless of how mind-numbingly simple it is, ends with a summary highlighting key points. Her and her "Secret" crew tried really hard to make the film into a decent book. My opinion is that Byrne's place is in TV and she should keep her fucking hands out of the book business. Some things probably work better on the screen, and that is definitely the case with "The Secret." As a book, this is probably one of the most embarrassingly idiotic pieces of shit I've ever willingly finished.

Rhonda Byrne proves beyond any doubt that you can truly have nothing new to offer the world and still rake in millions of dollars by saying it, as long as you make it look pretty and have a large team of douche bags serve as your "evidence." This is a book that assumes that the reader is a complete idiot, and it's tone is reminiscent of a local preschool Storytime Program, albeit one taught by that crazy New Age bitch who smells like cat food and incense and scares the shit out of the kids. Over and over in this book you are told to think happy thoughts...or else. I'm not joking. Byrne and her team of douche-y specialists constantly remind the reader that if there's something bad in their lives, guess what? They brought it on. Do you have cancer? Oops! That's your fault, homie. Lose your job? Oops! You should have been thinking "thoughts of abundance," because your "thoughts of loss" caused you to lose your job. Were your wife and child stabbed to death by a religious fanatic acting in the name of God? Oops! That was YOUR fault. Sorry to break it to you. This insulting idea in effect blames every single 9/11 victim for the attacks, since they were all operating on the same wavelength, and blames Jews for the Holocaust, which, really, people have been doing for years now anyway.

There are sections devoted to money, relationships, health, and The World, and the "secret" to all of them is to wish for the best and act on impulse. The book doesn't tell you that you have to really DO anything to get what you want. You just send your wish off to the universe and it will unfailingly send you your desires. However, you have to put everything in the positive, since the universe doesn't recognize negatives. Sound familiar? It should...it's affirmations yet again, those whorey old staples of Self-Help writing. There's a twist to these affirmations though, and it's that the dumb asses that Byrne quotes in her book talk about people recovering from cancer and rejuvenating internal organs all with their minds, with little or no help from medicine. Considering how popular this book is, this is a dangerous idea, since there are already people skipping medical attention due to financial reasons and because they hate going to doctors. With "The Secret," these people can now comfortably avoid going to the doctor and sit at home, imagining themselves as being free of sickness, while the disease grows to such an extent that you can see it through their tightly-bundled bodies. I can also imagine a few New Age retards imagining that they don't have genital warts, gonorrhea, or AIDS, and suckering a few impressionable morons into having unprotected sex with them because as long as they imagine their bodies as being clean and free of disease, they won't catch it. By the time this fad passes, their mangled genitals will be a reminder of how idiotic this idea is when given more than a minute of thought.

All of this is not to say that The Law Of Attraction as a way of living your life can't have some benefits. It can add to your life, but not in the extraordinarily shallow way that the book promotes. Adjusting your filters to look on the "sunny side" of things is always preferable to wallowing in misery, but certain unavoidable facts about life are not so easily ignored and must be dealt with, regardless of how bleak they are. Wars are waged, people die, and natural disasters strike without warning, and no amount of positive thinking can change the laws of nature or the basic, violent instincts of man. Regardless of what the Self-Help industry would like us to believe, the human species is hard-wired for violence, anger, and jealousy, and the only thing we can do is work on controlling it. That's all we can do, try to control it, because it will never be eliminated. Nature saw fit to give us these instincts, and they override happy ideals like The Law Of Attraction. The book promotes never actually thinking of these things at all, which is impossible because we are bound by our nature to think these thoughts on occasion. In what is perhaps the biggest fucking lie in this entire book, Michael Bernard Beckwith claims that it has been "scientifically proven that an affirmative thought is hundreds of times more powerful than a negative thought." First off, how the fuck do you measure that for it to be "scientifically proven"? Second, the fastest way to prove that this is a lie is to see just how quickly a friendship that has taken years to build can be destroyed by spending a bit of time outlining all of their faults and why others should hate them for it. You can quite easily demolish a life-long friendship in one hour. Or how about cheating on someone who you've been with for years? It's one action, one negative thought, and it snowballs over and flattens years of positive thoughts and emotions. Negativity always trumps positivity, and the final proof of that is that we all end up dead...a "negative." Sorry Byrne. Even though you go as far as to say that we are all "Gods" (I'm not making that up), your theory is shit because Gods aren't supposed to die. That's a mortal thang.

There is one thing that bears mentioning though, and it's this: Rhonda Byrne was a complete fucking nobody before "The Secret" came out. She is indeed a very talented woman, and she has done a very slick job with both her film and her book. She got on all of the big shows, and people everywhere want her products. Her "philosophy" is the same shit you'd pick up in any Self-Help book, but sent all the way to perhaps it's ultimate extreme, which is that you literally have to do nothing except think about what you want, and you'll get it. This flies in the face of everything Americans have been taught ever since the founding of this country, and the fact that in this age everyone is so eager for a piece of it is a frightening sign of things to come. Sit on your ass, think happy thoughts, and the world is yours. It's a simplification of a simplification of ancient philosophy that everyone with a passing interest in religion has known about for centuries. Regardless of how much me, or anyone else in this country bashes the book, it does stand as a shining example of what The American Dream has become. In the future, when the offspring of the offspring of our offspring's offspring dig through the past to find out what exemplified our whole-hearted embracing of laziness, this book will stand as a most valuable document indeed. A cultural phenomenon, created by a nobody. The fact that this happened might be Byrne's final proof that "The Secret" is legit.