Free Bright-Sided by Barbara Ehrenreich Page B

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 fatactually 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