The book’s circular logic is dizzyingly clear. Since the Secret is the generator of all success, then every successful person must be practising it whether he or she knows it or not. Similarly, any failure indicates a person is not practising the Secret properly. Be forewarned: the Genie’s mind is literal, much like Google’s, so if you rub his lamp saying “not cancer” you may be accessing “cancer” rather than “not.”
Despite these blatant caveats, The Secret does possess its core wisdom. Optimism, confidence, cheerfulness — Peale’s Positive Thinking — do have an impact on one’s health, achievements, and relationships. For anyone able to conquer irritation at the book’s glibness, its inspirational messages prove hypnotic, like ocean waves. But there’s more to The Secret’s popularity than pep talks, wish fulfillment, and dream team marketing.
For the past 300 years, materialism based on Newton’s physics and Darwin’s biology has been Western society’s defining belief system. It’s not that Newton and Darwin were wrong, but that materialism has proven to be an incomplete system, especially as a way of explaining personal experience and the mysteries of existence.
The anecdote with which I began this article is only one of many deeply meaningful events that have punctuated my life at critical times, and that are difficult to force into a materialistic shoebox. And in this realization, I’m not alone. The knee-jerk habit of Western materialists who dismiss all anecdotal evidence as without merit, as well as deride information that can’t be verified in a laboratory, has alienated and confused a large portion of the population by denying the validity of their personal experiences. This has driven the more easily satisfied into the arms of evangelical religion and the more thoughtful — or fashionable — into an exploration of such other traditions as Buddhism, kabbalism, and shamanism.
As history has aptly shown, extremism breeds its opposite. It was no accident that too much talk of money in the 1980s and ’90s led to too much talk of angels. Today a more dangerous version of that debate pits science (narrowly defined as Darwinism) against religion (defined as creationism), with few of the fulminators seeming to notice the vast, unclaimed intellectual and spiritual territory between the two.
The ironic genius of Rhonda Byrne and her Secret salesmen lies in their skill at cultivating that fertile middle ground by grafting our desire for material wealth onto our hunger for a connection to the Greater Mystery, free of religious dogma. Not a God to be served but a Genie to serve us. Who wouldn’t pay a few bucks for that?
