One Book Destroyed Western Civilization. No, It's Not The Bible.

It popularized the most toxic ideas in American history.

fantom_rd

So, my friend had this uncle.

He refused to put his scalding hot coffee in the cup holder while driving. Instead, he perched it on the dashboard. He believed it was safer there. His wife didn’t like that. She tried to convince him to use the cup holder.

He didn’t listen.

One day, the coffee spilled all over his wife's lap.

A week later, it happened again.

Every time, he blamed her for it. Apparently, she was causing the coffee to spill by worrying about it. She was doing it with her mind.

My friend's uncle didn't know what he was saying, but he was more or less preaching something someone had read in a book, the idea that you attract misfortune by thinking too much about it. In reality, it's insane to put hot coffee on a car's dashboard and expect it to stay there. Never mind that. A negative attitude trumps physics. Mind over matter. That's the American way.

America has a habit of banning books they don't like, books that dare to talk openly about racism, genocide, disease, poverty, or sexuality. There's one book this country will never ban, even though it deserves to be banned more than any book ever written. Since its publication, this book has sold more than 35 million copies. That's almost as many copies as Harper Lee's novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. In fact, the book outsold Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (30 million).

It outsold The Power of Positive Thinking.

It also outsold Orwell’s 1984.

It’s not the Bible.

It's The Secret.

You can't overstate the influence this book has had on western culture since its launch in 2006, almost 20 years ago. Even if someone didn't read the book, they've almost certainly encountered its ideas. You might already know that The Secret focuses on this idea called the Law of Attraction. It argues that anyone can change their life by sending positive thoughts out into the universe. You can manifest your desires. You can manifest millions of dollars. You can think yourself out of terminal illness. You can cure blindness. You can manifest love.

It's "effortless."

After that, the author goes on to insist that all disease and poverty in the world simply result from negative thinking. You can't get sick unless you secretly want to get sick. You’re only broke if you think about it all the time.

If anything bad happens to someone, they attracted it to themselves with a negative attitude. If a friend or a loved one falls ill, you should try to cheer them up. If that doesn't work, you should get away from them as fast as possible. If you stay, they're going to infect you with their negativity.

After describing Jesus as a billionaire prince, the author concludes by celebrating a rich American investor who manifested oil and kept drilling ever deeper into the earth until he found it. From cover to cover, the book promotes a jaw-dropping amount of scientific and cultural ignorance.

There’s a reason this book hit such a nerve in American culture. You can trace many of its ideas all the way back to the 1840s, when a clock maker named Phineas Quimby decided to start a new kind of business, traveling around the country “curing diseases” for $10 a head. After taking your money, Quimby would explain the cure—there’s no such thing as diseases.

It’s all in your head.

Quimby believed he cured his own tuberculosis by riding around on his horse. It made him happy, and the vibes restored his health. His act caught on because he operated in the decades before germ theory. In the 1847, while Quimby was making a fortune telling people they were making themselves sick with negative thoughts, Ignaz Semmelweis was getting laughed out of medicine for asking doctors to wash their hands, even when he had evidence that it worked.

One of Quimby’s patients, Mary Baker Eddy, went on to found the Christian Science movement two decades later. Christian Scientists believe that the physical world constitutes a mere illusion. They think we’re living in the matrix. Consequently, they viewed illness and disease as a mental error.

You didn’t need medicine, just vibes.

People couldn’t spread disease. They could spread sadness and loneliness, though, and those negative emotions made you sick.

By the late 19th century, Christian Science was the fastest growing religion in America. Eddy’s books sold millions of copies. The state of Massachusetts even granted her a special charter to build a church. Its members sometimes faced fines and even prison for child abuse and neglect, refusing doctors and medicine and letting their kids die, all out of religious ideology. Christian Science gained quite a following among the super rich of the day. They funded reading rooms all over the country. A long time ago, I even went to one—just to see what it was like. (It was nice.) The movement continued to grow through the 20th century, peaking during the Great Depression but remaining a force in American culture all the way up through the turn of the century. It’s not a coincidence that Christian Science started to fade right around the time The Secret was published.

The way I see it, the book and its author mainstreamed Christian Science and a number of other toxic ideas into American culture. It offered a sanitized, secular, safe, sane-washed version of to the public.

They absorbed it.

Oprah spent an entire year pumping The Secret relentlessly through her show and book club. A 2007 op-ed in Slate even begged her to stop, citing a moment when one of Oprah’s own viewers announced in a letter that she was so uplifted by The Secret that she was suspending her cancer treatment. Oprah implored the woman to restart her therapy, finally admitting that the Law of Attraction “is not the answer to everything.” Honestly, I think she was worried about liability.

Oprah just hates lawsuits.

If Oprah had seriously read the book, she would’ve seen that this is exactly what the author encourages readers to do, not to simply open themselves up to alternative spirituality, but that they could cure their own medical conditions by abandoning science and medicine while putting good thoughts out into the universe. By the time Oprah issued her warning, it was too late.

In a truly prophetic moment, the Slate op-ed wondered what would happen “if someone proposed running the government according to the Law of Attraction.” It even cites Karen Curelo’s overlooked Never Saw It Coming. Published in 2006, the same year as The Secret, it explores America’s problem with toxic positivity and wishful thinking in detail, showing us how we manage to drive straight into disasters, even the most foreseeable and predictable ones.

Spoiler alert, it didn’t sell.

If you want a great takedown of the toxic vibes culture that Oprah manifested into being, you can read Kurt Andersen’s Fantasyland. Oprah was merely cashing in on a 500-year love affair with quackery. She also helped flame the 1980s satanic panic, where Americans displaced their repressed anxiety.

Anyway…

More than 250 years after Quimby and Eddy, we’re watching the same thing happen all over again. Today, you’d have better luck selling healing crystals and gratitude journals than you would convincing someone to wear an N95 mask. We’re watching a disease disable millions of healthy children and adults, and we couldn’t even get funding to develop treatments, while our own party spent $1 billion on concerts and podcast sets. We’re about to get a health czar who doesn’t believe in fluoride, or even HIV. Our CDC can barely choke out the word “mask.”

It's not that hard to see how dangerous the law of attraction becomes when you scale it up to matters of public health, national security, and climate change. You actually can't solve problems by ignoring them or putting positive thoughts out into the universe. Society can't run with millions of individuals secretly trying to manifest their own personal desires, with zero thought about what their own personal desires mean for someone else.

And yet, that's exactly what's happening.

Our own party basically tried to manifest an election win. They even brought in Oprah to help sell it, paying her $1 million.

It failed.

Two decades after a Slate columnist wondered what the world would look like if governments adopted the ideas from The Secret, we’re watching it play out in real time as a government that ignores public health gives way to a government that puts public health in its crossfires, seeking to take away everything from fluoride to vaccines. If you want to know how we got here, look at the one book that presented our most unhinged ideas in one super digestible, consumable read.

Look at the ones who promoted it to us.

Right now, tens of millions of Americans are trying to manifest their own personal desires without the slightest concern for anyone else. It's driving the collapse of our institutions, from public health to education.

More than any other book, The Secret nurtures unapologetic greed and narcissism. On nearly every single page, it encourages readers to disregard any sense of social obligation or the greater good. It tells them to focus completely on their own fantasies, no matter how superficial. It reminds them how special they are. At one point, it even promises to save them from mortality.

That's right, you can reverse the aging process.

It's no wonder half of Americans go around thinking they're invincible. It's no wonder so many of them refuse to believe their own actions impact someone else. A book that sells 35 million copies winds up infecting an entire culture. The book has done incalculable damage by promoting and reinforcing myths, and the media never does a thing to stop it. The author continues to publish installments in the series, the latest at the end of 2020. What a great time to remind everyone that diseases only exist in your head, right?

Thanks to The Secret and its offspring, it's easy now to convince someone to abandon their conscience in the reckless pursuit of personal pleasure and consumption. Who cares if the world is burning? Make your fortune. Go on your vacations. Manifest your own little bubble where none of it has any impact on you. It's easy now to convince someone their actions have no impact on anyone else. Go live your life. If you happen to get someone else sick, it's really their fault.

There’s only one way to fight this book:

Do the opposite of what it says.

Practice the law of unattraction. Pay attention to the world. Anticipate and plan for disasters. Most importantly, care about people.

Listen to their problems.

Validate them.

Change doesn't happen when everyone sits around trying to manifest their own personal heaven with magical thoughts. Look at history. Change happens when enough people get pissed off to do something. From public sanitation to civil rights, we got things by causing trouble and making people uncomfortable, and then doing a lot of very hard work.

Even now, it’s the only chance we’ve got.

That's the real secret.