Inane self-help programs come and go with boring regularity, so I didn’t think anything of the most recent grist in the mill. What little I had seen convinced me that it was just the same old crap repackaged with some brazen DaVinci Code-esque packaging. I shrugged, went on with my life.

Yesterday I visited the family for my sister’s 20th birthday. While there I found a copy of “The Secret”, the aforementioned inane self-help program. The DVD was sitting unopened in a pile of other discs, probably given to my mother by one of her clients. They tend to do that. I thought nothing of it at the time. We went to The Stinking Rosefor lunch, opened presents, &c, and I drove home. That’s when I decided to look into what the program was about and realized that the people behind “The Secret” are either evil or goddamn insane.

“The Secret” is what they call the “Law of Attraction”. The idea is that thinking about and wanting something is enough to actually get it. Don’t want to get sick? Just think healthy thoughts. Overweight? It’s not the food, it’s that you’re thinking too fat!

Think about how crazy that sounds. The claim is that “like attracts like”, that negative thoughts attract negative events. Never mind that the magnetic metaphor they use is a broken one, that negative attracts positive. Nevermind that the idea is crazy and makes absolutely no goddamn sense, being just a modern rehash of sympathetic magic.

Michael Beckwith, one of the supposed experts on the DVD, spoke with ABC News about the program. What did he say?

“I’ve seen kidneys regenerated. I’ve seen cancer dissolved,” said Michael Bernard Beckwith, founder of Agape International Spiritual Center.

Byrne told ABC that she wouldn’t even get a flu shot because “if you’re feeling good, how can you attract any illness to you?”

If you feel good and stay positive, you can’t get sick. According to Beckwith’s logic, he could go into a hospital and lick the ever-loving hell out of patients and equipment and just sort of rub himself up against everything and come out fine. He could get into a fight with an ebloa patient and not end up bleeding out of every orifice because if he feels good, how can illness be attracted to him?

That’s not all, though. This is what Rhonda Byrne, the producer, had to say when asked about the genocide and slaughter in Rwanda.

“The law of attraction is that each one of us is determining the frequency that we’re on by what we’re thinking and feeling… If we are in fear, if we’re feeling in our lives that we’re victims and feeling powerless, then we are on a frequency of attracting those things to us … totally unconsciously, totally innocently, totally all of those words that are so important.”

The Producer of The Secret claims that victims of ethnic cleansing were slaughtered because they weren’t thinking positive thoughts. The implication is that it’s their own damn fault for not thinking positively enough.

I can believe that these people are either insane or exploiters of the highest order, preying on the insecurities of those who want to affect change without putting in too much effort. Were that the end of it “The Secret” would wither and die like others before it, excepting of course extraordinary circumstances.

Enter Oprah Winfrey, an extraordinary circumstance.

Oprah is, through her media empire, able to significantly influence people worldwide. To have Oprah promoting something is to lend it a credibility based on nothing more than raw fame. People listen to her, for better or for worse, and her support of “The Secret” can only lead more people into supporting and following some rather destructive ideas. There’s an article at Salon that explores Oprah’s support and what it means far better than I can do here.

I should probably call my parents about that disc when I get home.