The Power Of Positive Jerks

No, this isn't about Imus.

I read this a couple days ago, and have been thinking about how to approach it. Not the actual article there, but the book the column is about. This would be The Secret, that stupid book that apparently Oprah and others have been going on about. The author is one Rhonda Byrne, and upon finding out she's a reality TV producer, that really should be all we need to ever hear about this. Maybe you can't judge a book by its cover, but you sure ought to be able to judge it by its author.

Now, I'm going to bitch about the book without having read it, which is bad form, but let me excuse myself by telling a little story. During my first and only year of college, a lot of stuff I had managed to pretend wasn't anything to do with me suddenly became unpleasantly relevant, and this coincided, as college often does, with both a lack of health insurance and a glut of really good used bookstores. The net result of this was that I decided I could learn my way around my problems, and started in on the self-help books. I got lucky with my first pick and started learning stuff right away that, if it didn't solve my problems, gave me some hope that this was at least possible, and I dived right in. Soon my room was buried under piles of self help books, and after several months of this a bookstore owner gave me what was some of the best advice I've heard so far.

"You know," said a woman who didn't know my name but based on my buying patterns probably by then knew more about me than approximately eighty percent of the people I'd ever slept with, "maybe some people can't really help themselves by themselves."

I don't know if she expected me to get angry at her, though again based on what she knew about me from what I read she probably just expected me to slink away quietly and never come back, costing herself business. In any event, I wasn't angry, more startled, and in the years since, whenever I refill an antidepressant medication or a schizophrenia medication or a migraine medication, I am grateful to her for taking that risk. (I did continue to shop there.)

She's right. Sometimes self-help won't work. A lot of the time, in fact. Positive thinking is probably the stupidest of the self-help fads. It won't get you out of debt. It won't make your spouse stop beating you. It won't make your headaches go away. It won't cure your drug habit. It won't stop pollution. It won't keep your boss from laying you off. It won't make your car work. It won't make your schizophrenia go away. It is not a substitute for education, medication, money, therapy, or a stable homelife.

So I'm not going to read the book, because if I did, I have a feeling I'd be hurling it at a window within twenty minutes, and then I'd be deeper in debt trying to get that fixed. How's that for positive thinking? (Actually, it's a different thing, called "knowing your limits".)

But I read this column anyway, by Johann Hari, because I tend to read a lot of what comes up at Common Dreams and while I may have moderated the self-help book habit, I still enjoy reading and, again, reading online means I can fold cranes while I do it without having to hold a book open.

And I still haven't really established how to comment on this book. After all, when confronted with theories like this:

“The Universe will start to rearrange itself to make it happen for you… If you see it in your mind, you’re going to hold it in your hand.”

and quotes like this:

“I would visualise a parking space exactly where I wanted it, and 95 per cent of the time it would be there for me and I would just pull right in."

what is there to say, really? Although of course one would clearly be delighted that people have this magnificent power to affect the universe and use it to find parking spaces. Really, if I believed this person or this theory, I would be outraged at the lack of humanity on display here, so it's a good thing I regard it as similar to attempts to levitate the Pentagon.

Hari is equally disgusted with all of this, pointing out that the biggest flaw with positive thinking is "it instinctively blames all the people who falter or fail in life for their own misfortune."

This is just one of the many dead-on points made by this article, and I won't quote it all, so please do read it if you've any interest at all on the broader subject of a society that blames its victims. This isn't just about self-help, an admittedly fringe topic, it's about dismissing people as unworthy of our help.

But because this is covered so well by Hari, I've elected to not go off on a rant about it but instead to just snark. To that end, allow me to quote just a couple more lines.

She urges her readers to shun their friends if they become sick, because “you are inviting illness if you are listening to people talking about their illness”. You shouldn’t even look at fat people because that lets “fat thoughts” into your mind. (If you already looked at my byline picture - too late, fatso.)

To echo Hari, it's too late for you, dear readers. You're going to be fat. You're probably also going to end up with annoying housemates and neurotic cats, and the people I know who tell me I give them headaches can now be said to have a point (though it's one I've never really disputed).

However, if it works in reverse as well, you can at least be consoled that you'll be getting a lot more sex just from hanging around my positive sex aura. You can probably use that to cheer yourself up after getting the bill for whatever you break after you read Hari's quote from The Secret's author about the only reason people are poor.

My advice, read it over linoleum with a raw egg in one hand. Believe me, you're gonna want to break something.