They found that the degree to which the people were willing to support community-oriented initiatves was reduced after having them read such stories. I've been trying to find the study so I could link it here but have had no luck as of yet digging it back up.
The bottom line was this: if, for instance, you take 1,000 people who are willing to lend "X" amount of support to their neighbor/community on Monday, then saturate them with books and movies like "The Secret" for the next 7 days, they will then be less willing to lend the same amount of support the next Monday.
After all, why should somebody help their neighbor when they can just sit in their living room and attract themselves a bigger home in a nicer area where all the good rich people live?
It's not all that different than what missionaries did to native tribes in the past. The missionaries would move in and convince some members of the tribe that they no longer needed to participate in the tribe's communal activities in order to get to heaven. Instead they could just accept this new faith and get an automatic ticket into paradise. Ultimately, the multi-national corporations benefited from this as once the tribal culture was in tatters it was easy to move in and grab whatever resources they wanted.
I think something similar thing is going on in America with books and DVDs like "The Secret." The goal is to get people good and divided, each person thinking they can punch their own ticket to wealth and happiness. Once a significant portion of the population is thinking this way it becomes much easier to steal from their community as there will be no collective resistance of any nature:
"Why should I care if my neighbor is getting screwed by the bank
when I *know* it won't happen to me because I'm using the law
of attraction to strike it rich!"
From the Independent article, emphasis added:
- The rise of self-help exactly coincides with the decline of faith in collective political solutions. You won’t find an answer out there, through getting involved with the society you live in, it says. “I made a decision I would not watch the news or read newspapers any more, because it did not make me feel good,” Byrne declares. 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”.
(I suppose Byrne would tell those kids in Iraq they are attracting the cluster bombs dropped on their neighborhoods and the death squads showing up at their doorsteps?)
- If it seems like a leap from The Secret to the ballot box, you just have to turn to the book’s explicitly political pronouncements. “Why do you think that 1 per cent of the population earns around 96 per cent of the money that’s being earned?” it asks.
- Massive tax cuts, markets rigged in the favour of the rich, the rise of a right-wing ideology? No, “the rich think thoughts of abundance and wealth, and they do not allow any contradictory thoughts to take root in their minds.” And as for the poor, “the only reason any person does not have enough money is because they are blocking money from coming to them in their thoughts.”
Just wait, when "the long emergency" really kicks into gear and the fossil fuel goodies stop rolling into and out of Wal-Mart, you'll have adherents of "The Secret" sitting in front of abandoned strip malls visualizing great truckloads of Chinese made crap arriving any moment.
-Matt Savinar
4/13/2007
