The Oprah Winfrey Show is about as compelling and gruesome as road kill: no matter how much it grosses you out, you just can’t help looking. A particularly bloody lump of matter recently made it on to our small screens, courtesy of the queen of talk shows, in the shape of a posse of smug self-help gurus whose brand of snake oil has seduced millions the world over. Yes, it’s The Secret.
I wonder if women would have given it a passing thought if they’d paid more attention to their physics teachers at school.
Free your life of misery, The Secret‘s creator Rhonda Byrne claims, using the ”most powerful law in the universe”, the ”law” of attraction. Now forgive me if I’m wrong, but having just dropped a mug on my toe, I’d have thought there are several other universal laws that are considerably more powerful that the ”law” of attraction, gravity not the least of them.
Byrne prescribes her cure for anything from a compound fracture of your savings account to a toxically shocked love life. Think positively about that pesky brain tumour and bugger the chemo. Raise your sickly child’s t-cell count with the power of your thoughts. Get thin, pretty, happy, in love, successful and rich by believing that you’re the centre of the universe.
The secret of The Secret is not terribly secret at all: bastardised ancient mysticism and New Age whoo-whoo, repackaged with marketing sleight of hand. It wouldn’t irk so much if it hadn’t turned Byrne into a multi-multi-millionaire ($50-million and climbing, by some accounts) and put her on to Time magazine’s list of 100 most influential people.
This is symptomatic of a wider trend of belief system hijacking science — quantum, the scientific study of the sub-atomic and most recent victim — has been adopted by the mind-over-matter brigade and turned into pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo. And if post-Oprah sales of The Secret are anything to go by, it’s women who are drinking this up in great big drafts.
A law is a statement of scientific truth about the natural world, such as the way gases exchange or objects move. There is no such thing as a law of attraction. No matter how hard I concentrate on reversing the fall of that mug, it’s going to hit my toe. Unless I move my foot out the way — but the objective of this experiment is not to save my toe, it’s to suspend Newton’s law of universal gravitation. According to Byrne, I should be able to bend even gravity to my will.
It doesn’t end there. We have been throwing our money at beauty products that claim to do everything short of changing our genetic structure to keep us looking 18. Fleeting TV ads of airbrushed nymphs give just enough time to throw a few chemical names at us, along with a computer-generated graphic of wrinkles overcome, before dashing off the screen, leaving the audience wanting. Legally, manufacturers are required to test scientifically that their products are safe, but that doesn’t mean their claims of reversing the signs of ageing are based on proven clinical trials.
Women have turned the purveyors of eternal youth into a vast empire, even though there’s no way of knowing if the R500 tub of cream you apply twice daily has made the slightest bit of difference to your hard-earned laughter lines.
A body-lotion manufacturer recently claimed, on national tele-vision, that 80% of women were convinced that its cellulite potion had reduced the dimple effect. The asterisk next to this statement pointed to text at the bottom of the screen which I couldn’t read, even with my nose pressed against the glass. It was probably some legally required small print pointing out that this was not a scientific finding, but rather anecdotal observation from a handful of women so desperate to regain the thighs of a 12-year-old that they convinced themselves the cream worked.
This is why science uses blind testing, to remove results skewed by the placebo effect.
Another product, this time a deodorant, apparently contains pearl extract. Really? Calcium carbonate? Why not, then, claim that it contains bits of that stuff used to mark out the white lines on a sports field?
A supremely wealthy industry has built itself on the back of our yearning for happiness amid the inescapable realities of the human condition; youth against the ravages of cell degeneration. It has taken years to get women out of the kitchen and into schools and universities, into secretarial and nursing jobs before, more recently, into the seats of engineering, politics, medicine, business and more. Yet with all this available to us, we still make someone like Byrne a very wealthy conman. Just remember that, ladies, next time the carnie folk come to town.
Leonie Joubert is a freelance science journalist and author of Scorched: South Africa’s Changing Climate