A Scientific Critique of the Book and Film The Secret

The Secret; the Law of Attraction, positive energy; quantum secrets of success and similar interpretations; these are some of the keywords of the public deception program that has become increasingly prevalent in society in recent years. The promoters of the public deception program also launched extensive advertising and hype, and on the other hand, many people, by buying the DVD or the book The Secret, or ultimately by attending seminars on “a hundred ways to succeed,” tried to transform their lives and apply the teachings of The Secret program in their daily lives. Those involved in and the creators of The Secret program claim in their advertisements:

After watching this documentary and applying this important and very simple secret, you can easily live happily after a short time. This is a dream that has fascinated the minds of the most brilliant scientists since Einstein. Now scientists have found it, an exciting theory that took the scientists' breath away.

The root of the advertising fever for the Law of Attraction goes back to the film The Secret, directed by Drew Heriot in 2006. This narrative film, which is essentially an attempt to introduce a vague and unsubstantiated concept called the “Law of Attraction,” is based on a book of the same name written by Rhonda Byrne, who also produced the film. The book The Secret has sold over 6 million copies, and its DVD has generated over 65 million dollars in profit for its promoters.

Of course, so far, there seems to be no problem. Some people offer suggestions and strategies for success and wealth, and some people buy these suggestions. But the matter does not end there, and the problem begins when talk of scientific proof, or the so-called “scientific” nature, of The Secret story comes up. They try to present their program as “scientific” or, in other words, “endorsed by science.” For this reason, in new public deception programs, there is no longer talk of goblins, nightmares, bogeymen, and the like. The talk is of metaphysics, quantum, electromagnetism, energy, the cosmos, and molecular software engineering. The words must be pompous and resonant so that the uninformed audience imagines they are dealing with a scientific subject, or at least one endorsed by science, and surrenders. Even the public deception program of Erfan-e Halgheh, whose followers imagine that by leaving a “+” comment and a period mark on Facebook statuses they can cure diseases, uses the term “non-organic beings” instead of the word “jinn” so that the content of their beliefs does not seem superstitious and outdated.

Anyway, as usual, the first victim among scientific concepts is quantum physics, which, as the all-purpose scapegoat, is used in most of the charlatanry of our time. In The Secret documentary, there is talk of scientists and celebrities who, the film claims, were aware of a particular secret. The entire The Secret program is an inculcation of the idea that Newton, Galileo, da Vinci, Einstein, Alfred Hitchcock, Madame Curie, and others knew a secret that has now been rediscovered and is being offered to the people in the form of a DVD.

Why are the teachings of “The Secret documentary” series considered a public deception program?

Public deception programs of a pseudoscientific and superstitious nature usually have much in common with one another: contradiction, fabricated and distorted information, projection, false statistics, and the misuse of scientific terminology. The Secret is no exception to this rule. It is obvious that in this article, there is no room for a detailed examination and mention of all instances. For this reason, for each of the symptoms of a public deception program, we will suffice with only brief examples.

1. Contradiction: For example, the advertising for The Secret program, with a glaring historical contradiction, says, “This secret has captivated the minds of the most brilliant scientists since the time of Einstein,” and offers no explanation that if this secret has preoccupied the minds of scientists since Einstein’s time, then how were Newton, Galileo, and da Vinci aware of this secret?!

2. False and Distorted Information: What The Secret series attempts to promote is clearly based on confused information without logical or reasoned backing, and sometimes stems from an incorrect understanding of scientific concepts. The reason for this is also clear. The Secret says: Whatever you think about, you will attain!

This claim is in no way verifiable or falsifiable. One can imagine thousands of experiences where a person thought of something and did not attain it. At the same time, one can imagine experiences where an individual thought of something and attained it. Nevertheless, such a claim is clearly not scientific. Scientific experiments must be repeatable, and anyone anywhere in the world should be able to test the truth or falsehood of the claim through experimentation and arrive at the same results. Just as the truth or falsehood of Maxwell’s equations, the second law of thermodynamics, and the conservation of momentum can be tested in any laboratory around the world, and proving them experimentally requires no cherry-picking of input data or the publication of selective and manipulated results. However, the above claim cannot be proven in any independent test. To prove this test, a number of subjects must be categorized, observing laboratory requirements and standards, for example into two or more laboratory groups, and some asked to think about a specific subject while the second group does not think about that subject. At the end of a specified period, the results must be statistically analyzed and examined. If this test is repeated over and over, observing scientific protocols, and each time yields significant results, then one can say: Whatever you think about, you will attain!

What The Secret program tries to instill is not based on any scientific proof or empirical testing method. This claim is clearly in contradiction with the rules of sound logic. For example, imagine an experience where two football team coaches each focus their thoughts on being victorious in the match. Both, based on what the law of attraction says, align their thoughts towards winning on the field. But truly, in whose favor does the law of attraction work? Is it not the case that one team’s victory necessitates the other team’s defeat?

3. Projection: If you ask the promoters of The Secret’s public deception program and the law of attraction why the law of attraction hasn’t worked and had no effect on your life, they will place all the blame on you. This book says:

Sometimes when you do everything you can to achieve something and get no result, you might mutter under your breath: “The law of attraction is nothing but a big lie!” But let me reassure you right now that this is not just your problem, and millions of other people like you cannot properly use the law of attraction. But we will prove to you with reason and evidence that the problem is only you, not the law of attraction.

4. False Statistics: The Secret program is overflowing with fabricated and false statistics. For example, the film, in justifying the inefficacy of the law of attraction idea, cites a person named Dr. Bruce Lipton, who says:

In fact, 99 percent (pay attention to this figure!) of your life is in the hands of your subconscious mind. And it provides no explanation as to where it got the 99% from.

5. Misuse of Scientific Terminology: Another noteworthy point that should not be overlooked regarding the pseudoscientific nature of the Law of Attraction is the use of incorrect interpretations based on misunderstandings of scientific terms and concepts. Proponents of the Law of Attraction, like others, resort to scientific analogies and borrowings from physics in order to somehow impress the uninformed audience, who lack knowledge in physics, and make them believe that this law has precedent and application in science as well. Below, we quote one such argument verbatim:

In fact, just as a magnet has the property of attracting iron, the human mind also has the capacity to attract and attracts exactly what it thinks about. Your mental energy acts like a powerful magnet to draw towards you the circumstances, events, and occurrences that lead to the attraction of that desire.

A Scientific Examination and Expert View of This Book and Film:

• From a scientific perspective, there is no such thing as the Law of Attraction. From the viewpoint of psychologists, positive thinking is something that can help you focus your energy, plans, and efforts on your work, and for this reason you succeed, but this does not mean that you achieve success merely by thinking about it; rather, your success is the result of your planning and serious effort. Some researchers have even gone further than this and shown that the Law of Attraction is nothing more than a myth. In research conducted by researchers at the University of Hamburg, it was found that when our brain thinks about a subject excessively, not only does it not lead to achieving it, but the brain, assuming that specific subject already exists, engages with it less in a practical way, and the desired result is not achieved. Furthermore, the amount of electromagnetic energy emitted from the human brain while thinking, due to the biological activities taking place, is far too little to cause physical changes in our surroundings, and our mental changes have no physical effect on the world.

• Explicit and serious scientific, psychological, and philosophical criticisms have also been leveled at this book. Many critics believe the only people for whom this book has brought success and wealth are the author and publisher of this film and book. Critics also believe that this book gives its audience false and futile hopes, which generally have negative effects. Barbara Ehrenreich, author and social critic for the New York Times, addressed this book in a detailed article and wrote that believers in this book presumably abandon their illnesses and merely hope to recover. Or presumably those afflicted by natural disasters who lose their lives in earthquakes and tsunamis were on the frequency of that very event and deserve such a painful death. Apart from this, using this film and book as a tool for career advancement is a form of trickery and duping people.

• Michelle Goldberg of the University of Southern California (USC) wrote in another article: “As a belief in positive thinking, this book tells the reader, ‘Change your mind, and then you can have anything.’ This is very troubling and can be extremely dangerous for people’s psychological state and decision-making, because with this belief, the individual effectively ignores the real and logical conditions behind every problem. In other words, this thinking promotes ‘blaming and belittling the victim/the oppressed and encouraging the oppressor/the ruling system.’ The individual flies from ‘the harsh reality that says their failure is the result of insufficient effort’ toward the belief that ‘those who fail are inherently and individually losers and victims.’ We should not think negatively, but we must see realities and be logical. We must correctly and wisely understand the problem and see how we should confront it.”

• Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons also wrote in a 2010 article about this book: “This is the apocalypse now. The magnetic and mysterious relationship and the connection to quantum physics! Wherever you hear someone trying to explain the workings of your mind with bizarre explanations from physics, run away immediately! Today we have sciences called psychology and neuroscience that answer such questions in a completely scientific and clear way. Pseudoscientific demagogues, with the ‘illusion of knowing,’ try to convince you that they understand things better than others.”

• Professor Lisa Randall is a particle physics and cosmology researcher at Harvard University. After completing her studies at Harvard, she was a professor and researcher at Princeton University and MIT for a time, and then returned to Harvard as a professor of physics. She is one of the world’s renowned figures in physics. Professor Randall writes in her book “Knocking on Heaven’s Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe”: “It is very worrying that the author of this book has no education in physics and perhaps never even studied physics in school, yet claims to read and fully understand today’s highly complex books on physics and quantum mechanics because she wanted to understand (!), and even more worrying is that she writes about these subjects without sufficient knowledge and people read it.”

• The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, in a special article titled “Secrets and Lies,” wrote: “The problem is that neither the book nor the film is based on reality and science!”

Conclusion

No one denies the effect of positive thinking and spirit on improving daily life. It is obvious that if someone has a moderate and attractive social demeanor, they will find better friends and, consequently, likely better opportunities for business and life. However, this matter is fundamentally a psychological (or, in other words, sociological) discussion and has absolutely no connection to a fictitious and baseless law called the law of attraction.

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The article “A Scientific Critique of the Book and Film The Secret” was written through the efforts of Erfan Kasraei (Science Studies researcher at the University of Kassel, Germany) and the collaboration of the scientific advisory group of the Gomanah website.

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