Letters to the Editor
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The secret to lessen your guilt
I think Oprah is a true believer for the simple reason she needs to deal with the knowledge (and possible guilt) that she consumes more than her share. Let say you are worth a billion dollars, money you worked incredibly hard for. You are a sensitive person, intelligent, who sees that the world is full of suffering and poverty (which you experienced first hand). Why were you blessed with this? How is this fair? Isn't it easier to justify your own consumption (even if you know it affects others) if you earned it, and plus if others earned their misery? Isn't it easier to subscribe to magical thinking and say to yourself, "i DESERVE this". Oprah is human and I do believe that wealth creates its own bubble of magical thinking. Let them eat cake!
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Yeah -over the top...
Not so much "The Secret" as your cynical and somewhat hysterical article. Unfortunately, your prose comes off about as polished as some crank who writes in just to grind his personal ax. What's so off putting about the idea of that which we focus on in our psyche tends to manifest itself in our life - doesn't sound like snake oil or new age mumbo jumbo to me. The only thing I found an unfortunate cliche of our time was your anger and cynicism - perhaps an honest projection of how you view the world in general. Relax - life is better than you think:)
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Candide
Just sayin'.
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viva la oprevolution
It is very interesting to see programs like that and then read articles like this. I don't think there's much wrong with a healthy self esteem and fixation with personal goals but like a thriving democracy its all about checks and balances. These people who preach this sort of info constantly leave this out resulting in hopeful, but clueless followers that will self-destruct when, in a few years, they aren't pulling up to their mansions in shiny new sports cars.
I think If you realize your goals at a young enough age its possible to condition your life so its more likely to go your way.. But that is much more difficult and takes a lot more sacrifice then they will tell you. If you think it, it will happen..pshshsh.. Like many who've posted before me, Oprah seems to have forgotten about the many handouts she's surly been given. Not to dismiss the fact that she's obviously the result of some serious passion and drive, but with all her experience you'd think she'd use her "God-like" influence to throw some advice on reality checks in there.
Materialism pervades her every action and message these days. Im not sure if her audience knows about her ridiculously huge mansions in Bev hills, San Barb, Miles of beach on Maui, or her island in the south pacific to name a few. She promotes the very lifestyle that will lead to future brain dead generations by telling every young one that if they want the lifestyle's of those on "Cribs" just think it, and the universe will unfold as you wish.
sweet read, keep it up,
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Well, Yes and No
I managed to watch one of the "Secret" shows on Oprah, and her self-promoting hour of TV about her Leadership Academy for Girls in South Africa. I think her finest hour as an activist was neither of the above, but the time she moved her show to Texas so that she could respond to the Texas cattelemen's lawsuit against her. At that point, external forces and internal responses and personal resources all came together to produce a result many of us could cheer, more unreservedly than we could cheer the Secret shows or the Leadership Academy show.
William James was a nineteenth-century Harvard professor of philosophy who gave us major contributions in philosophy (pragmatism), psychology (empiricism), and religion ( Varieties of Religious Experienc). He wrote an instructive essay titled "The Will to Believe." Were we not to believe in a visualized goal, he thought, very little could be accomplished. No matter how critically we examined the evidence available to sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch, the crucial matter of predicting and then producing an outcome also required what one might call rational belief.
That rational belief might be the element that kept Marie Curie at the thankless task of refining a tiny amount of Uranium out of cartload after cartload of pitchblende. That rational belief keeps a dedicated inner-city schoolteacher at her or his job for years. The reward is not measurable, it is a matter of belief.
I have taught the same college course to two different groups: half of one group tried to plagiarize their way through the course, half of the other group will be among the top 500 movers and shakers in their age-range in ten years. Which group has the Secret? For which group will the Secret work, if they latch on to it? The second group. You could find a lot of social and economic differences between the two groups, and my teaching was different, too. The measurable difference in outcome, though, is that the first group felt entitled to good grades, but didn't believe they could get them on their own. The second group pushed me for good grades, to be sure. They also worked hard to earn them, by and large.
I also know a man who is crippled from birth by Cerebral Palsy, though his speech is not impaired. He often uses a wheelchair. We became acquainted near the front desk at our apartment building, where the New York Times newspapers are spread out every day for the tenants who subscribe. He mentioned to me one day that however much his paraplegia from CP affected his life, the gift he most wanted was the ability that others so casually took for granted, to read the New York Times every day, because he is also profoundly dyslexic. That was four or five years ago. Since he had access to a computer, I found text-to-speech software that he could use. He learned to use it, and found various on-line news sources, though not yet the NYTimes--as they experimented with various subscription models. Now, though, I read every NYTimes article he forwards to me. His son found for him, and he has learned to use, a fairly simple program called Talk-It-Type-It. Using this, he adds comments to the NYTimes articles.
There are many points to such a story, and the sob factor is like fancy rhetoric--it kills critical thought. The point that's relevant to Oprah and the Oprah factory is that he had a visualization of something he wanted, the ability to read the NYTimes, and the sense that if he could only read the NYTimes he would be admitted to a world of ideas from which he was excluded. So visualization is a part of the recipe for success. If he hadn't wanted so very very much to do something ordinary, like read, he wouldn't have gone through all the trials involved in learning to use the text-to-speech reader. If he hadn't wanted so very much to do say something about what he read, he wouldn't have gone through the really annoying problems involved in learning to operate the dictation software. BUT if he hadn't impressed me with his thoughtfulness about the world, and mentioned his wish to read the NYTimes, he would still be wishing to read the NYTimes. There are questions of finding the right amount of money at the right times for computer access, too.
My friend thought he was just making a comment about the difference between being physically hobbled with CP and being mentally hobbled by profound dyslexia. The cynic at this point, or much earlier, will be thinking, "Why didn't she just teach him to read?" I did. He couldn't learn to read. Dyslexia is also called "word blindness."The connections you and I make in order to read don't happen for the profoundly dyslexic.
Now he wants to find a way to educate the many people who really really want to learn, but did not get what they needed at the right time, in certificates and transcripts and degrees. I've asked him to dream up how that would work. Who knows what will happen next.