The Law of Attraction and "The Secret": pseudoscience with quantum breading

A review of two theoretical and cultural artifacts... that have no scientific backing.

Almost every week, an opinion column or a letter written by a reader criticizing a reader criticizing the popularity that individualism has been gaining in western societies.. The examples usually given to denounce the tendency to look at one's own navel are usually quite stereotypical: young people who do not give up their seats to elderly or pregnant women, crowds of people who avoid crossing their eyes with a person asking for help, etc.

Faced with this type of writing, it is difficult to defend individualism as a way of life, but, of course, there are people who are capable of it. In the end, it is a philosophical position, totally opinionated and usually taken as something that goes beyond logic and reason.

The most serious problems arise when one day someone decides that the ideology and morality behind individualism are something more than a philosophical position, and are part of the basic structure of reality. This is what has happened, for example, with the law of attractionwhich has become very popular as a result of the book and film The Secret.

What is the law of attraction?

The law of attraction is the idea that everything we experience depends in essence on our thoughts and our will.. Literally. In fact, the motto associated with the law of attraction is something like "you get what you think about". It is assumed that thoughts are actually positive or negative energy that, once emitted, obtains a response according to its nature. This would allow us to reach certain goals or move away from them according to what we think and depending on the type of mental "requests" we make.

The law of attraction may seem so absurd that at first it is difficult to get an idea about what it really means, but in reality its implications can be summed up in two words: imaginary christmases.

Since the law of attraction is based on the idea that reality is shaped by thoughts, the results we can obtain depending on how we visualize our objectives can be material or, let's put it this way, imaginary. Acting as if the expected results have been achieved is, in itself, obtaining the expected results. A triumph of lies.

For example, thinking about fortune in the right way can translate into obtaining literal fortune (money) or any other conception of the term that we believe has been given to us because we have acted with the law of attraction in mind... which means that the law of attraction can neither be demonstrated nor can it be used to predict anything at all. Didn't get what you were looking for? Maybe you haven't thought about it in the right way. Or maybe you did get what you wanted, even if you didn't realize it. Apparently, the law of attraction is always true, because it feeds on ambiguity. Like the Forer effect.

Word of mouth and The Secret

One of the biggest media springboards that the law of attraction has had has been The Secret, a documentary film that later gave way to a book of the same name written by Rhonda Byrne. In these works, the law of attraction is presented as a simple formulation of a series of principles related to a religious movement called New Thought.

The simplicity of the message and the marketing of the film did the rest: The Secret became a success that is still recommended by many people today.. After all, the law of attraction offers two beliefs that are quite attractive: the power of thought is practically unlimited, it only depends on ourselves and it puts us in contact with a metaphysical entity that acts according to our will and our way of perceiving things. And, well, as we are still suffering the after-effects of the New Age culture culture, it is also very possible that this halo of oriental mysticism makes the product more attractive due to the fact that it has no scientific basis.

Criticism of the law of attraction

The law of attraction has the dubious honor of turning against it people from such diverse circles as physics, neuroscience, philosophy and psychology, and for good reason. neurosciences, philosophy or psychology, and this is for a good reason. This belief is based on assumptions that not only have no scientific basis whatsoever, but go against virtually everything we know from decades of rigorous, scientifically based research. decades of rigorous research and progress in different sciences.

This means that, although the law of attraction interferes in scientific fields such as biology or psychology by putting on the table ideas that have not been proven and do not deserve any attention, the criticism that is made to it does not come exactly from these fields, but from philosophy. And, more specifically, from the philosophy of science and epistemology. The point is not that the law of attraction is useless in explaining reality or predicting events, but that the ideas on which it is based are absurd to begin with and do not follow from anything resembling scientific research.

Playing science

It is entirely valid to place a lot of emphasis on the importance of motivating oneself to think about what one wants to achieve and spending time and effort doing "mental exercises" to make one's goals more achievable. There is nothing wrong with choosing to focus more on mental and subjective factors than on the external objective factors that affect us in our day-to-day lives. They are, without more, preferences about how to live life. If the law of attraction were something like a philosophical principle about how to order one's ideas and priorities, it would not have unleashed so much criticism..

But the law of attraction plays at passing itself off as something resembling a scientific law, or at least part-time. Since the law of attraction can be explained by theoretical formulations as ambiguous as they are diverse, it can cease to be something scientifically verifiable during the minutes in which someone puts its defenders on the ropes ("reality is too complex for measuring instruments", "we cannot just rely on classical scientific theories to understand everything", etc.) to become so again when the danger has passed and the audience is sufficiently credulous.

In fact, where the flirtation of the law of attraction with that veneer of legitimacy that science can give it becomes most evident is in its use of ideas associated with quantum physicsIt is confusing enough for pseudosciences to try to seek refuge in it, using a language that is as complicated as it is imprecise.

Let us not forget that the law of attraction cannot be fully understood without answering the question: who gives us back our thoughts in the form of consequences of these thoughts? Who recognizes the "positive vibrations" and the negative ones to send us consequences in the same tune? The answer falls far outside the scientific realm.

In therapy

In addition to having no empirical solidity, the law of attraction is in itself very dangerous: it infiltrates "therapeutic" workshops and strategies to energize work teams, making people who follow instructions based on absurd ideas and may end up worse off than they started with.. Both NLP and the proposals born of humanistic psychology have been permeable to the law of attraction, and the belief that reality is essentially what you think it is feeds a philosophy so alienated and egocentric that it can appeal to certain political and business sectors.

This makes the law of attraction and the message of The Secret more than just the fruit of intellectual laziness and magical thinking: they are also a marketing product that can have dire consequences for people's quality of life.

Are you poor? Your problem

But, in addition to all this, the law of attraction has political implications that feed an exacerbated individualism. It denies the influence on our lives of all those factors that we can consider as alien to ourselves and our will, and can give way to a mentality that blinds us to what is happening around us.

It is part of a type of thinking with perverse implications on a planet where birthplace is still the best predictor of how healthy and wealthy a person will be in his or her lifetime. Under the law of attraction, social problems disappear as if by magic, but not because they have gone away..