Tuesday, July 10, 2007

OK, I *must* own The Secret now...

Katy-the-Wise tipped me off that the Secret contains a bunch of Emerson quotes and they are all fake.

I'd like to see if this is true.

Would a Chalicesseur be kind enough to buy it for me?

CC

5 comments:

Steve Caldwell said...

According to Netflix, you can rent it.

Chalicechick said...

The book?

Anonymous said...

If no one bites, maybe you could visit a bookstore and copy down the Emerson quotes.

It seems weird that there would be fake Emerson quotes given that Emerson was so prolific. He could practically be quoted by accident.

I haven't heard anything about fake Emerson quotes, but I have heard some annoyance that Emerson (among others) were quoted as knowing The Secret, even though they never said anything about "the law of attraction."

Steve Caldwell said...

Sorry ... I had not heard of a companion book for the The Secret film.

Personally, I would check through interlibrary loan. I would rather not give my money to self-help gurus of dubious value.

But I would love to see Penn and Teller's Bullshit show on Showtime taking a critical look at The Secret.

I suppose that the "power of positive thinking" thing was original back in the 1950s when Norman Vincent Peale popularized it.

You may appreciate this quote from Wikipedia which quotes a critic of The Secret:

Karin Klein, editorial writer for the Los Angeles Times, called The Secret "just a new spin on the very old (and decidedly not secret) The Power of Positive Thinking [book by Norman Vincent Peale (1952)] wedded to 'ask and you shall receive'." The editorial, in one of its strongest criticisms, asserted Rhonda Byrne "took the well-worn ideas of some self-help gurus, customized them for the profoundly lazy, [and] gave them a veneer of mysticism..."

Joel Monka said...

I watched "The Secret", and had decidedly mixed feelings... first, I was tempted with the thought that perhaps I, Too, could steal a couple of woohoo new age concepts and make a fortune from it, then was immediately ashamed for even momrntarily contemplating preying on desparate people like that.