The full story of how Rhonda Byrne turned a positive thinking realization into “the greatest success story in the annals of viral marketing”-–to quote The American Spectator-–is only now emerging in court papers filed in the US and Australia, and from interviews with the participants. To Byrne, it’s the story of a small group of people bringing “joy to the world”; to some of those involved it’s a story of hypocrisy and ruthless double-dealing.
Like many of her public utterances, the message that Australia’s platinum-haired self-help guru Rhonda Byrne sent out last November to her millions of followers was a rhapsodic outpouring of goodwill. Thanksgiving Day was approaching in the United States, where Byrne now lives in a Californian celebrity enclave just up the road from Oprah Winfrey’s 17-hectare, neo-Georgian estate, and the creator of the New-Age blockbuster The Secret wanted to remind the world about the crucial importance of gratitude.
“Remember,” Byrne wrote, “if you are criticising, you are not being grateful. If you are blaming, you are not being grateful. If you are complaining, you are not being grateful.”
Those are worthy sentiments, but it was an odd time for Byrne to be expressing them because her lawyers had just sued two of the very people who were instrumental in launching her book and film The Secret to phenomenal success. Drew Heriot, the Australian director of the movie, and Dan Hollings, an Arizona internet consultant whose “viral marketing” helped propel Byrne to global fame via Oprah, had both been demanding that Byrne pay them a share of the estimated $US300 million ($340 million) revenue they claim she’d promised them. In the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, Byrne’s lawyers had counter-attacked by launching legal actions against both men in jurisdictions far from their homes, a tactic one judge has since described as vexatious and harassing.
For a woman whose central message is the power of positivity, Byrne has a surprisingly long history of such bust-ups, stretching back to her days as a television producer in Melbourne. But those past disputes pale next to the legal storms swirling around The Secret, a New-Age marketing phenomenon the like of which has not been seen for decades. It’s a bunfight of cosmic proportions that has drawn into its orbit some of the best-known figures and most fundamental tenets of the global self-help industry.
Continued in The Weekend Australian Magazine.
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13 responses so far ↓
1
Mr. Patterson
// Aug 27, 2008
The big Secret is that the secret is most likely bunk.
http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/Story?id=2975835&page=1
If only I could think of something like this to get rich on. Then again, I can’t make money of off giving the terminally ill false hopes. I’m funny that way.
2
Thomas
// Sep 5, 2008
I’ve gotta say, when I watched the Secret, I wasn’t all that impressed. This just gives me more reason to think she’s out for the money than any genuine desire to help people.
3
Chris
// Sep 6, 2008
I hope her followers are paying attention. The real secret is, getting what you want may destroy you.
4
Karate_and_Taiji_student
// Sep 12, 2008
Thanks a lot for the articles. Very interesting, indeed.
5
Tashi
// Sep 23, 2008
I used to be a “believer” of the secret. Now, I am a practitioner of “the secret” without getting scared by the “superstition portion” of it. The new age slogan “you create your reality” does indeed have great merit without getting into the quantum-reality debate.
Your mind has superb information processing capabilities. It can generalize, distort, delete any information it sees fit. If it doesn’t, we would suffer from information overload. Each of us create a map of reality inside our mind. You create your map of reality, and if you change the map, you change reality itself. Robert Anton Wilson called this “Reality Tunnel” in Prometheus Rising.
Now, “reality tunnels” are positive feedback mechanisms. If you adopt a “positive” reality tunnel, you will behave in a very different way than if you adopt a “negative” reality tunnel. This is the “secret” within The Secret.
Is the “law of attraction” true? We would never know. Everything is a perspective, a map of reality. When you believe something too much, you become dogmatic, and you lose track of the magic of living. If you’re happy, enjoying the “abundance” the universe provides you, life will treat you well.
Oh ya, if you haven’t truly realized this yet: money doesn’t always bring happiness. Happiness is within you. If “law of attraction” is true, the Secret lady doesn’t is attracting what she’s looking for, “money”.
PS. English is not my native language. Sorry if there’s grammar problems, i’m too lazy to check.
6
Chris
// Sep 23, 2008
Tashi, Robert Anton Wilson is a cool cat. I believe that if he were still around, he would be speaking out against this, as I have.
Have you heard the old saying, “the dose makes the poison”? Well, The Secret is an overdose, and the doctor is a quack.
7
Newton
// Dec 22, 2008
How about the following novel thought: that the mentality created by “The Secret” largely contributed to the current economic crisis; and that an associated mentality existed in the 1920’s which led to the Great Depression.
This is from a book titled THE SCOURGE OF OUR TIME: The Demise of Critical Thinking in the Age of “The Secret” written before the economic collapse which argued that the mentality associated with it is economically dangerous as it nurtures a virtual consumerist psychosis. It also points out how the entire project is a well conceived scam and that such scams were also very prevalent during the 1920’s. The $50 billion Madoff fraud also being a particular example of this greater psychosis.
For more go to: http://www.newfort.co.za/scourgeindex.html (general);
http://www.newfort.co.za/scourge.pdf (economy) and
http://www.newfort.co.za/voodoo.pdf (science).
8
Chris
// Dec 22, 2008
Newton,
I read and enjoyed “The Scourge of our Time”. Personally, I would like “The Secret” to have all the respect it deserves–which is more than nothing, but less than it receives now.
I see “The Secret” as a set of mismatched abstractions, compiled without reason or rigor for nakedly selfish ends. Taken point by point, its statements are sensible–I could defend them myself. Put together…well, suffice to say they were not put together properly, from my viewpoint.
As for its classification, I might have chosen “Ponzi scheme”, but your “black magic” is apt.
9
Newton
// Dec 22, 2008
Chris,
Thanks for reading it.
And you’re right, it does not deserve the attention it is getting—but yet it did end up as an all-time bestseller, and still selling strong.
I merely used it to point out how these fraudsters operate–that is, by grossly distorting and omitting the facts. I personally think that this type of distortion is becoming an epidemic, but more alarming is that we are idly sitting by while fraudsters are operating with impunity — from the church to Wall Street to Washington – and is indicative of the underlying cause of the economic crisis.
10
Chris
// Dec 23, 2008
In regards to the financial catastrophe that has only just begun, I do not regard inaction as the problem. The problem is that we as a society are complicit, and we will do almost anything–pay almost anything, to anyone–to avoid acknowledging that.
We blamed the short-sellers, and lost. We paid to blame the banks, and lost again. Next, the Chinese?
And I wonder: who but the guilty would buy an injunction to “think only positive thoughts”?
11
Newton
// Dec 24, 2008
You’re absolutely right, we are collectively complicit and unless we change…
But the problem with taking responsibility for one’s role in a ghastly manmade apparition of this magnitude, is that acknowledging one’s own complicity, and then to do the necessary painful work to affect the required change, is just too damn awfully negative to contemplate… and thus it is just better to blissfully remain in the dark, albeit that it is shrouded by false positivity.
In my book, this is pure unadulterated cowardice.
True positivity as Barbara Ehrenreich pointed out in The Pathologies of Hope, after all, is about “ac¬knowledging the lion in the tall grass, the tumour in the CAT scan”, and then to devise one’s actions accordingly.
Another word for this is to be brave in the face of utter destitution.
Perhaps Obama will bring some realism to your country, but it again appears – based on the mass hysteria I’ve witnessed – that the expectation is that he will wave a magic wand once he gets into office, and the nightmare will be over… Poor guy, Americans are already setting him up for failure by their expectations.
Nevertheless he’s the only true hope we have at this time (even for me watching this unfold from the southernmost tip of Africa), and we may just as well hang on to any real hope we can find. That is, as long as it is backed up by a clear and cogent plan…
12
Newton
// Jan 17, 2009
Chris, I’m honored by your entry in Steve Pavlina’s (black Magic) forum. The comments are interesting and very revealing about the “Psychosis” which I referred to in my book. What is most revealing is that vociferous punting of magic ((black or white), and that there appears to be a pervasive belief–as I indicated this being similar to the period before the great depression.
Finally, there are two further links to consider. The first is a New York Daily News article titled The poison of positive thinking: How self-help culture helped create the credit crisis (http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2008/12/26/2008-12-26_the_poison_of_positive_thinking_how_self.html). Interesting, but I do think the author, Steve Salerno takes the self-help argument a little too far (at least in another book (Sham: How the Self—help Industry made America Helpless).
The other is a great audio which clears all the associated issues (http://selfhelpfraud.com/uploads/Anti-Secret_Teleseminar.mp3).
13
Mariana
// Apr 19, 2009
What about hard work? unforeseen circumstances? limited resources? If Bob sits on his sofa all day with a beer and starts wishing for champagne and a mansion, will it just appear? It’s an unbelievably rose tinted and fantastical message. But I suppose it is what most want to hear, hence it’s selling.
The Secret = Rhonda is laughing all the way to the bank.
On another note, I do think (on a realistic level) positive thinking does change our behaviour, and behaviour affects our interraction with others. But this is obvious!
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