“Outdated” according to people who do not know how to conduct experiments. If we’re talking about assumptions, I think assuming more entities than necessary to explain natural phenomena is what is outdated. By several centuries.
This anti-science bullshit is literally killing our planet.
It rhymes, so it must be true!
ETA: I need to emphasize this: Mitch Horowitz and Ferdinando Buscma, who have no scholarly training (as far as I can tell—they don’t seem to have any academic credentials), are asking us to give them money so that they may try to convince us that wishes come true, but only if you believe that they will come true. And if you don’t believe them, you are misguided by “scientific skepticism.” This is fucking insulting.
So, the Jews and Cambodians could have fixed their little problems with a lot of positive thinking, huh? This way, it’s so much easier to blame people who’ve been victims of genocide as not having tried to think their way out of the problem. And thus we have no responsibility for what happened to them.
Awesome. I’m so glad I live through all the 1970s version of this magical thinking crap so that we can ramp it all up again, and have a whole new generation of New Age suckers taken in by it.
In my PhD program, one of my office mates was the perfect person to share an office. Rarely there, quiet when she was there, no smelly food or anything, just ideal. About two months into the session we were making conversation and she told me she was a “Breathatarian” and believed that there were people who could harness something in the air and survive on that alone. No water, no food, nothing - just air. You had to be sufficiently advanced in the technique to do it, but it was possible.
This is a business PhD program at a major state university with actual standards - you don’t just pay money and get in. And actually given the very high number of religious nuts that I also had to deal with, it wasn’t so much the idea of believing in magic that threw me (or probably anyone else), it was picking THIS one as the hill she was willing to die on.
I asked a few questions and gamely tried to be polite and suggest that there was no physical way, etc. there was literally no way this would be possible. After a few minutes I finally realized it was pointless and then suggested that we agree not to talk about it any more. She was the best person to share an office with…as long as we were OK with agreeing that we did not have the same understanding of reality.
Stayed office mates until she left (sans degree) a year later. A very nice person and I wish(ed) her nothing but the best.
If anything these books promoted were true then why can’t we just wish them all into the cornfield?
I once had to be a production editor on a Lynne McTaggart book and it was pretty nightmarish on every level (I referred to it in the office as ‘that which shall not be named’). It was of the “Quantum stuff . . . therefore magic!” school. I recall even having a conference with the editor to explain that these things did not mean what she thought they did. I did get her to fix some really embarrassingly stupid mistakes, but I don’t really know why I bothered in retrospect.
Are we seriously repping The Secret now? Because it really sounds like we’re repping The Secret and that’s bullshit. Your thoughts have no direct influence over anything outside of your body. They might govern your actions, but if you have to resort to some kind of intentionally blind religion-like philosophy to self regulate, I suggest talking to a therapist rather than reading a book that suggests such things are normal.
Edit:
“I believe that thinking, in a direct, highly focused, and emotively charged manner, expands our capacity to perceive and concretize events, and relates us to a nontactile field of existence that surpasses ordinarily perceived boundaries of time and thought. This outlook is less a personal doctrine than a line of experimentation.”
“We live under the accidents of fortune, illness, forces of nature, traumas of the past, and on the waves of relationships with others, who may possess conflicting needs and aims. These are lawful facts of life. But the mind also wields a shade of influence — it is an influence that we don’t fully understand, but one that is accorded steadily greater credibility by generations of study in medicine, psychology, biology, and the physical sciences.”
Stop misusing science to sell false hope, you vulture.
It seems that a book like "The Secret” had the effect of over-exemplifying the ideas of mind metaphycs, as well as bitterly polluted the well of the conversation.
From what I can see, most of the people commenting here didn’t read Horowitz’s book (I did): he consciously addresses most of the frequent critiques (including “The Secret” and Barbara Ehrenreich often quote book). Plus, they use the typical rhetoric of mockery to dismiss the topic. Not cool.
Here are my 2 cents to the conversation:
Speaking of “magical thinking” (which is the wide unbrella under which one could fit the New Age positive thinking woo-woo), the philosopher Ken Wilber offered an elegant conceptual tool called the "pre/trans fallacy”. For Wilber, the pre-rational magical modes of thinking (exemplified by folk-magical practices, shallow New Agey practices, and literalist/fundamentalist interpretations of religion), should rightfully be considered vestiges of the evolution of human consciousness (and less developed modes of thinking). According to Wilber, we are currently in the midst of a more integral/holistic cultural mode, where reality is freshly understood in its inherent unity and underlying interconnectedness. For Wilber, this post-rational state may have commonalities with the pre-rational state of magical thinking, as in both modes the individuals perceive as having mystical agency on the broader reality. In pre-rational magical thinking, this agency comes in the form of superstitious rituals, omens, contact with spiritis, astrology, and the inaccurate and pseudo-scientific assumptions of magic. In the post-rational holism, however, this agency comes from the a deeper understanding of the the nature of reality. The “pre/trans fallacy” occurs when individuals operating in the rational, scientific stages of intellectual development look at post-rational states and mistake them for the pre-rational magical states. To the heardheaded rationalist, skeptics and materialist, both states represent mumbo jumbo or New Age thinking - which is accurate in the case of pre-rational magical thinking, but inaccurate in the case of post-rational states, which incorporate rational, logical, scientific and even postmodern thought within a wider holism.
Well, I propose that we spend a few moments focusing our thoughts on something of vital importance to see how this works out. Hmmm, “President Hilary R. Clinton, President Hilary R. Clinton, President Hilary R. Clinton…”
I don’t want to open my eyes to see if this worked!
As people here have discussed, the works polluting that well go further back and ranges wider than that one silly book. Yet another contribution to the literature is the last thing we need at this point in history. There are real problems to be addressed.
What did you expect on a site whose regular authors regularly debunk and mock snake-oil salesmen, televangelists, GOP politicians, and all manner of other charlatans? A commentariat that would welcome more “positive thinking” woo into the world under the BoingBoing brand?
At least you (and I assume Wilber) didn’t characterise it as a logical fallacy, because as you frame it there logic has nothing to do with it.
I’m all for philosophical discussions about the nature of reality. But casting “positive thinking” as a way to hack reality in order to get all the things you want is rubbish whether you’re talking about using a magical incantation, ayahuasca, positive thinking, or a hack that allows you to re-code the simulation we’re all living in. Belief in the power of these things can affect your own state of mind, sometimes to a strong degree, but they’re not going to magically transform the world around you. That takes actual work and effort.
That’s EXACTLY the point. Beliefs CAN have an effect, it’s not the ONLY ingredient. Maybe the word “magic” is over/wrongly used. And yes, “magic” DOES TAKE actual work and effort - which is something that Horowitz (and any serious advocate of these ideas) will tell you.
Empty rituals and mumbo-jumbo and “prayers and thoughts” and wishing really really hard are indeed work and effort, of the empty and wasteful variety. Note that I said “actual work”.
Reality seems right now to be anything but “freshly understood in its inherent unity”. From my desk, the world has seldom looked more divided.
I’m having a hard time visualizing the reality you’re describing. What would be an example of the post-rational state you reference? How do you integrate post-modernism with science? How will I know when I am thinking post-rationally?
