The Secret Is: Don’t Worry, Buy Happy

The new evangelists have really shaped up their act. They don’t tell you to beat your wife, or kill the unbelievers, or give poison to Socrates or strike Laat and Manaat out of Mecca or tell Job to kill the unbelievers (err…at least only privately to George

Bush).


At first mankind was ignorant and believed in the wrong gods, then mankind became enlightened and started to believe in the right gods. Then mankind became a bit smarter and said no god. But that meant more and more people would ask questions and not do as they are told. So mankind had to be taught to believe in god again and ignore the really difficult questions of why we kill, why there is war, why doesn’t anyone care about global warming, or better yet call all such intellectuals negative thinkers. (Don’t you know, thoughts have frequencies and we will attract bad things if we think bad things?). So mankind has started to believe in god again. But today’s god is very different from yesterday’s god. Today’s god dons plastic and metal. Quite fittingly, in line with the times, today’s god arrives in CDs, books, videotapes, audio cassettes, URLs as an electronic signal. God-hood comes complete with a remote control, a catalogue, a set of options, giveaways, t-shirts, logos and a music theme. And oh, the Voice. The voice of peace, doom or pious self-righteousness—whatever gives you goose bumps.

The old evangelists can’t hold a candle to the new ones. The new evangelists have really shaped up their act. They don’t tell you to beat your wife, or kill the unbelievers, or give poison to Socrates or strike Laat and Manaat out of Mecca or tell Job to kill the unbelievers.(err…at least only privately to George Bush). The new ones simply tell you to place your order using your Visa or Mastercard over the phone, on the Internet or at the corner store or at the nearest store. There, there, don’t worry, buy happy.

Just a decade or two ago when capitalism was fighting the righteous battle with socialism, and I was growing up in Pakistan, Reader’s Digest used to be full of articles about how in a capitalist society people are free and prosperous. They have the freedom to believe in God, whereas in autocratic Russia, people can’t go to Church, in the world of good America, people can pray wherever they want, own property, wear good clothes, eat good food and curse the President.

Our home in a third world country (where we did all the work from scratch and still had time to have conversations, write letters, sew our own clothes, knit, make handicrafts, cook four meals a day, read the classics in two languages, appreciate poetry, play tennis, jog, weight train, wash clothes, solve Mensa puzzles, play with the dogs, cats, feed the chickens and ducks, wash the driveways and cars, help our grandmother with her millions small needs, laugh, watch TV, attend University and arm wrestle) was actually a critical outpost of political ideas.

On the one hand we were supplied with a ready list of books from Russia, written by wonderfully gifted writers with incredible critical thinking skills about life in Russia. On the other we had Reader’s Digest, with all the happy talk about American freedom. (Dostoevsky vs. Reader's Digest).

Guess what happened? Right there, in the middle of Karachi, home of the struggling refugees from India, an important idea was planted. Americans had fun, Russians did not. Eventually, the Russian Empire failed but American Freedom took over the world.

And now, when the buzz we’d get from a new thing is just a puff, when personal debt has reached obnoxious levels, when the price of a home is beyond the reach of most people, feminism is unaffordable and proper food a rare treat; when we literally have pretty much bought and sold it all, a new era of capitalist-spiritualism has taken over. Jesus, Shiv, Mohammed and Moses, dripping with mortgages, gadgets, leather and fake diamonds rush about in their SUVs. Zoom, click, chant, eat, bend your way to god. Here is the law of post modern relativity; goodness is success times 2.

Spiritualism and Capitalism are very odd bedfellows. The first is about listening to one’s highest self and the second is about convincing people to buy. In the strange melting pot of modern day culture, the two have become synonymous. Imagine Budha under the Bodhi tree, saying here is a twig with my name on it for you to keep. Imagine Budha writing his words on to a CD, giving it a jazzy title like ‘The Power of Now’, ‘The Secret’, ‘What the Bleep Do We Know’, ‘Wayne Dyer’s Choice of Stocks’, ‘Warren Buffet’s Secret’, putting a barcode and shipping it out by the millions. Imagination fails. Simply, because spiritualists are not evangelists. Evangelism is unique to capitalist societies, where terms like ‘marketing guru’, ‘Marketing VP-product evangelist’ denotes gab skills that brainwash and numb the mind, to the point that listeners come away converted, convinced, free from even one iota of disbelief.

One such master piece of spiritual transliteration is a popular film called ‘The Secret.’ It is now the talk of the town especially since the queen of capitalist evangelism, ‘Oprah’ has had it on her show. In the Secret, we are told, please think about what you want and it shall appear magically because that is the law of attraction. “Thoughts have frequencies” and, “three words, thoughts become things.” A woman with a crazed look screams, ‘it is like placing an order, place your order and believe it will appear.’ So we see a child thinking about a bike and his grandfather brings it, a woman ogling at a necklace and her man gives it to her, someone dreaming of a car and getting it.

Why is there such incredible appeal of the Secret?

There are many reasons, yet all of them can be summarized in a simple word ‘hope’. Hope is the real magic that makes miracles. The Secret caters to an audience reared to believe that the path to happiness lies in making money and having things but its message is the same as any spiritual message repeated down the ages in the guise of some religion or another. The packaging is success instead of Arab, Hebrew or Saxon superiority but the underlying message is hope and hope is what we all need. The Secret proved to me that capitalism is not just an economic system but a religion complete with mythology (the market knows everything), group affiliation (we live on a suburban hill with a view, what about you?), values (be on time), hierarchy (the boss is a white man) and gender roles (get thee a man soon, or else).

Another irony is the way subjective truths (perceptions) are twisted to become objective facts. I do not see much difference between the logic of the evangelists in The Secret and the people who send emails about how they can see the verses of the Quran in squash or signs of the moon separating as per Mohammed’s vision.

There are perhaps two kinds of spiritualists. The first are the few who can humbly face the truth, that our desires are our weakness and then tell us how to be authentic. The rest are the hypocrites who will lie, cheat and/or kill to fulfill their own desires while talking about the greatness of god.

The conflict of the spiritualists is also between Need vs. Desire. Come to think of it, perhaps Russia and America’s real war was also between Need vs. Desire.

Frankly, I had expected a lot more from The Secret. I had hoped it would be more thoughtful and better researched. But sadly it turned out to be Fox news rather than anything else. That is not to say that its ideas won’t work for you. I am sure that if you visualize it, you will get the car, the house, the relationship, the size of success that you want. The Secret tells us there is no hope of justice and tough luck if you don’t focus on what you want. Yet, don’t we also have a duty to the environment, future generations, our intellect, the world full of poverty, or even to the millions killed for the oil that powers our cars?

And, no, I don’t mean Oprah style queenly charity. I mean really caring about the limited resources of this planet and not living a life of material abundance but of spiritual and emotional abundance, whereby we share time, space and laughter while living simply.

So yeah, The Secret works but doesn’t actually do the job.