The Law of Attraction and "The Secret": Quantum Pseudoscience

Almost every week there appears in the newspapers an opinion column or a letter written by some reader in which the popularity that individualism has been gaining in Western societies is criticized. The examples that are usually given to denounce the tendency to look at one's own navel are usually quite stereotyped: young people who do not give up their seats to the elderly or pregnant women, crowds who avoid meeting someone who asks for help, etc

Faced with this type of writing, it is difficult to defend individualism as a lifestyle, but, of course, there are people who are capable of it. After all, it is a philosophical position, totally debatable and that is normally taken as something that goes beyond logic and reason.

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

What is the law of attraction?

The law of attraction is the idea that everything we experience depends essentially 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 depending on 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 hard to get an idea of ​​what it really means, but in reality its implications can be summed up in two words: imaginary christmas.

Since the law of attraction is based on the idea that reality is made up of thoughts, the results that we can obtain depending on how we visualize our objectives, they can be material or, let's put it that way, imaginary. To act as if the expected results had been achieved is, in itself, to obtain the expected results. A fake triumph.

For example, thinking about fortune in the proper way can translate into obtaining literal fortune (money) or any another conception of the term that we believe has been given to us because we have acted taking into account the law of attraction... which means that the law of attraction cannot be demonstrated or used to predict anything at all. Didn't get what you were looking for? Maybe you haven't thought about it properly. Or maybe you did get what you wanted, even if you didn't realize it. Apparently, the law of attraction is always fulfilled, because it feeds on ambiguity. As 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 with 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 puts us in contact with a metaphysical entity that acts according to our will and our way of perceiving the things. And, well, since we are still suffering from the blows of the new age culture it is also very possible that this halo of oriental mysticism makes the product more attractive due to the fact that it does not have a scientific basis.

Criticism of the law of attraction

The law of attraction has the dubious honor of turning people from circles as diverse as physics, neurosciences, the philosophy or psychology, and this is for good reason. This belief It is based on assumptions that not only have no scientific basis, but also go against practically everything we know. thanks to 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, putting ideas on the table that have not been demonstrated and do not deserve any attention, the criticism that is made of it does not come exactly from these fields, but from the philosophy. And, more specifically, from the philosophy of science and epistemology. The point is not that the law of attraction does not serve to explain reality or to predict events, but rather that the ideas on which it is based are absurd to begin with and do not follow from anything resembling research scientific.

playing science

It is totally valid to put a lot of emphasis on the importance of motivate yourself to think about what you want to achieve and spend time and effort doing "mental exercises" to make our goals more achievable. There is nothing wrong with choosing to focus more on the mental and subjective factors than on the external objective factors that affect us in our day to day. 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 your ideas and priorities, it would not have sparked so much criticism..

But the law of attraction plays at pretending to be something similar to a scientific law, or at least part-time. As the law of attraction can be explained by theoretical formulations as ambiguous as they are diverse, it may cease to be something scientifically verifiable for a long time. the minutes in which someone puts his defenders on the ropes ("reality is too complex for measuring instruments", "we cannot limit ourselves to relying on classical scientific theories to understand everything", etc.) only to be so again when the danger has passed and the audience is gullible enough.

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

Let's not forget that the law of attraction cannot be fully understood if the question is not answered: who returns our thoughts to us in the form of consequences of these thoughts? Who recognizes the "positive vibes" and the negative ones to send us consequences in the same vein? The answer falls far outside the scientific realm..

In therapy

In addition to not having empirical solidity, the law of attraction is itself very dangerous: it infiltrates "therapeutic" workshops and strategies to energize work teams, making the people who are intervened follow instructions based on absurd ideas and may end up worse than how they started. Both the NLP as the proposals that are born from the humanistic psychology have been permeable to the law of attraction, and the belief that reality is essentially what oneself think feeds a philosophy so alienated and self-centered that it may be liked in certain political sectors and business.

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 the quality of life of people.

You're 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 that all those factors that we can consider as foreign to us have on our lives. ourselves and our will, and can give way to a mentality that blinds us to what happens to our around.

It is part of a type of thinking with perverse implications on a planet where the place of birth It is still the best predictor to know the health and wealth that a person will have throughout his life. life of her Under the law of attraction, social problems disappear as if by magic, but not because they are gone..