WHAKATE

Lambasting self-improvement authors for lecturing others rather than concentrating on developing their own talents is nothing new: Almost a hundred years after the United States’ iconic founding father Benjamin Franklin had penned his best-selling self-improvement tomes, Mark Twain would savage Franklin as one who had “prostituted his talents to the invention of maxims and aphorisms.”

Never one to mince words, Twain let his opinion of Franklin be abundantly clear during his long career as one of America’s most cutting satirists, making us wonder what he might have made of one of the more recent contributors to the long tradition of self-improvement.

Measuring Rhonda Byrne’s 2005 book The Secret (a piece in the “Secret” franchise, which started on DVD) against some of her predecessors in this long history, we have to agree that Twain would have had enough fodder for two lifetimes.

Benjamin Franklin, the Self-Improvement Author

Ben Franklin, that kite-flying printer and US founding father published not one, but two self-improvement works: Poor Richard’s Almanack – an annual calendar and compendium of sayings and adages on life – and The Way to Wealth.

While the concept of a best-seller did not yet exist in Franklin’s time, Poor Richard’s was published annually for more than 25 years, with print runs as high as 10,000 copies, surely qualifying it as such in retrospect.

Originally published in 1758 as the preface to Poor Richard’s, The Way to Wealth is still held in high esteem by finance professionals today and is widely credited as the United States’ first personal finance book.

Most of Franklin’s advice on building wealth revolved around frugality, hard work, hands-on business ownership and the dangers of debt. He provided a foundation for many of our current financial authors when he spoke on the subject: “Think what you do when you run into debt; you give to another power over your liberty.”

“Minty-Fresh Snake Oil” or “A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes”

A master of sarcasm, Twain never attempted to shred Franklin’s rhetoric, focusing instead on razing his personality. In his essay “The Late Benjamin Franklin,” published around 1870, he wrote that Franklin “was of a vicious disposition” and his works were “calculated to inflict suffering upon the rising generation of all subsequent ages.”

It takes only a short foray into Rhonda Byrne’s book The Secret to admit with a heavy heart that Twain might have been on to something. Published in 2005, the book promises to reveal a great “Secret” that has been passed down through generations of great thinkers and achievers.

Ludicrously simple once we cut through Byrne’s titillations and fanfare, the big secret is simply that like attracts like. This is what she calls the law of attraction. Negative thoughts and actions attract more negativity and the same goes for positivity. When we are rich, it is because we are having constant and positive thoughts regarding money and wealth; when we are in a car-crash, it is because on some level, we attracted our misfortune by thinking negatively. According to Byrne, this is true for everything and all situations, without exception.
“The law of attraction is a law of nature. It is as impartial and impersonal as the law of gravity is. It is precise, and it is exact” (Byrne 27). There are many parts of Byrne’s philosophy that unintentionally provoke laughter, none more than her attempt to manufacture a connection between her secret and quantum physics. What masquerades as a scientific method that eliminates chance from readers’ lives is nothing more than a book-length self-indulgent romp saying: The universe is one giant smorgasbord, quivering to serve You. Simply ask, and then truly believe you deserve that Ferrari. The best part is that unlike Franklin, who advocated pesky hard work and frugality, Byrne would have us just sit and do some hard day-dreaming. After all, sweating and scrimping creates bad feelings, which lead to negative vibes that sabotage your request to the universe!

While some of the book’s basic principles - love and accept yourself, think positive, set and visualize completed goals - are transparently helpful enough, others sink to shameless intellectual blasphemies. In the chapter called “The Secret and Your Body,” Byrne writes that it is not overeating that causes obesity (she dismisses this as “balderdash”), but the thought that food causes weight-gain (Byrne 58). And if you are near-sighted and middle-aged, your woes are at an end! Byrne has discovered that it is not aging that causes deterioration in eyesight, but the perception of a correlation (Byrne 134-135). Throw away your glasses and pretend you can see like you did back in your 20s (literally what the author claims to have done) and you will solve your eye problems for life. By the way, positive denial works wonders for cancer too.

If you think this is starting to sound extremely absurd, you’re not alone. In the words of Salon.com writer Peter Birkenhead, the whole thing adds up to little more than a “bottle of minty-fresh snake oil.” And what might they have said in the past?

Forced to read Franklin as a boy, Twain claims the result was a “state of general debility, indigence, and mental aberration.” If that is true, I am happy that more than a century of death protects him from Byrne’s works: Her phrases may have driven one of America’s wittiest writers to an early suicide, robbing subsequent generations of his literary masterpieces!

A Real Secret?

“Those pretentious maxims of his, which he worked up with a great show of originality out of truisms that had become wearisome platitudes as early as the dispersion from Babel” - One of Twain’s most biting criticisms of Franklin was that his sayings were either common sense or simply tired. Still, he himself admitted that “[Franklin] did a great many notable things for his country, and made her young name to be honored in many lands as the mother of such a son. It is not the idea of this memoir to ignore that or cover it up.”

It’s not that his methods for success didn’t make sense - it’s just that making sense and being rational is often insufferably boring. Twain couldn’t know that had he been in another time and place, he might have infinitely preferred pedantic common sense to the nonsensical feel-good franchise that only demean the reader.

In “Decoding ‘The Secret’,” Newsweek.com reporter Jerry Adler criticises Byrne’s presentation of the law of attraction as a well-kept method that influential people have long tried to hide. “What it doesn’t contain, though, is a secret,” he says of the book. “That should be self-evident to anyone who has ever been in an airport bookstore. The film and book are built around 24 ‘teachers,’ mostly motivational speakers and writers (dressed up by Byrne with titles like ‘philosopher’ or ‘visionary’) who have been selling the same message for years.“ Birkenhead is even more direct. “’The Secret’ unabashedly appropriates and mishmashes familiar self-help clichés.”

They may not have Twain’s sniper precision, but through these authors, his sentiments echo in the words. Self-improvement theory may have come a long way since Ben Franklin’s time, but writers like Byrne have done nothing to enrich our minds, choosing instead to get rich on peddling mind-numbing “philosophical” candy.

Author: Ilike Merey. Additional writing by Rochelle Broder-Singer

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