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Laws are not selective, unless you’re either rich, powerful, a celebrity , politically connected, or know someone who is when you break one.

Gravity is a law. It works 100% of the time with no excuses whether you like it or not.  In fact, you don’t have to buy a book or movie to see how it works; nor do you have to believe in it.  Gravity is a law of physics and doesn’t care what you think. It just does it’s ‘gravity’ thing and you cannot fight it and win.  Ever.  No matter what.

Attraction, the new age kind rather than the law of physics kind, is an emotional or electromagnetic force that does not occur consistently but appeals greatly to our greed, arrogance and inherent need to feel special.

If there was a Law of Attraction then the millions of consumers of the law of attraction and Oprah viewers worldwide would be manifesting every material desire for their health, relationships, careers and financial material wealth that the NYT #1 Best Seller, The Secret, promised them rather than there being a global recession.

Have you talked to a law of attraction believer lately?  How’s it working beyond believing results will arrive at some soon yet undisclosed time after years of practice?

Obama could mandate that every American citizen has to think better thoughts so we can attract our way out of economic crisis and have everything our hearts desire.  Yeah, an army of attractors, that’s the ticket.  Someone get that idea to the Treasury Secretary stat!

Good Emotional Marketing = Many Believers and More Manifrustration

Forget for a moment that the stars of The Secret are seasoned professional marketers who became even more rich and famous after inventing The Secret as a brand, and are about to unleash a sequel to get even more rich and famous.  (Cash cows have got to be milked, even in spiritual capitalism, right?)

Forget that the unfulfilled promises in The Secret just happen to be for the four things every psychic and marketer happens to sell you hope for – money, relationships, health and avoidance of death, lets look at the definitions of attraction from Dictionary.com that apply:

5.Physics. the electric or magnetic force that acts between oppositely charged bodies, tending to draw them together.

6. an entertainment offered to the public.

For #5 note that it says “oppositely charged” which is contradictory to the Secret’s formula of aligning yourself with what you want to attract.  So maybe thinking about poverty is the true road to attracting wealth. hmmm….

Also for #5, there is a “tendency” rather than a law (i.e. – a principle based on the predictable consequences of an act, condition, etc.: the law of supply and demand) though for #6 we’re getting closer.

It is practically a law that the public will pay to be entertained – especially if that entertainment makes them feel like they are special.

Instead, most people practicing the law of attraction techniques live in constant hope and manifrustration which ironically was the same state they lived in before buying into the marketing campaign for the law of attraction.

It Works Fine, You’re the One Who’s Broken

The scapegoat is that when the law of attraction doesn’t work there’s an easy answer; the law works, but YOU are the problem.  You’re not believing hard enough.  (You and the tens of millions of others who aren’t getting results.  Would you keep taking a drug with results like these?)

This is what bothers me the most.  It’s the same crazy making blame game that people get in multi-level marketing and sales rooms with no proven sales system.

Remember that you only need a handful of success stories (or actors reading their lines) on your infomercial to appear successful and deflect the fact that 99% of your customers didn’t lose weight with your plastic exercise device.

How many people do you know of who appear to have great relationships, material wealth, successful careers or great health?  Out of those people who enjoy the results promised by marketers of the law of attraction, how many do you think practiced the principals in The Secret?

Most successful people I know have been so busy taking action to create results that they didn’t have time to watch the Secret movie much less buy into it’s superstition.  A couple of them do have vision boards and the like, but they use those tools to remind them of what they’re working so hard to achieve while taking massive amounts of action.

Notice that the correlation of success to taking action, reviewing results and taking more action (very concrete steps) is much higher than the correlation of success to ‘believing the right thoughts’ – which is pretty damned nebulous.  Who determines what thoughts are right and whether they’re ‘right’ enough to attract what you want?

Note that magnets attract 100% of the time by being in proximity to what they naturally attract, metal.  A magnet needs to be close to it’s target (humans do this by taking action) and it does not attract anything else like sand, carpet or plastic (which would be what for humans?  Bad jobs? Mean people? Losing money?)

The Secrets to Success

Sorry Charlie, the secret to success is that there is no perfect formula to follow that anyone can sell to you.

See, there are also people taking tons of action and not getting results with or without playing The Secret game.  Heck, you may even know some or be one of them.  Look in the mirror real quick and check.

Why aren’t they succeeding?  Luck, timing, how they did in the womb lottery (being born in L.A. gives you a better shot, though no guarantee, at success than being born in Uganda), how rich and powerful their families were or weren’t, whether their talent was nurtured or not, who they did or didn’t  meet as they grew up, how industrious their attitude is, and so on.

Read Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success,  Geoff Covin’s Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else or Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets to really wake up to this.

Can the principals work?  Maybe.  Are they the principals most successful people throughout history have used?  No.  Will they work for you? Magic 8 ball says “probability doubtful.”   Will a little focus and a lot of action give you a better shot at achieving your goals? Probably.

A Mind is a Terrible Thing

The mind makes up meaning and is not very good at it.  That’s it’s job like a teenager’s job is to push their parents buttons.  That’s just how the wiring works.  Deal with it.

In hindsight, you will probably attribute your success or lack thereof to a misguided conclusion that getting up early, practicing the law of attraction, going to a good school or whatever explains your situation.  The truth is that many factors, including many we miss, contribute to our perceived failures and successes.

Do your thoughts create your reality? Well, thinking positively and consciously is never a bad thing, but we’ve all experienced both great and terrible circumstances without either consciously believing that we could or couldn’t experience them.

Did most of your happiest moments occur after intense practice visualizing them?  I didn’t think so.  How about your unhappiest? Uh huh.  And you’re moderately not-so-notable experiences?  Okay.

If You Believe in the Law of Attraction it Can’t Just Work for the Stuff You Like.

Are children molested, adults contracting cancer or drivers getting in car accidents because their thoughts attracted that experience?

Did the US Airways flight crash into the Hudson with no casualties because the passengers were attracting an exciting yet non-lethal experience in an airplane?

Or maybe it was because the pilot was skilled and had been flying since he was a teenager which enabled him to react in the best possible way to a random life threatening occurrence.

Or maybe we’ll never know because our brains are experts at making meaning out of the first possible plausible explanation it comes up with or is exposed to.

Did every single one of the 9/11 victims or the millions of Iraqi’s killed in the last 8 years envision those experiences to manifest them?  If some of those 9/11 victims would have told someone their visions of planes crashing into buildings maybe we could have prepared better.

Law of attraction? Nope.  Theory of attraction? More accurate by definition.

If it helps you to take better action in your life great.  If it’s another late night infomercial emotional crutch to provide false hope, not so good.

Ask your doctor if the law of attraction is right for you and then remember that results WILL vary.  You can count on that.

This book review was contributed by Lena Phoenix:

Kluge is a slang term for “a clumsy or inelegant solution to a problem.” In this new book, Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind, psychologist Gary Marcus argues that the human mind itself is a kluge, and then goes on to discuss how this explains why you can’t remember the name of that woman from your yoga class when you run into her at the movie theater.

The basis of Marcus’ argument is that evolution was working with the tools at hand when it whipped up the more complex parts of our brain and that the result—while generally functional—is often far from optimal. In each chapter, Marcus details various maddening brain systems ranging from memory to belief to pleasure and offers intriguing reasons why they so often fail to work as we would like them to. In the chapter on choice, for example, he points out that we often make highly irrational decisions when it comes to money because our mind is basically trying to wing it with a system that was developed not to deal with money but rather with food. Anybody who has ever found themselves staring at the result of some financial indiscretion will well understand that evolution is clearly still working out the kinks on that one.

Marcus is not shy about highlighting the fact that klugey nature of our minds does not bode well for arguments in favor of intelligent design. As he discusses how we adapted our existing physiology to deal with the increasingly complex demands of language, it does make one wonder why—if there was an intelligent designer involved—the adaptations to the larynx that gave us more control over our vocalizations also dramatically increased our chances of choking to death. It does seem like there could have been a better way.

Though this book does revisit some territory I was already familiar with, his fundamental premise was compelling enough that it added a new dimension of understanding to the things that frustrate me about my own brain. In his final chapter, Marcus makes a good argument that we all need to understand the sloppy shortcuts evolution made with our minds so that we can better defend ourselves against the tendency of advertisers, politicians, cults and the like to exploit the flaws in the system, and he concludes with a useful, 13-point listing of concrete steps we can take to counteract the built-in weaknesses of our klugey brains.

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Something very cool seems to be happening in politics.  It seems like the old politics of fear aren’t working as well as they used to in the current presidential election campaigns.  Maybe people have finally been so pummeled with lies in such a short period of time that they’re less inclined to swallow a mouthful of scare tactics.

Last week there was a lot of talk of how the McCain campaign was focused on making voters afraid of Barack Obama, even to the point of inciting crowds to shout racial epithets.  The thing is, this didn’t help his poll numbers and probably didn’t attract new voters.  It just made the rallies sound like elementary school bullies and their pals taunting and booing on cue.  This leads to the question of why today’s politics seem so antiquated and cartoon-like.

Lets be honest, if a little explosion happened that could be traced back to a terrorist, foreign or domestic, politicians may be able to work the shock doctrine to their advantage as they’ve done for decades.  We just saw the shock doctrine work with the mortgage crisis and stock market crisis allowing the government to use a problem-reaction-solution strategy to partially nationalize and acquire banks and insurance companies.  But even then, Americans may not be so quick to roll over. With the current economic crisis people seem to be more angry than afraid for a change.

It’s interesting how a company laying people off is a crisis for workers but a “restructuring” for management.  Is this an economic restructuring or a crisis?  Who is benefiting from the restructuring?

So why do scare tactics work better than issues in a crisis and in a political campaign?   Have you noticed that the more a person is married to a belief system (Democrats tax and spend or Republicans are the party for business)  the more zealously and easily he reacts to politicians and talk show hosts pointing fingers?  Interestingly, many times these belief systems run contrary to facts.

Seriously, why to adults act like mindless silly children at political rallies and conventions? Psychologically what is happening is that people are reverting back to being children who naively thought their parents were superhuman.  We see this is fundamentalist religious beliefs also, but that is too big a topic to include here.  The relationship is either like adults acting like young children treating the government like a parental god who can fix everything or adults acting like teenagers treating the government like an idiot parent who can do nothing right.

The main answer to the question of why people are so easily manipulated in politics is actually a biological one.  Under normal circumstances humans do the majority of their thinking in the frontal lobes of the brain where critical thinking is king.  But when we’re under stress we think from the rear areas of the brain where the limbic system rules.

The amygdala and other portions of the brain that have been our primary areas of thinking for much longer than the frontal lobe are ruled by emotion and the drive for short term gain.  Because of this, when we most need our critical thinking we don’t use it.

This type of thinking was great in primitive times when stress was related to food, shelter and sex.  In today’s world where our stress is over money, health and relationships, which have long term impacts, we’re predisposed to make bad decisions most of the time.  The fact that most people jump out of the stock market as it goes down even when historically we know that it goes back up and the golden rule is to buy low and sell high is the best example of this.  For more information on how and why our brains deceive us most often read the book Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind.

In respect to politics we may be in a time of ‘fear fatigue’ from constant warnings of real and imagined threats the last eight years.  In reality, we are hurt and killed most often by unperceived threats like car accidents than from perceived threats like terrorists. Finally, the politics of fear may be losing and the public may be gaining from this circumstance.

The next time a politician goes for your vote with scare tactics, race baiting, or fear mongering remember to stop, take a deep breath, relax and do a little frontal lobe critical thinking.  Remember how many times this record has been played before and how the leaders promising security did not deliver it or even raised your anxiety levels after they were elected.  Both you and your country will be better for it.