The Secret of self-help

A new book on how to get whatever one wants in life is simplistic and stupid

There are few books that are considered to be a publishing phenomenon and yet get scathing reviews, like the one that is to follow, the way The Secret has.

The Secret, written (and I use the word loosely) by one-time television producer Rhonda Byrne, is part of the flood of self-help books that have invaded bookstores over the past few decades in an attempt to make humans (who, I personally believe are congenitally unhappy, and malcontents) happier, richer, slimmer, prettier, younger and god knows what else.

All of us want this all the time and more, and since not many do get all that they want out of life, enter:authors of these detestable self-help books. The reason these books are detestable is that they are so badly written that they can make anyone who has studied English beyond class II weep inconsolably. Like I did when I tried to "read" The Secret.

The book starts without any warning with a series of quotes from various "visionaries" and other such evolved souls who have all contributed to this book. And the book, throughout, is written so much in this byte-friendly way that you don't need to read the book sequentially at all. The font and the way there is a bullet point single page summary at the end of every chapter (again the word "chapter" is used in the loosest sense of the word) makes the book idiot-friendly.

If it's not high literature, it's also not deep philosophy or an in-depth understanding of the human mind and how to conquer it to be able to live happily ever after. For, unhappiness in life is not a function of lack of material comforts or even an absence of problems, but how one is able to handle and overcome them. And that, as many spiritual thinkers have concluded, is a difficult path to walk, which requires great self-discipline and the ability to ask questions that go beyond the obvious.

Since no one has the time and many may not even have the bandwidth to do what spiritually awakened masters have tried to communicate to the ordinary human, the quest for happiness has reached a sorry state of silly books like The Secret which honestly trivialises that quest to the point of stupidity.

There are gems like, "You are like a human transmission tower, transmitting a frequency with your thoughts. If you want to change anything in your life, change the frequency by changing your thoughts," which frankly take the reader to be a real moron.

And to take that analogy of a transmission tower, what happens when the transmission experiences a breakdown? Who will fix that and how? Another book, maybe titled, The Secret of Fixing A Broken Transmission Tower?

The problem is that this book, even for the genre that it falls under, is just too basic and simplistic. Byrne and her team of contributors (the usual self-help suspects) don't even attempt to answer the obvious questions that can be asked and must occur to anyone who even for a moment wants to believe in this idea.

For instance, if it was so easy to control your mind to think in a particular way, why did those who spent years in the pursuit of that control (and that even includes Arjun in the Bhagavad Gita) talk of the immense difficulty in doing so? And Arjun had Krishna, no less, to guide him through the treacheries of the mind. And if truth be told, Byrne is no Krishna.

Self-help books are problematic not because they give people hope, but because the arguments and the solutions that they offer are usually stupid and simplistic: think a particular way and it will happen. God, if only life were that simple.