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...Which also brings to mind the regressive nature of these groups. The fact is that they cultivate a type of childishness with the attendant grandiosity, dependence, impulsivity, and emotional immaturity. They reduce people. They make people foolish. Recall the book Joan Didion wrote about her descent into insanity when both her husband and her child were struck by fatal and serious illness at the same time?
"I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome" (Joan Didion).
She titled it "The Year of Magical Thinking." I think she'd probably rip the current "Secret" nonsense to shreds.
Ellen
great & intriguing insight, and so true about how these groups reduce people and make people foolish. Without that ability to reduce and demean, there'd be no suckers born or created and I wonder if that ability exists only because we as a species find growth and maturity so difficult to achieve and master that it is just easier to get 'reduced'. I don't believe in evolution much myself but for those that do, this behavior would seem counter-evolutionary for humankind.
I know for me sometimes, depending on the difficulty of a task at hand, I'd rather just fail at it than work hard and overcome the difficulty. Maybe the 'magical thinking' is just an extreme sort of avoiding responsibility and hoping against hope to turn the cold hard truth into an 'Alice in wonderland' experience. If a person believes in 'the secret', Alice in wonderland is only a thought away... :wink:
Is there a connection to this tendency and the dopaminergic (reward) pathways in our brains?
'I think 'The secret' survives only in the shadows of lazy human tendency for denial, but denial wears thin the longer it remains an [i:e27e07e713]only[/i:e27e07e713] comfort and refuge.