Almost every week an opinion column or a letter written by
some reader criticizes the popularity that individualism has been gaining in Western societies . 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 that avoid crossing glances with a person asking for help, etc.

It is difficult to defend individualism as a lifestyle in the face of this type of writing, but of course there are people who are capable of doing so. In the end, it is a philosophical position, totally open to opinion and normally taken as something that goes beyond logic and reason.

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

What is the law of attraction?

The law of attraction is the idea that everything we experience depends in essence 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 in fact positive or negative energy that, once emitted, obtains a response according to their nature. This would allow us to reach certain goals or move away from them according to what we think and depending on the type of mental “requests” we make.

The law of attraction may be so absurd that at first it is difficult to get an idea of what it really means, but in reality
its implications can be summarized in two words : imaginary christmas .

Since the law of attraction is based on the idea that reality is shaped by thoughts, the results we can obtain depending on how we visualize our objectives can be material or, let’s say, imaginary. To act as if the expected results have been achieved is, in itself, to obtain the expected results. A triumph of the little lie.

For example, thinking about fortune in the right way can translate into obtaining literal fortune (money) or any other conception of the term that we believe has been given to us because we have acted according to the law of attraction… which means that the law of attraction can neither be demonstrated nor serves to predict absolutely nothing. Have you not obtained what you were looking for? Maybe you haven’t thought about it in the right way. Or maybe you got what you wanted, even though you didn’t realize it. Apparently, the law of attraction is always fulfilled, because it feeds on ambiguity. Like the Forer effect.

Word of Mouth and The Secret

One of the biggest media springboards for the law of attraction 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 hit that is still recommended by many people today . In the end, 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 things. And, well, as we are still suffering the tails of the New Age culture it is also very possible that this halo of oriental mysticism makes the product more attractive because it has no scientific basis.

The criticism of the law of attraction

The law of attraction has the dubious honour of turning against it people from circles as diverse as physics, the
neuroscience, philosophy or psychology, and this is for a good reason. This belief is based on assumptions that not only have no scientific basis, but 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 with scientific fields such as biology or psychology by 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 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 that, to begin with, the ideas on which it is based are absurd and do not stem from anything like scientific research.

Playing Science

It is entirely valid to emphasize the importance of
to motivate oneself to think about what one wants to achieve and to dedicate time and effort to perform “mental exercises” to make our goals more achievable. There is nothing wrong with choosing to focus more on mental and subjective factors than on the objective external factors that affect us in our daily lives. They are simply preferences about how to live life. If the law of attraction were something like a philosophical principle about how to order one’s ideas and priorities, it would not have unleashed so much criticism .

But the law of attraction plays at impersonating something like a scientific law, or at least a part-time one. Because the law of attraction can be explained by theoretical formulations as ambiguous as they are diverse, it can cease to be something that can be scientifically proven during the minutes when someone puts its defenders on the ropes (“reality is too complex for measuring instruments”, “we cannot simply rely on classical scientific theories to understand everything”, etc.) to become so again when the danger has passed and the audience is sufficiently credulous.

In fact, where the flirtation of the law of attraction with this coating 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 take refuge in it by using language that is as complicated as it is imprecise.

Let us not forget that the law of attraction cannot be fully understood if the question is not answered: who gives us back our thoughts in the form of consequences of these thoughts? Who recognizes the “positive vibrations” and the negative ones to send us consequences in the same tune?
The answer is far from the scientific field .

In therapy

Besides not having empirical strength, the law of attraction is in itself very dangerous: it infiltrates “therapeutic” workshops and strategies to energize work teams, making
people who are intervened on follow instructions based on absurd ideas and may end up worse off than they started .Both NLP and the proposals that are born from humanist psychology have been permeable to the law of attraction, and the belief that reality is in essence what one thinks about it feeds a philosophy so alienated and egocentric that it may be liked in certain political and business sectors.

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 people’s quality of life.

Are you 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 on our lives of all those factors that we may consider alien to ourselves and our will, and can give rise to a mentality that blinds us to what is happening around us.

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