Hoisting the "Law of Attraction" on its Own Petard

We continue to 'bone up' on this Law of Attraction stuff, with an eye toward maybe being able to effectively pull someone away from it if they have been drawn toward it at all. And a lot of people have, lemme tell ya.

My focus for now is to be able to quickly and effectively illustrate the self-refuting nature of the entire enterprise. Aprille and I are re-reading Rhonda Byrne's "The Secret" and I've come up with a nice way to illustrate this. And by the way, in my first post about "The Secret" I had Ms. Byrne's first name wrong. It's Rhonda, not Robin. My apologies.

Now let's get out of the way and let the "Law of Attraction" refute itself. I've taken 3 examples right from Rhonda Byrne's book and created a simple illustration. These are examples (page 14) that are used to illustrate what relationship "negative" thoughts have to events in your life. In my diagram, the negative thought is placed in a white thought bubble and the negative consequences of that thought (according to Rhonda Byrne) is in a black thought bubble.



Notice the pattern here. "I don't want _______." and "You get ________." Clear enough, right? And I've only given three examples. Byrne's book gives 9 examples on page 14, and they all follow this same template.

Now, the idea behind the Law of Attraction is that you must train yourself not to have these sorts of negative thoughts because those thoughts result in precisely what you don't want. But what kicks off a person's effort to train out such negative thoughts? Seems to me the only way to get that going is to have this thought:



But notice that this thought follows the same template as all the other thoughts! And according to the LoA, this will bring you exactly what you thought you didn't want, whatever that may have been. In this case, negative thoughts.



Now if the LoA works as advertised, the thought you had about not wanting negative thoughts will deliver to you the negative thoughts which you did not want, and those negative thoughts (bad haircut, catch the flu, lose your table, etc.) will deliver to you exactly those things. So, in effect, the "Law of Attraction" (if true) actually should produce nothing but negative circumstances in your life because there will be no escaping the negative thoughts which bring you all these negative circumstances.

In other words, you're really, really screwed.

Case closed.