While objective, scientific knowledge scrambles to explain consciousness in purely biological terms (“the meat thinks”), subjective belief enjoys cultural and scientific predominance. And no wonder — the allure of subjectivity is freedom and power: if scientists can control the outcome of their quantum mechanics lab work by what they believe, then surely the rest of us can also believe the results we want into existence. In fact, isn’t it true that we create our own reality, either consciously or not? If so, then consciously is better, because that way we’ll get what we intend instead of something mashed together by our shady, suspect subconscious. And the good news is, we can learn and practice conscious creation. Put that to work, and we can do and have and be whatever we want! Nothing is impossible for us!
I.e, belief in belief is the apex of human consciousness and self-efficacy: it’s what makes the impossible possible. At least, that’s the self-help gospel, which also has deep roots in the New Testament. We’ll be looking deeper into both.
The Music Man lampooned belief in belief as practiced by con man Harold Hill’s “think method.” The show came out in 1957. Five years before, the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale published The Power of Positive Thinking, and twenty years before, Napolean Hill published Think and Grow Rich, in which he penned its most-quoted aphorism, “Whatever your mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.”
Americans in particular have had an enduring allegiance to belief in belief, ever since we got started 500 years ago. Since then, we’ve taken it to ever-increasing extremes:
“The American experiment, the original embodiment of the great Enlightenment idea of intellectual freedom, whereby every individual is welcome to believe anything she wishes, has metastasized out of control. In America nowadays, those more exciting parts of the Enlightenment idea have swamped the sober, rational, empirical parts. Little by little for centuries, then more and more and faster and faster during the past half century, we Americans have given ourselves over to all kinds of magical thinking, anything-goes relativism, and belief in fanciful explanation.
“Why are we like this?
“The short answer is because we’re Americans—because being American means we can believe anything we want; that our beliefs are equal or superior to anyone else’s, experts be damned. Once people commit to that approach, the world turns inside out, and no cause-and-effect connection is fixed. The credible becomes incredible and the incredible credible.
“America was created by true believers and passionate dreamers, and by hucksters and their suckers, which made America successful—but also by a people uniquely susceptible to fantasy, as epitomized by everything from Salem’s hunting witches to Joseph Smith’s creating Mormonism, from P. T. Barnum to speaking in tongues, from Hollywood to Scientology to conspiracy theories, from Walt Disney to Billy Graham to Ronald Reagan to Oprah Winfrey to Trump. In other words: Mix epic individualism with extreme religion; mix show business with everything else; let all that ferment for a few centuries; then run it through the anything-goes ’60s and the internet age. The result is the America we inhabit today.
Belief in belief soared to new heights in mega-bestseller The Secret:
“The Secret takes the American fundamentals, individualism and supernaturalism and belief in belief, and strips away the middlemen and most the pious packaging…. What’s left is a “law of attraction,” and if you just crave anything hard enough, it will become yours. Belief is all. The Secret’s extreme version of magical thinking goes far beyond its predecessors’. It is staggering. A parody would be almost impossible. It was number one on the Times’s nonfiction list for three years and sold around twenty million copies.”
Fantasyland: How American Went Haywire, a 500-Year History, Kurt Andersen (2017)
American culture’s embrace of belief in belief was supercharged in its earliest days by the Puritans, about whom Kurt Andersen concludes, “In other words, America was founded by a nutty religious cult.” Maybe that’s why The Secret distanced itself from those Christian moorings:
“The closest antecedent to The Secret was The Power of Positive Thinking in the 1950s, back when a mega-bestselling guide to supernatural success still needed an explicit tether to Christianity.
“In The Secret, on the other hand, Rhonda Byrn mentions Jesus only once, as the founder of the prosperity gospel. All the major biblical heroes, including Christ, she claims, ‘were not only prosperity teachers, but also millionaires themselves, with more affluent lifestyles than many present-day millionaires could conceive of.’”
The Secret also stakes its claim on the side of subjective science:
“There isn’t a single thing you cannot do with this knowledge,’ the book promises. ‘It doesn’t matter who your are or where you are. The Secret can give you whatever you want. ‘Because it’s a scientific fact.’”
But The Secret is just one example of the subjective good news. Believe it into existence — that’s how the impossible is done American, self-help, Christian, subjective science style. Never mind the objective, empirically-verified, scientific “adjacent possibility” approach we looked at last time — that’s just too stuffy, too intellectual. Belief in belief is much more inspiring, more of a joyride.
And that’s a problem.
More next time.
Iconoclast 