Howl

"Don't take refuge in the false security of consensus." -Christopher Hitchens

The phenomenon of Oprah's book club has been bothering me of late. For every Love in the Time of Cholera there is a The Secret or A New Earth. Such books as the latter two sow such unfounded hope. They take the grain of truth about the beauty of life and our innate ability to control our fate, for lack of a better word, and twist it into a marketing gimmick. And yet is it so bad to give hope, even false hope, to those who want it? And who am I to decide what is right for one to read and one not to read?

These books do not traffic in pure truth or logic. They deal the drug of wish fulfillment. They tell someone, without specifics, that the universe is created for them and that it is only their weakness that stops them. The Secret, for example, when taken to its logical conclusion states that genocide victims were at the wrong end of a machete or gas chamber, not because of their circumstances, but because they wished themselves unconciously to be in that position. This is a monsterous proposal, yet is accepted without criticism.

A New Earth proposes a wishy-washy, half ass interpretation of Daoism, ignoring the hard choices of balance and acceptance of cycle, instead focusing on how one can become better by, bare with me now, simplifying their existence.
Maybe it's the few beers I've ingested, but I find it hard to tell the difference between actively selling such books for profit, when I feel they can only bring destructive memes to an individual, with when I helped build weapons for the military. Death by shrapnel, or death by faulty, hollow words.