Scam Psychology: The Secret's real secret is victim-blaming and reckless thinking

Recently, I came across MLM "inspirational" propaganda that permeated social media. An example is embeded below, along with my reply:

“But all the love in the world won't save a sinking ship. You have to either bail or jump overboard.” -- Sarah Dessen

— Kasey Chang (@kschang777) October 28, 2017

The original tweet is an attempt to reframe sunk cost fallacy as a virtue, when it's really a cognitive bias that leads you into making irrational decisions.

Think about it... Why is "working through" the pain is preferred way to resolve the pain, when it is just as easy to stop the pain altogether?  Yet that is clearly the implication of the original tweet... by implying that your setbacks are only temporary, and as long as you dedicate sufficient effort you will succeed.

This is unrealistic, dangerous and utterly reckless thinking, yet what MLMers call "positive thinking".  Positive thinking was repopularized recently because some author copied a 1910 book and added some pseudoscience to unproven pop psychology. And MLMers ate it up. 

Yes, I am talking about "The Secret".

First of all, the Secret is not new. As I said, it's a rewrite of a 1910 book with some new pseudo-science references to quantum physics that really made no sense. It is basically magical think: if you ask and believe, you shall receive. It's a rephrase of Bible Matthew 21:22, yet somehow this was generalized to anything in life.

Yet there are a lot of stuff you don't know that's in The Secret...  And they are things you won't hear about from the MLMers who don't want to read about "negativity", even if it's in the book that taught them about positivity.

Scam Psychology: Misconstruing quote from Zig Ziglar about Positive Thinking

Every once in a while, you'll see some MLMer pull out this quote as a reaction to criticism:

Positive thinking will let you do everything better better than negative thinking will. 

Remember, this is in reaction to criticism, not "general application", that the quoter basically threw the quote out, meaning "why are you so negative? think positive!"

Live video feed of Zig Ziglar speaking at the Get Motivated Seminar at the Cow Palace in Daly City, California.
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Some of the folks may have even gotten the source, Zig Ziglar, correct. Zig Ziglar is a almost legendary salesman and motivational speaker. He has left a lot of positive legacy when he died in 2012 after decades in the field.

I have a lot of respect for Zig Ziglar, which is why I need to point out that this is a total mangling of the original Zig Ziglar quote, and is taken out of context.

In other words, Zig Ziglar NEVER meant for this quote to be used in deflection of criticism. And to understand this, you need to read the ENTIRE quote by Zig Ziglar, which will prove it was taken out of context.

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