Is the Law of Attraction Infantile?

Getting what we want in an amoral world: our destruction

Do we always get what we fundamentally want, as long as our desires are heartfelt and not fantastic? Is the world forced somehow to cater to our cravings? Is the universe here for us and does that make us gods?

Ancient and Modern Daydreams of our Cosmic Importance

The ancient Jews used to think they always got what they deserved, because a just and wise, all-powerful deity was in control of everything and had chosen the Israelites to live righteously under a set of revealed divine commandments. The ancient Jews were either rewarded or punished, depending on how faithfully they kept to their covenant with God.

Eventually, however, the course of Jewish history became impossible to rationalize in that tidy theological fashion. The Israelites, after all, were conquered numerous times, held captive by the Babylonians and freed by the Persians. Jews witnessed the relativity of morality, since evidently some empires were brutal while others were enlightened and tolerant.

That skepticism seeped into the Jewish scriptures, into Ecclesiastes and the Book of Job where Job’s protestations about his unjust suffering force Yahweh to disgrace himself and appeal not so much to his wisdom or his benevolence, but to his raw power. If might makes right, though, the Jews weren’t favoured by God at all. Instead, the imperial Egyptians, Assyrians, or Romans would have been God’s chosen ones, and Jewish morality and rituals would have been so many excuses to avoid facing the appalling truth.

Much later, in our science-powered shelters from the amoral and absurd wilderness, some pampered optimists are so used to getting what they want and so discouraged from questioning their whims and impulses to consume that they’ve become smitten with themselves. This narcissistic consumer presumes that because she’s always getting what she wants in her upper-class, First World refuge, her desires must be worthy of the universe’s attention.

Symbolized perfectly by the monstrosity of President Trump, her narcissism leaps ahead to the mystical conclusion that everyone must be getting exactly what they really want, that the world exists to serve us. If you’d have thought the scientific foundations of our secular societies would have discredited such gratuitous personification of nature, you’d be overlooking the fact that science only empowers us, which is far from making us wise. Indeed, that technological empowerment has the opposite effect, since power corrupts the dominator. One form of that degradation of our character is our infantilization as we define ourselves by our actions, as domesticated consumers.

Dysfunctional Breaks on Scientific Empowerment

Science shows us how to obtain what we want, by explaining how the world works, whereas it’s the business of religion, philosophy, and art to question our desires. Science discredited the ancient religions by disproving the intuitive worldviews that sustained the illusory self-evidence of the religions’ theological projections.

Meanwhile, by striving to live up to science-centered standards of rigor and professionalism, modern philosophers were forced to abandon their foundational, quasi-satanic project of undermining fantasies at the cost of threatening the myths that enable us to cooperate in a civil order. Locked into its sterile, inauthentic, academic debates, philosophy is unpopular and sidelined.

As for art, modernity is infamous for killing that form of creativity, the death throes being the hypermodern outbursts of relativistic subjectivity in which everything goes and nothing really matters. Their talents duly devalued, artists themselves languish like captives tied to the social media that impoverish them by permitting the pirating and trivialization of their work. The few artists that succeed must excel in amoral business practices that are antithetical to the creative spirit.

Thus with religion, philosophy and art subdued, infantile consumerism proceeds largely unchecked.

The Amoral Theology of Consumerism

If we ask whether it’s true that we always get what we most want, even when the desire is secret or subconscious, we should reflect on how we often learn, rather, to live with what we get even though we can hardly take full responsibility for it.

Early on in life we may prefer something or hope for this or that, but we find we don’t work hard enough or are confused or unlucky, so we get something else entirely. Instead of succumbing to despondency, we adjust our expectations to suit the results of our failures and of the world’s blind indifference.

Out of pride, we may even take full credit for our lot in life and pretend we wanted that outcome all along, to avoid recognizing the world’s fundamental unfairness and inhumanity. Or we may soothe ourselves and retreat to the fantasy that the world is benevolent and would never go against our deepest wishes, even if we wish indirectly to harm ourselves or to fail and suffer.

It might seem obvious that some people are happy while others are not, but that would be a superficial distinction, because we’re highly flexible in making ourselves more or less happy, in the sense of being content with our position, by inuring ourselves to many shades of suffering and misfortune.

The more accurate reading is that some people are effectively more privileged, influential, and dominant than others. Take, for example, Jeff Bezos compared to a homeless man. Has the world rewarded each with what he truly wanted? Bezos worked hard to establish Amazon, and the metaphysical optimist will interpret any luck involved as being the world’s way of responding to the strength of Bezos’s ambition.

Perhaps the homeless man was never as ambitious, was more confused about what he wanted, or wanted all along to be marginalized because of his misanthropy. The world responds to that weakness of will or to those antisocial longings by turning him into a failure and a disgrace.

But notice how asinine this reasoning is. Amazon employs many people and is very convenient for its complacent customers, but how many companies have been ruined by that monopoly? How many products have to be manufactured by wage slaves to be sold on Amazon, because Amazon has contributed to the dwindling of the Western middle class?

Therefore, should Bezos be praised or condemned for his ambition? He became a billionaire, but if the world’s power to fulfill our wishes were to merit our use of that power, it should have been Bezos who became homeless, for entertaining the ambition that threatened the welfare of all the millions of people whose well-paying jobs his monopoly would have destroyed.

Likewise, if our science-powered civilizations are set upon destroying the world’s ecosystems due to our parasitic decadence, why shouldn’t it have been the misanthropic homeless person who was awarded Bezos’s fortune for daring to condemn a monstrous society?

Infantilized and Doomed by Scientific Empowerment

Suppose, then, the world does amount to something like Aladdin’s magic lamp — which is preposterous because our species of intelligent life is insignificant in light of nature’s blindness, dumbness, and unfathomable inhumanity. Still, suppose the world’s processes are somehow directed towards fulfilling our fundamental desires. That power would evidently be an amoral mechanism, since it would fulfill our wishes regardless of our ethical status.

And that’s the clue that this consumer-friendly form of pantheism is a convenient fiction for consumer culture. The amorality of science transfers to the technological applications that encourage us to think of ourselves as sovereign individuals who deserve to run our affairs with capitalism and with democratic republics. That amorality flows in turn to the metanarratives we spin to feel proud of our way of life and to ward off any discomfort at the suspicion that maybe, for long-lost philosophical or spiritual reasons, our way of life is wholly in the wrong.

One such myth we tell to keep us asleep with our daydreams is that the world always gives us what we want, like a magnet attracted not to metal but to human desire. Again, there’s nothing close to any such mechanism in nature. At most, we can inspire or persuade those around us to help us, but we needn’t succeed and may be enlisted instead to serve the interests of others so that we neglect our personal preferences. The incoherent myth at issue is pseudoscientific at best, but the point is that it serves modernity indirectly by failing to question the amoral institutions of technoscience.

From a purely scientific standpoint, the task is only ever to understand how things work so we can conquer nature and improve our collective living standard. Science has no business telling us what we ought to do with scientific empowerment, since that’s a matter for religion, philosophy, and art. But when we’ve become so spoiled by our domination of the planet that we discount those three breaks on the machine of “modern progress,” we find we gravitate to myths that tell us what we want to hear.

And children love bedtime stories.

As infantilized consumers, we fall for self-serving escapism and for a phony “secret law of attraction,” according to which the world can’t help but give us what we want. Children aren’t interested in questioning their motives, settling down, or wising up, since they only want to play. The equivalent fantasy of the Jinni of the lamp enables us to play as coddled adults, to excuse ourselves all too readily for the apparent injustices perpetrated by our “liberated” societal megamachines, as we turn our home planet into a pig sty.

But if we adults are virtual children, including the spoiled Millennials and other young adults who can’t bear even a stern look without “cancelling” its source, there will be no parents to arrive just in time to clean up our mess. Instead of pretending we needn’t question our impulses or strive to be wise, we should have applied the three breaks to progress in our war against nature’s indifference. In any case, not even the world as simplified by the consumer’s short-sighted, self-serving delusions will teach us what we should have been wishing for all along.

The Jinni in the lamp will allow devious parasites and rapacious predators like us to destroy ourselves.