The “Law of Attraction” Is Cruel

How to empower change without blaming the victim

The popular metaphysical philosophy of the “law of attraction” promises empowerment for all. After all, if all you have to do to attract good fortune into your life is vibrate at the right frequency, you can do that. You have the power to change your life.

However, this empowerment comes with a dark side. The “law” goes like this. You deserve all the good things that come into your life because your vibrations attracted them. Therefore, you deserve all the bad things that come into your life because your vibrations attracted them.

The wealthy and successful people preaching the law of attraction do so because it makes them feel better about what they have. Their success is not due to blind luck and random chance. It’s because of their superior vibrations! They deserve everything they have!

Whether they mean to be cruel or not, however, they’re engaged in blaming victims. Consider someone who has been hit by truly awful blind luck and random chance. This person is already feeling terrible. Now, you want to load them up with more shame and blame, because their bad vibrations caused their situation?

Did she kill her husband?

At a recent party, a widow who knows I study metaphysics confided her secret fear to me. Since she was a small child, she’d had a dread of a particular disease. Ever since she first heard of it, it terrified her. She feared that she would get it, and die from it.

Her husband contracted that disease. And after a long, agonizing period of suffering, he died from it.

She wanted to know, did she kill her husband? Had her fear of this disease manifested it in her life?

People who follow the law of attraction would say, yes. The strength of her emotional reaction to this disease was so strong that she created it in her life.

What would telling her that do? Take someone who was still grieving, and pile on further guilt. It’s not like she could do anything to fix it. She couldn’t manifest her husband returning to life in full and vibrant health, no matter what her vibration was like.

All that answer would do is destroy any chance of eventual happiness she might have.

A kinder interpretation

A purely rational, scientific interpretation of the world might try to brush it off as a tragic coincidence. Since the fear still lurked in her, years after her husband’s death, clearly she was not accepting the coincidence explanation.

To satisfy her, any explanation had to address three things: why did she respond so strongly to the disease as a child, why did her husband die from it, and most importantly, what part did she play in this?

According to Albert Einstein, time is illusionary. Everything happens all at once, and “the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

That means, the moment when she learned of the disease and the moment when she was devastated by it killing her husband were connected. The violent grief and consuming emotion of her husband’s death at the hands of this disease echoed into her younger self when she heard the name of the disease.

Imagine that moment. She hears the name of a disease, and suddenly feels agony, suffering, nearly unbearable pain, and the conviction that her life is over. What is she to make of that?

She’s a child. She couldn’t possibly understand the adult love of a spouse, where you feel their suffering as your own. The idea that you would rather die yourself than watch the person you love suffer and die.

So naturally, she comes to the conclusion that the disease is terrifying and likely to kill her.

What part did she play in this tragedy?

That explains her childhood reaction and her husband’s death. But it doesn’t address the most important question. What part did she play in her husband’s death? Why did she have a terror of this disease, if her terror was not what attracted the disease to her husband?

I believe that her part was to convince him to take the disease seriously, and to fight it.

He had slightly unusual symptoms at the beginning, which led to his doctors initially failing to diagnose the disease correctly. If she hadn’t been so terrified of the disease, she would not have pushed him to get a confirming diagnosis. He would have been happy with the initial diagnosis, until much later when it was obviously wrong, and too late to do any good.

She also pushed for anything that could be done to stave off the disease. He ended up getting experimental treatments out of the country, which he wouldn’t have without her support. They didn’t cure him, but they gave him a few more good months.

Because she had a terror of this disease, he learned that he had it earlier, and took aggressive measures to increase the time he had before it consumed him. He was able to live long enough to hold his first grandchild. He was able to ensure that all of his family members were adequately taken care of. He took quality vacations with friends and family, and made the time count.

Conclusion

The “law of attraction” works in one direction only. Your emotional and mental vibrations now attract your future. If that future contains bad things, it’s your fault for having bad vibrations.

Einstein’s theories of time and relativity, on the other hand, allow for bi-directional cause and effect. The emotional and mental vibrations of a bad thing in your future can affect your present.

It’s not your fault that something bad happens in your future. However, it’s still up to you how you deal with that bad thing.

Does fear of it paralyze you and prevent you from doing anything? Are you like someone in a Greek tragedy, so desperate to prevent your fate that you actually cause it?

Or does it prompt you to take a second look at something you’d otherwise brush off? Does it make you fight harder or dig deeper than you normally would?

In other words, something bad happens. That could be fate or just random chance. But your reaction, whether at the time it happens or leading up to when it happens, are up to you.

You have the power to make the best of the bad situation, or allow the bad situation to get the best of you.

That’s true empowerment.

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