How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions. Francis Wheen

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СКАЧАТЬ ‘You and I are nothing but saints in the making’ – is intensified by his mellifluous Anglo-Indian cadences and the mellow sitar riffs that often accompany them. Those who want the full-immersion experience can book in to the Chopra Centre for Weil-Being in La Jolla, California – dubbed ‘Shangri-La Jolla’ by the irreverent – where their ‘profound personal transformation can be customised for stays of 1–7 days’. The Centre grosses about $8 million a year, though Dr Chopra himself no longer attends to customers personally. ‘It wouldn’t be in the best interest of patients,’ a spokeswoman said, ‘because of his writing and speaking engagements.’ Perhaps wisely, Deepak Chopra MD ceased renewing his California medical licence after the annus mirabilis of 1993 and therefore cannot be held professionally accountable for the consequences of his advice. ‘I don’t consider myself a religious or spiritual leader,’ he has said. ‘I consider myself a writer who explains some of the ancient wisdom traditions in contemporary language.’ And for contemporary rewards, one might add: his speaking fee is about $25,000 per lecture. One corporate client, Atlantic Richfield Co., employed Chopra for almost a decade to teach employees how to find their inner space. ‘We were going through a lot of changes at the time,’ a company spokesman explained. ‘We needed to impress on people the need to look at the world differently.’

      Harold Bloom argued in his 1992 book The American Religion that many Americans are essentially Gnostics, pre-Christian believers for whom salvation ‘cannot come through the community or the congregation, but is a one-on-one act of confrontation’. Clearly this does not apply to the more traditional churchgoing masses, but it suits solipsistic New Agers seeking the ‘inner self – and high-achieving materialists who like to think that fame and riches are no more than their due, reflecting the nobility of their souls. Chopra is happy to oblige: ‘People who have achieved an enormous amount of success are inherently very spiritual … Affluence is simply our natural state.’ Vain tycoons and holistic hippies alike can take comfort from Chopra’s flattery (‘You are inherently perfect’), and from his belief that the highest human condition is ‘the state of “I am”’: since we reap what we sow, both health and wealth are largely self-generated. Following this logic ad absurdum, he argues that ‘people grow old and die because they have seen other people grow old and die. Ageing is simply learned behaviour.’ Demi Moore was so impressed by this aperçu that she named him as her personal guru, announcing that ‘through his teachings I hope to live to a great age, even 130 years isn’t impossible’. Chopra himself, rather more cautiously, says that ‘I expect to live way beyond 100.’ Why the longevity formula failed to work for Princess Diana, with whom he lunched shortly before her death, remains a mystery.

      Other famous admirers have included the former junk-bond king Michael Milken, Michael Jackson, Elizabeth Taylor, Winona Ryder, Debra Winger, Madonna, Mikhail Gorbachev, Hillary Clinton and Donna Karan, who expressed her gratitude by supplying the dapper doctor with free designer suits. Alas, as Karan looked to the east her business went west: she was replaced as chief executive of her own company in the summer of 1997, under pressure from investors who feared that a growing obsession with herbs, healing crystals and reincarnation was blinding her to the financial imperatives of running a publicly traded corporation.

      For celebrities – and many others – Chopra offers a metaphysical justification for smug self-absorption, and requires no effort or sacrifice. Gita Mehta summarised the trade-off as long ago as 1979, in her excellent book Karma Cola:

      The westerner is finding the dialectics of history less fascinating than the endless opportunities for narcissism provided by the Wisdom of the East … Coming at the problem from separate directions, both parties have chanced upon the same conclusion, namely, that the most effective weapon against irony is to reduce everything to the banal. You have the Karma, we’ll take the Coca-Cola, a metaphysical soft drink for a physical one.

      The comic writers Christopher Buckley and John Tierney attempted to satirise the phenomenon in their book God is My Broker: A Monk Tycoon Reveals the 7½ Laws of Spiritual and Financial Growth (1998) – supposedly written by one ‘Brother Ty’, a failed, alcoholic Wall Street trader who saves his soul and earns a fortune after joining a monastic order devoted to the great Chopra. Brother Ty’s ‘laws’, though amusing enough (‘If God phones, take the call’; ‘As long as God knows the truth, it doesn’t matter what you tell your customers’; ‘Money is God’s way of saying “Thanks!”’), serve only to confirm that the genre is beyond parody, and probably immune to mockery anyway. Is Brother Ty’s second law –‘God loves the poor, but that doesn’t mean He wants you to fly coach’ – any more hilariously absurd than Chopra’s advice in Creating Affluence: ‘B stands for better and best … People with wealth consciousness settle only for the best. This is also called the principle of highest first. Go first-class all the way and the universe will respond by giving you the best’? And Brother Ty’s seventh law –‘The only way to get rich from a get-rich book is to write one’ – does not seem to apply to piss-takes. Although the publishers of God is My Broker claimed that it was ‘destined to be a cult bestseller’, it remained all cult and no bestseller. Chopra himself continued to flourish, heedless of the sniggering sophisticates. Named by Time magazine as one of the hundred top Icons and Heroes of the twentieth century, he is reported to earn more than $20 million a year from his spiritual business empire. No coach class for him.

      In style, as in content, the sub-genres of self-help literature had much in common. Jonathan Lazear’s Meditations for Men Who Do Too Much, aimed at workaholics who burned themselves out by reading Keep Going for It and The Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun, had clearly bought its wisdom off the peg from the same retail chain patronised by the management gurus, Statements of the Obvious Inc. ‘Our families, our partners, our extended families, our children will always be there for us if we can make the decision to be there for them’; ‘We need to learn to pace ourselves’; ‘Wealth doesn’t really translate to happiness’; ‘Trusting no one can be as dangerous as trusting everyone’; ‘We can learn from our failures’; ‘No one is happy all of the time.’

      The gurus who were chortling and whooping all the way to the bank might have questioned that last assertion. Kenneth Blanchard parlayed the success of The One-Minute Manager into an income of $6 million a year from videotapes and lectures promoting his message that ‘people who produce good results feel good about themselves’. In the late 1990s Stephen Covey’s Utah-based consultancy had annual revenues of more than $400 million, and employed 3,000 people in forty countries to spread his gospel of ‘Principle-Centered Leadership’. Anthony Robbins, who once worked as a school janitor, had earned about $80 million – some of it from books such as Awaken the Giant Within and Unlimited Power, but mostly from his talent for persuading sober-suited executives to shout ‘Yes! I can do it! I will lead not follow!’ while Tina Turner’s ‘Simply the Best’ blasted out of the PA system. John Gray had an ‘income-stream’ of $10 million in 1999, partly from 350 Mars and Venus ‘facilitators’ who paid him for the privilege of distributing his books at monthly workshops. By the end of the century, self-help publications were worth $560 million a year, and according to the research firm Marketdata Enterprises the total income of the ‘self-improvement industry’ in the US – from seminars, personal coaching, CDs and videos – was $2.48 billion. As Newsweek reported, ‘With slick marketing and growing acceptance by mainstream Americans, authors like Covey, Anthony Robbins and John Gray are amassing fortunes that rival those of Hollywood moguls.’

      Why would mainstream Americans pay to be told what they knew already? One of Blanchard’s satisfied customers tried to explain. ‘What he’s saying is a lot of common sense and not really new,’ the executive manager of B. H. Emporiums, a Canadian retail chain, conceded. ‘But if I pay him $15,000 to say it, my general managers and my people listen. If I’m paid to say it, my people don’t listen in the same way.’ The mega-stars in this branch of showbiz may have had nothing original to impart, but they knew how to put on a performance. Anthony Robbins, a six-foot-seven Superman lookalike, would ask his audience to take off their shoes and socks and walk across СКАЧАТЬ