HEIDEGGER AND THE LAW OF ATTRACTION

The Law of Attraction is all around me. I suppose I must have attracted it. I hear it from friends, co workers, coaches, and Oprah; I see it in books and websites and newspaper articles. I raise questions, and people object, sometimes quite vigorously. I suppose most people who believe will continue to believe despite what I say. And those that don't believe don't need to hear what I have to say. Nevertheless, let me write down my thoughts, if only for my own sake. I wonder what Martin Heidegger, one of the great European continental philosophers of the 20th century, would have said about it.
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The Law of Attraction is about always being able to get whatever you want , if you focus your thoughts and energies and actions enough. Like attracts like. You create your own reality. There are apparently no limits. You're fully responsible for your own reality, because you yourself created it.
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I turn to Heidegger (despite his associations with Nazism) and my own life experience to help me reflect. I believe Heidegger would have dismissed The Law of Attraction as an incomplete and even harmful doctrine. In Being and Time, Heidegger coined a new word to describe human beings: Dasein, which translates to Being-in-the-World. We are always situated in the world, and this particular world that he refers to is not the physical world of rocks, trees, and buildings. This world is the unseen, interior network of cultural backgrounds and linguistic systems that shape and limit what we think and how we think. It influences how we act in a nightclub, how we behave at a funeral, how we vote, how we make sense of what someone else is saying, how we simply live.

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If I am a subject, then this world is the intersubject, or intersubjectivity, because it is about the connections between subjects. We're embedded in this world and can't escape it. In Heidegger's words, we are thrown into it. This interior intersubjective world affects the other world: the exterior physical world around us, the world I can see and measure with scientific instruments. It influences everything from how we design and erect our buildings and bridges to how we create art. The reverse is true as well: our ideas and designs for bridges must take into account the laws of physics and how molecules bond. And Heidegger tells us both of these worlds - the interior intersubjective world and the exterior world - impose limits on what and how we can be.
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Let's take a look at my own experience. The worlds I live in present me with a range of careers I can choose from. I can be a musician, but only certain types. I can be a symphonic musician, a jazz musician, a rap musician, a world music musician, a composer, an arranger, an instructor, perhaps some sort of combination of the above, but I can't normally be a wandering minstrel of the Middle Ages. That is just not something that even occurs to me!
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In the early 21st century, being an orchestral musician means competing with dozens for a single position, unlike the situation some thirty to forty years ago. Too much supply and not enough demand. And this means not all of us can win orchestral jobs. Even highly qualified musicians have trouble winning jobs. Now according to the Law of Attraction, all of us could eventually win orchestra jobs if we just learned to used the Law. This is just not borne out by the facts.
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Furthermore, if anyone could use the Law of Attraction to be richer, why are inequalities of wealth and income increasing? The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (http://www.policyalternatives.org/) reported that between 1998 and 2006, the 100 highest paid Canadian CEO's increased their compensation by 201 %. In 2006 those CEO's were paid 259 times higher than the average Canadian worker. Am I to believe that the Law of Attraction only works for the rich?
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I believe Heidegger would have concluded the Law of Attraction to be not only false, but even harmful to society. First, it can blind people to the very real inequalities hard wired into our Anglo Saxon neo-liberal version of capitalism (see Jim Stanford, Economics for Everyone). Reality being harsh, it's easy to see why so many people turn to an ostensibly empowering but misguided fantasy, instead of organizing politically for a better share of the pie. It gives people false hopes. In addition, people might end up blaming the poor for being poor, the sick for being sick, the marginalized for being marginalized. Finally, it could exacerbate the documented growth of narcissism in our society by encouraging people to believe that they create their own reality (see Twenge and Campbell, The Narcissism Epidemic). I believe it was Ken Wilber who said: "You don't create your reality, psychotics do."
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We are constantly testing our personal freedom against the world's limits. I'm reminded of the serenity prayer of Reinhold Neibuhr:

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.
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No doubt the Law of Attraction has helped some people improve their lives, mostly in the first world, not the third, and that is no surprise: the techno-economic bases are drastically different. Positive thinking and optimism can definitely help. But make no mistake, there are limits that our world imposes on our thinking and actions--some overt, some subtle, some very difficult to spot. Unfortunately the Law of Attraction doesn't teach us the wisdom to know the difference.
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The positive side is that all of this shows a real spiritual hunger in N. American society. We have normally been given the choice between conventional religion and secular humanism/atheism. What a terrible choice to have to make! The result is that many people turn to dozens of New Age/ New Thought spiritual approaches, one of which is the Law of Attraction. Unfortunately many of these approaches are incomplete: they lack any real understanding of intersubjectivity that continental philosophy has brought to the world in the mid to late 20th century. I believe that supplementing these New Thought approaches with post-modern studies of intersubjectivity (e.g. Heidegger, Foucault, Habermas, Gadamer) could lead to more intellectual rigour. Then we would begin to have a more rounded spirituality, on the way towards an integral spirituality (Ken Wilber: Sex, Ecology, and Spirituality; Integral Spirituality).