藍色情懷

有個打著賺錢秘方招牌、並已成經典的行銷騙術，就是教人寫本如何賺大錢的書，然後以郵購方式販賣。當買了書的凱子收到書一看，會發現這個秘方是：寫本如何賺大錢的書，然後以郵購方式販賣。

　　An old yarn about a classic marketing con game on the secret of wealth instructs you to write a book about how to make a lot of money and sell it through the mail. When your marks receive the book, they discover the secret—write a book about how to make a lot of money and sell it through the mail.

與此類似的鬼祟伎倆，可在伯恩及一批教人自助的宗師編寫的書《秘密》（The Secret）及拍攝的同名DVD中找到。由於歐普拉（Oprah Winfrey）的背書，迄今該書及DVD總加起來已經賣了超過300萬份。其中的秘密是所謂同性相吸的「吸引力法則」：從你身體散發出來的正面想法，有 如磁能一般，會以任何你所想像的形式回歸，好比說金錢。書中告訴我們：「任何人錢不夠的唯一原因，是由於他們本身的思想把錢給擋住了，讓錢進不來。」該死 的肯亞窮人，你們別那麼怨天尤人就好了。該影片的促銷預告片裡，充斥著自負虛榮的求財真言，像是「我能點石成金」、「我是吸錢機」，以及我最喜歡的一句： 「此刻還不斷有更多的錢在為我印製。」在哪裡印？影印店嗎？

　　A confidence scheme similar to this can be found in The Secret (Simon & Schuster, 2006), a book and DVD by Rhonda Byrne and a cadre of self-help gurus that, thanks to Oprah Winfrey's endorsement, have now sold more than three million copies combined. The secret is the so-called law of attraction. Like attracts like. Positive thoughts sally forth from your body as magnetic energy, then return in the form of whatever it was you were thinking about. Such as money. “The only reason any person does not have enough money is because they are blocking money from coming to them with their thoughts,” we are told. Damn those poor Kenyans. If only they weren't such pessimistic sourpusses. The film's promotional trailer is filled with such vainglorious money mantras as “Everything I touch turns to gold,” “I am a money magnet,” and, my favorite, “There is more money being printed for me right now.” Where? Kinko's?

預告片裡有一票衣著光鮮的快樂名流向觀眾打包票，《秘密》根據的是科學：「科學已然證明，正面想法要比負面想法強大個上百倍。」沒這回事。「人體生 理製造疾病，為的是給我們反饋，讓我們曉得自己的觀點不夠平衡，愛心及感恩之心也都不足。」那些癌症病人難道不知道感恩嗎？「你體內所含的能量，足以提供 一整座城市的照明之需達一週之久。」沒錯，如果你可以利用核分裂，把體內所有的氫原子轉變成能量的話。「我們的思想不斷發出磁性訊號，並將相同的訊息吸引 回來。」不過以磁鐵而言，異性的正極與負極才會相吸。「人的每種思緒都有特定頻率如果你不斷重複某種思緒，你就會把該頻率發射出去。」

　　A pantheon of shiny, happy people assures viewers that The Secret is grounded in science: “It has been proven scientifically that a positive thought is hundreds of times more powerful than a negative thought.” No, it hasn't. “Our physiology creates disease to give us feedback, to let us know we have an imbalanced perspective, and we're not loving and we're not grateful.” Those ungrateful cancer patients. “You've got enough power in your body to illuminate a whole city for nearly a week.” Sure, if you convert your body's hydrogen into energy through nuclear fission. “Thoughts are sending out that magnetic signal that is drawing the parallel back to you.” But in magnets, opposites attract—positive is attracted to negative. “Every thought has a frequency.... If you are thinking that thought over and over again you are emitting that frequency.”

人腦當中的神經元使用離子流在突觸間傳遞訊息時，確實會產生電性；根據馬克士威公式，任何電流都會產生磁場。不過，美國加州大學洛杉磯分校的神經科學家波爾德瑞克（Russell A. Poldrack）向我解釋，人腦磁場極其微小，只有在嚴密隔絕外在磁場的房間內，使用極其靈敏的超導量子干涉儀（SQUID）才檢測得到。再者，我們還 得記住平方反比定律：從某個源頭發出的能量波強度，隨測定點與源頭的距離平方成反比。兩個大小相當的物件，其中一個與能源的距離是另一個的兩倍，它所接收 到的能量就只有後者的1/4。人腦的磁場強度在10^-15特士拉左右，並從腦殼向外快速遞減，很快就被其他的磁力源給蓋過了，更不要說地球本身的磁場有10^-5特士拉，那是腦磁場強度的10^-10倍！

　　The brain does produce electrical activity from the ion currents flowing among neurons during synaptic transmission, and in accordance with Maxwell's equations any electric current produces a magnetic field. But as neuroscientist Russell A. Poldrack of the University of California, Los Angeles, explained to me, these fields are minuscule and can be measured only by using an extremely sensitive superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) in a room heavily shielded against outside magnetic sources. Plus, remember the inverse square law: the intensity of an energy wave radiating from a source is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from that source. An object twice as far away from the source of energy as another object of the same size receives only one-fourth the energy that the closer object receives. The brain's magnetic field of 10^-15 tesla quickly dissipates from the skull and is promptly swamped by other magnetic sources, not to mention the earth's magnetic field of 10^-5 tesla, which overpowers it by 10 orders of magnitude!

在一切條件相同的情況下，正面想法當然要比負面的好，只不過在現實生活裡，不論你的想法有多樂觀，其他條件就從來不會完全相同。這一點，你只要問問 納粹集中營裡的倖存者就可知道。如果說吸引力法則是真實的，那麼猶太人，連同被屠殺的土耳其亞美尼亞人、被姦淫的南京中國人、被殘殺的美國原住民，以及被 奴役的非裔美國人，不就是咎由自取了？上述最後一個例子，對照歐普拉在其網站對《秘密》的支持，更讓人心酸：「你貢獻給宇宙的能量，無論好壞，都會照樣回 到你身上。也就是說，你每天所做的決定，就造成了你生活的環境。」難道說非洲人當初製造了讓歐洲人奴役他們的環境？

　　Ceteris paribus, it is undoubtedly better to think positive thoughts than negative ones. But in the real world, all other things are never equal, no matter how sanguine your outlook. Just ask the survivors of Auschwitz. If the law of attraction is true, then the Jews—along with the butchered Turkish-Armenians, the raped Nanking Chinese, the massacred Native Americans and the enslaved African-Americans—had it coming. The latter exemplar is especially poignant given Oprah's backing of The Secret on her Web site: “The energy you put into the world—both good and bad—is exactly what comes back to you. This means you create the circumstances of your life with the choices you make every day.” Africans created the circumstances for Europeans to enslave them?

歐普拉，請你收回對這本可笑廢話的支持，一如你在發現佛雷（James Frey）的回憶錄《百萬小碎片》只是「百萬小謊」後所做的舉動，並請告訴你的廣大追隨者，成功來自相當程度的努力及創意，一如當初你所做的。

　　Oprah, please, withdraw your support of this risible twaddle—as you did when you discovered that James Frey's memoir was a million little lies—and tell your vast following that prosperity comes from a good dollop of hard work and creative thinking, the way you did it.

【本文轉載自科學人2007年7月號】