Getting burnt – Literally

If you have not heard, 21 people were treated for 2nd degree and 3rd degree burns this past weekend at a Tony Robbins Fire walk event.

Robbins is one of the best-known if not, the richest of motivational speakers out there in the world. He’s been featured on Forbes magazine dozens of times and he’s on a first name basis with folks like Bill Clinton. I’d see his infomercials on late night TV and to me, he reminded me of Jaws’ long-lost baby brother (the villain from James Bond flicks like “Mookraker”). Big teeth, big smiles and big promises. In my mind, that spelled Red Flag Alert.

Jaws

Separated at birth?

Of course you just had to buy his recordings and listen to them and watch yourself magically morph into a millionaire or billionaire overnight.  Robbins uses a lot of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) in his teachings and to me, there’s almost a subliminal mind programming element about that. I have no problem with people using NPL to break a bad habit like drugs or smoking or help get themselves out of an abusive situation. I do however have major issues with people using NLP for improving sales tactics.

This incident exemplifies one of the biggest issues I have with the New Age movement in general, that somehow if I just think the right way, I will attract all the abundance that the world owes me, that if bad things happen to me it’s because I deserved it because I wasn’t thinking the right way or sending out the right vibes. While trying to get people out of a victimization mentality, all it does is replace it with guilt and self-recrimination. It completely misses the point that there are outside forces at play in this world and that it really isn’t all about you. That bad things happen to good people all the time through no fault of their own.

I recently finished reading Chris Hedges most excellent book “Empire of Illusion”. He rightly pointed out how the New Age community is actually doing more harm than good to millions of people suffering out there. People need to wake up.

From CHRIS HEDGES
Transcribed from BookTV interview

Q: What do you think of Oprah’s role in the cultural and religious pursuit of personal wealth?

CH: Negative. Oprah peddles this fantasy that we can have everything we want if we just focus on happiness and grasp that we are truly exceptional if we dig deep enough in ourselves, and this is just magical thinking. It’s not just peddled by Oprah… I don’t want to pick just on Oprah. The Christian Right does it, Hollywood does it, Corporatism does it. Tony Robbins, self-help gurus do it… and it’s just a myth… a myth used to beat up on the poor.

There are no jobs in Camden, New Jersey. They used to make Campbell’s soup in Camden… even that’s gone… everything is gone. The school’s are dysfunctional with a gigantic drop out rate, the streets are unsafe… and to somehow tell a poor black child who’s not getting an adequate education, not being raised in an environment that provides safety and security and nurturing… and upon that, being tossed out into a city where there is no work, that they have to dig deep enough within themselves is really a way for us to turn our backs on the vulnerable and the poor. And to say, the cultural message is, “you are responsible for  your fate”… that’s just the way the corporate state wants it as it sheds job after job… as larger and larger segments of American society are reduced to a subsistence level without any kind of job security, without any kind of adequate health insurance… that it’s sort of their fault because they haven’t managed to tap into their inner strength… this is not only delusional, but in the end, I think, callous to the weak and the poor and the working class.

There should be heavy state interventions into impoverished areas in our inner cities and rural enclaves where poverty has become tremendous… I’ve spent a lot of time with military units, and the best military units never leave their wounded or dead on the field… even corpses, they still mean something, they’re not commodities although their utility to the unit is gone… and I’ve seen soldiers and marines crawl out and bring these bodies back… and these were always units with the highest morale and most effective fighting capacity. It was the units, who left their dead on the field and walked away, that rapidly disintegrated… and I think that’s what we’re doing as a nation. We need to rebuild that solidarity, that community, that sense that when you stumble and fall, I will reach down and help pick you up… if we are going to make it.

We have allowed corporate values, whether it’s reality television… reality TV is essentially about Corporatism… it’s about the celebration of values that are characteristic of psychopaths: self-aggrandizement, incapacity for remorse or guilt, betrayal… one builds false friendships then betrays them… for what? Fleeting fame or a little money, and it’s writ large throughout the whole culture. We have to begin to question our value system if we’re gonna make it.

One of the most important questions is: what are we going to do about all those people that we’ve allowed to be treated like human refuse?

From his book Empire of Illusion