Oprahism: The religion of our time
People think they want Truth, but what they really want is reassurance.
Oprahism [1] is an increasingly dominant religion in many western countries. Sadly it epitomizes the avaricious secularization of spiritual pursuit prevalent in the United States. But due to that country’s influence, oprahism has now spread throughout the world. It is a religion founded upon surface analysis, disdain for detailed knowledge, and greed masked as ’spiritual growth’.
Ophraism’s adherents have arrived at the seat of their religion already saturated in the feel-good individualism foisted upon them by the hidden curricula of North American public schooling. That is to say, habituated to the distortions of Durkheim, Dewey, Maslow, Rogers, and their pedagogic followers. In effect Oprahism expresses the resistance theorist’s radical humanism - a background belief in the need to humanize and even de-rationalize all undertakings. All in the belief that by so doing they can create and justify social change by and through individual advancement alone. Oprahism thereby follows the Rogerian model and posits that experts do not and can not ’own’ knowledge and ’deposit’ it in the minds of individuals. Rather Oprahism suggests, like Dewey, that valuation of a priori knowledge is alone paramount. Therefore learning should never be praxitic but rather be largely centered in the self-referential, independent of action.
In other words, it practices a willful denial of reality.
In place of reality Oprahism projects a mass infantilism, whereby reality is never an impediment to personal desire. Failure to achieve this latter is always presented as a failure of individual spirit, or rather, of the individual herself: People are not successful because of the intervention of the real world, but because they lack merit, spirit, drive, or ’personal power’. People are poor because they lack the drive to lift themselves from poverty. It is their fault... And as with all such prosletised hierarchialism, this extreme emphasis upon the individual and individual merit is in fact little more than a convenient means of propagating the mythos that the material or societal success of the few is because of their ’merit’. That is to say, Oprahism is a Dunning-Kruger error, an updated Randian objectivism, writ large. Or more plainly - it is western Brahmanism - an excuse wherely the powerful justify the oppression of the weak.
Additionally all of this leads to the natural agglomeration of numerous messages of self-esteem, empowerment, self-discovery, and individualism - an ideal foundation for severe curtailment of knowledge. Which in reality is Oprahism’s result. For Oprahism is an anti-praxitic self-referential self-actualization of extreme narcissism. There is no “big picture” other than as seen through the eyes of the individual practitioner.
This because Oprahism (and its kin from neo-Advaita, American Zen, Christian fundamentalism, and the like) is antithetical to knowledge for its own sake. Knowledge is seen merely a means of social climbing, social success, individual satisfaction, or a means to “feel-good”. These are what matters, not awareness, not knowledge for its own sake or for the good of all. In Oprahism the larger economic, social, cultural, environmental, spiritual, ethical, or political consideration always takes second place to self-referential empowerment of the individual ego. Everything becomes subservient to individual struggle and success. Self-perception takes precedent over perception of self. The result? intellectual pursuit of truth is eschewed in favour of an almost hedonistic blindness wherein ’feel-good’ is synonymous with a content-free narrative of hedonistic narcissism. It is IMHO, little more than a thin effort to disguise a comprehensive policy of ’dumbing down’ by a dual mythos of individualization and individual advancement. All whilst espousing an overt cover narrative of spiritual attainment, intellectual growth, and "helping" others to see the world through the same lens.
Further, as with so many mass religions, Oprahism is a business. A business funded by a raft of very well paying corporate sponsors which flood a particularized and highly malleable target mass market with products. Products largely unfettered by government regulation, constraint, or objective appraisal. Oprahism pushes not only tangible products and goods, but services and therapy-of-the-day alleged “healing techniques” with little or no vetting beyond that of the market place and the perhaps questionable for-profit (whether in dollars or in adulation) opinion of the church elders.
“... they lost their fair qualities through being unable to bear the burden of their riches and began to appear ugly to those who have the gift of perception.” — from Plato’s Critias, 360 BCE
Finally, like so many similar religions Oprahism is a form of therapy designed for those aspiring to a better life, where said “better life” is synonymous with western-centric middle class values and lifestyle. With the postulant at the center. Hence it is a therapy of infantalisation toward a fantasy maintained in obfuscated necrosis by a for-profit religious narcissism. That such belief systems exit is a very sad comment upon the desperation underlying so many western endeavors whilst in the midst of riches and plenty unreachable by the majority of humanity.
Ophrasim does the opposite of what it preaches - it brings a self-congratulatory, anti-intellectual, dull embrace of personal profit in the guise of spiritual growth. Sadly it is the voice not of personal empowerment, but of its destruction. And it is unfortunately, the dominant voice of what is termed ’spirituality’ in the west.
[1] Please note that the term "Oprahism" used throughout this page is meant to apply to a belief system or Weltanschauung, and not any particular individual, service, product, group, cosmic warty thunder, or any entity, collective, corporation, or concept, imaginary, or otherwise.
