Master Key System Criticism: The Case Against and For

Criticism of The Master Key System falls into four main charges. Its central law, that thought creates conditions, is asserted rather than shown. Its science is borrowed and often outdated. Its logic can blame the poor and the sick for their own situation. And the wider positive thinking tradition it belongs to can push people to deny real problems, a case Barbara Ehrenreich made in Bright-sided (2009). Defenders reply that the course's exercises in attention and self-control have practical value, that it ties success to service, and that it should be read as a philosophy rather than a lab manual.

This page sets out both sides. It does not revisit the legends about bans and famous readers, which our page on myths covers. It looks at the substance of the teaching.

Claims without evidence

The course states its laws as facts. After describing how fearful or courageous impressions shape a person's "Mental Home," Part Five says, "These are psychological facts; there is no theory or guess work about these thinking processes." Part Twenty-Two says that "Many have eliminated chronic ailments in a few weeks by this method," with no names or records.

The main evidence offered is testimony. The 1919 St. Louis printing opens with letters from students and explains that they "have been selected from a very large number." One letter, dated 1918, says the course "should be taught in every school in the world. The effect would be that all worry, fear, disease and poverty would disappear from the Earth." Letters like these show that readers valued the course. They cannot show that the law of thought works as stated, because they come from satisfied students chosen by the seller, with no comparison group.

This was not only a modern complaint. In 1934 the historian A. Whitney Griswold, later president of Yale, published a critical study of the movement, "New Thought: A Cult of Success," in the American Journal of Sociology.

Borrowed science

Haanel presents his system as scientific. He draws on electrons, the ether, vibration, the nervous system and cell biology, and quotes physicists and biologists. Critics call this pseudoscience, and on the specific claims they have a strong case. The ether had been abandoned by physics, electrons do not fill space as a "Universal Substance," and there is no evidence that a thought can change "every atom in the body." Our page on the science in the course checks these claims one by one. The short version: some of Haanel's figures were accurate, but his conclusions do not follow from the physics he cited.

Blaming the sick and the poor

The sharpest moral criticism follows from the course's own logic. If thought creates conditions, then bad conditions point back to bad thinking. Haanel draws that conclusion himself. Part Twenty-Four says that "every form of disease, sickness, lack, and limitation are simply the result of wrong thinking." Part Nine, after a claim about the body rebuilding itself, adds: "If we build the defects back into our bodies year after year, we have no one to blame but ourselves." Part Three says, "The world is harsh only as we fail to assert ourselves."

On poverty, Part Seven says the law operates "to bring about poverty, lack, and every form of limitation for those who are continually entertaining thoughts of lack and fear." Read plainly, that places the cause of poverty in the mind of the poor person, not in wages, illness, discrimination or chance. Our page on money and success looks at the course's financial teaching in more detail.

Haanel did not write to condemn anyone, and he paired these claims with a message of hope: what wrong thinking caused, right thinking can change. Critics answer that the hope and the blame come together. A reader who stays ill or poor after following the course has only one explanation left within its terms.

Ehrenreich and the case against positive thinking

The best known modern critique of this tradition is Barbara Ehrenreich's Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, published in 2009 and in Britain as Smile or Die. Ehrenreich began from her own experience of breast cancer, when she was told again and again that survival depended on a positive attitude. Her chapters run from "Smile or Die: The Bright Side of Cancer" through "The Dark Roots of American Optimism" and "God Wants You to Be Rich" to "How Positive Thinking Wrecked the Economy."

In an extract published in The Guardian, she cites a 2007 review by James Coyne and colleagues in Psychological Bulletin that found the research did not support claims that psychotherapy extends cancer patients' lives. Her conclusion is that positive thinking "encourages us to deny reality, submit cheerfully to misfortune and blame only ourselves for our fate." Her book concerns modern positive thinking in general, but the reasoning she attacks is the same one found in the course: inner attitude as the master cause of outer events.

What psychology research adds

Experimental psychology has tested a few practices close to the ones the course teaches, with mixed results for the New Thought approach.

• Positive fantasies. Gabriele Oettingen and Doris Mayer reported in 2002 that expecting success and fantasizing about it have different effects, with idealized fantasies linked to less effort and poorer results. Oettingen's later popular work has its own critics, including James Coyne.
• Outcome versus process. A 1999 study by Lien Pham and Shelley Taylor found that students who pictured the steps of studying did better on an exam than students who pictured getting a high grade.
• Affirmations. A 2009 study by Joanne Wood and colleagues in Psychological Science found that repeating a positive self-statement helped people with high self-esteem but left people with low self-esteem feeling worse.

These findings bear on the visualization exercises and the affirmations of Part Nine. They suggest that how a person pictures a goal matters, and that pure wishful picturing can backfire.

What defenders point to

Defenders of the course make several points that the critics do not always address.

• It asks for work. The course is a training program, not a wish list. The weekly exercises, from the sitting exercise onward, build attention and self-control, and Part Three says, "We learn by doing."
• It ties success to service. Part Twenty-Three states that "The first law of success then is service, and this in turn is built on integrity and justice."
• Attention is real. Training concentration, calming the body and examining one's habits of thought are practices that many later traditions, religious and secular, also recommend.
• It invites testing. The 1919 printing describes the course as a key for those "broad enough to weigh the evidence, firm enough to follow their own judgment."
• It is history. The course belongs to the line of success writing that runs to Think and Grow Rich and the books of Rhonda Byrne, and it is worth reading as a record of the New Thought movement whatever one makes of its claims.

Weighing it up

The critics are strongest on facts. The course offers no controlled evidence for its central law, its science does not support its conclusions, and its logic can turn misfortune into personal failure. The defenders are strongest on practice. A disciplined habit of attention, a calm body and a focus on useful work do not depend on the metaphysics. A fair reader can keep the second without accepting the first, and can treat the course's larger promises about health and wealth with the caution its critics recommend.