Like those plastic bathtub toys, I worry that most, if not all of you, will simply hand yourselves over to the capricious currents and trade winds of fate. Rather than take stock of your life and set out on a direct path with grim determination, you'll simply let life make its decisions for you.

It's easier that way.

The trouble is, you'll one day emerge from years of virtual passivity. I say "virtual" because it'll involve a little bit of interaction from you, but no more than a few mouse clicks or abbreviated keystrokes. You'll have spent who knows how long letting songs from I-Tunes and images from You Tube simply wash over your tree stump of a brain and your only communication with the world will be through abbreviated keystrokes.

You'll have created your own world, all right, but it's just a My Space world with some really fresh wallpaper. And while it's nice to have a theme song, the recording artist probably didn't have you in mind when he wrote it.

You're bored rats in a lab pressing a lever to get a treat, bored rats that inexplicably have delusions of grandeur.

Unfortunately, for most of you, when you wake up from this electronic torpor, you'll have missed your life. In text messaging language, you'll see that TARFU, 4EAE.

(By the way, I'm NIFOC right now.)

Of course, a lot of you have outs. A lot of you even know "The Secret," so you think you'll be okay. As long as you understand the laws of attraction, your imperially slim frame will be draped in Armani and propelled by BMW.

I now ask that those of you who know "The Secret" to put on your I-pod headphones or text message somebody while I address the others for a minute.

Are you "Secret" believers text messaging? Are you preoccupied? Good.

You see, I don't want to dis The Secret in front of the people who believe in it. Like any group that's swallowed any kind of swill-laden dogma, they get awfully defensive when you smite their gods.

"The Secret" started out as a movie, but it's festered and grown into a book, instructional DVDs, and a termite's nest of websites. The premise is that through the centuries, a select group of successful people shared a single belief that was responsible for their success.

The secret is essentially this: if you wish for stuff, you'll get it.

Really. I'm not lying. They invoke metaphysics and science and art and history to back up their assertions. They reason that laws of attraction rule the universe, and that if you simply think positive, you'll attract what you want.

Are you fat? It's all because you think of yourself as a fat person. Are you poor? Negative thinking.

Their team consists of a group of pop-psychologists and general hucksters who spout tidbits like this:

"Why do you think that 1 percent of the population earns around 96 percent of the money that's being earned? Do you think that's an accident? It's designed that way. They understand something. They understand The Secret, and now you are being introduced to The Secret."

Apparently, things like drive and intelligence and a whole lot of perspiration having nothing to do with financial success. It was just a case of "the man" withholding information and trying to keep you down.

As evidence, they list a number of Western Civilization's greatest thinkers who supposedly knew The Secret, men like Plato, Shakespeare, Newton, Hugo, Beethoven, Lincoln, Emerson, Edison, and Einstein. Never mind that we hardly know anything about Shakespeare, these mulyaks believe he was in on The Secret.

I've got a strong feeling that if Einstein were alive to find his name had been invoked by these hucksters, he'd spit so hard that his loogie would approach the speed of light, reach infinite mass, and wash the offending peckerheads away into a different space/time continuum.

It's The Da Vinci Code meets Tony Robbins. The book even includes faux parchment paper, quill and ink fonts, and wax seals. Sure! It's mystical! Written by hobbits or elves or magicians and sealed in a cave for centuries!

Horse piss.

If you flip open any random two pages in their book, they say virtually the same thing: Just think positive! You are a magnet! Think good thoughts and good things will be attracted to you!

Think all his is harmless? I know a college-educated girl who has printed aphorisms from The Secretand pasted them to the shaker bottle she carries in the gym. She explains that, "studies have shown the affirmations cause the molecular structure of the water to change and it becomes a kind of holy water."

Good God woman, if I paste affirmations on the inside of my shorts, it doesn't mean I'm going to pee wine and shit loaves of wholesome multi-grain bread.

I actually know secretaries around town who have, because of The Secret, tacked up pictures of fancy cars on their cubicle walls. They fully believe that by staring at the picture and thinking good thoughts about it, they'll get the car.

As long as I can remember, I've hung pictures of naked girls on my office wall and thought nothing but really, really, good thoughts, and it's yet to work. Nary a naked woman has plopped her firm buttocks down on my lap. Chad Waterbury came in drunk once and relieved himself in my Mexican Hat Plant, but that's as close as anything's come to being naked in my office.

And there are literally millions of these "Secret" people walking among us.

And sure, The Secret "helps" people, but I'm going to quote Karl Marx here and proclaim that The Secret is the opium of the people. People who believe in The Secret surrender responsibility. They don't need hard work or resolve or perspiration, The Secret will provide all. They're all plastic ducks that have cast themselves onto the mercies of the ocean.

If you're vulnerable to every false god that comes along, you're pretty much doomed to be a 7-11 clerk...4EAE. (That's "forever and ever" to you non-texting people.) And not even a dayshift 7-11 clerk. No, you won't be good enough for "the show." You'll work the night shift and when some punk slips a 12-count box of Bud underneath his parka, you'll look the other way lest he use your rectum as a bottle opener.

If you're prone to every false god that comes along, you're emotionally and intellectually weak. You're a plastic duck.