the problem with "new age"

There's a little place in San Francisco's Inner Sunset called Cafe Gratitiude (I'm sure I've griped about it before). Everything on the menu is vegan and uncooked. But this isn't what bugs me. What bugs me is that I can't just order a nasty, overpriced, "live" pizza made of sunflower and weed if I want to. Oh, no. I have to sit through a new age prosletyzing session given by my waiter. A while back one of the Cafe G's waiters asked me out, and while on our date, I asked him if all the gibberish and faddishness of the SF new age population (and Cafe Gratitude) irked him even a little. He said that he initially felt a little resistance, but then realized that it was just his jaded self that prevented him from subscribing to a life-affirming philosophy. Even though I didn't believe him (and he didn't get any pussy), I couldn't put my finger on where exactly my beef with the vegans and the Secret people lie...

Until last week. I had begun reading the book, The Happiness Myth. There was a line or two that spoke to world view. The popular belief among SFers nowadays is that what you bring is what you get out; if you think it's hard to make friends, it's not that in actuality it's hard, it's that some part of you is creating a world where people aren't open to being your friend. Or, say, if you have cancer. It's not because various multinational corporations are shamelessly dumping waste into our water supply and genetically modified food pervades our diet. It's because we didn't think away the cancer hard enough.

But the truth of the matter is that that is utter bullshit. To say that the world is only what we make of it, that our misfortune is created by ourselves, is to presuppose that the world and its various societies don't have structural problems, like racism or ableism, sizeism or ageism, preferences toward beauty and youth, or heirarchies based on class and wealth. Would the Secret make any sense in Iran? Would you turn to a 11-year old girl with a fistula and tell her that this was all part of some great plan that would bring her to reconciliation with the universe?

That is to say, this New Age is yet another scapegoating mechanism for the well-off. They're tired of not taking care of the rest of us, but they're also tired of feeling guilty about it. All they want to do is sit back on their prayer bench, have some nice organic wine and realize that the world isn't as bad as they made it. Is that so wrong?