Believing that like attracts like directly blames the victim. Blaming the victim is something called victim precipitation. This term was coined by a man named Marvin Wolfgang who studied homicide situations, perpetrators, and victims in the Philadelphia area in the 1950s . The Fifth Edition of the text Criminology defines victim precipitation as ‘opening oneself up, by either direct or subliminal means, to a criminal response.’ The example given by Wolfgang is:

During an argument in which a male called a female many vile names, she tried to telephone the police. He grabbed the phone from her hands, knocked her down, kicked her, and hit her with a tire gauge. She ran to the kitchen, grabbed a butcher knife, and stabbed him in the stomach.

Victims, in the instance of victim precipitation, are not innocent. They did something to provoke the criminal act. In fact, in this instance, the man was committing criminal acts of abuse and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. But, he’s the one that ended up dead. Let’s do one more example:

Two men get into a verbal disagreement. One man becomes so ticked off at the other that he gets in his face and begins to use curse words and derogatory slang. The other matches the level of verbal anger. The first now pokes the second with his finger and then pushes the other’s shoulder. The second says he’d better not do that again. The first then smacks him across the face. The second takes a great deal more escalating verbal and physical abuse and then punches the first in the stomach. The first man eventually dies due to internal injuries.

That was a real news story from just a few years ago, and things like this happen in varying degrees all the time. The person who just wouldn’t leave well enough alone eventually - as people say - gets what’s coming to him/her. Does it make the end result correct? Perhaps in instances like the above where you’re acting in self-defense. But, what about the kid who is just tired of all of the rumors and verbal abuse at school that takes a gun and kills his tormentors? That’s victim precipitation, too. The victims caused the situation by torturing someone until they felt they needed to act.

It’s not the same with thoughts, though. These are all things that take place in the natural world. Unexpressed thoughts exist in your head. And even if the Law of Attraction - summoning something specific to you merely by thinking about it - is true, that doesn’t make it true to the statement ‘like attracts like.’ If you’re melancholic, that doesn’t mean you’re going to draw a bad day to you. It might mean that you view the world negatively and choose to only see the parts of your day that didn’t go as planned and forget the rest. That’s called a self-fulfilling prophecy. You expect something so much, you internalize it, and then you either become or see that very label that you were thinking.

These laws…they’re not laws. They’re theories, hypotheses, untestable notions. Sure, there might be data that comes along that gives a much stronger correlate to some of them, but these magical laws have not been proven true. The academic journal Scientific American put out an article in June of 2007 that said this:

The brain does produce electrical activity from the ion currents flowing among neurons during synaptic transmission, and in accordance with Maxwell's equations any electric current produces a magnetic field. But as neuroscientist Russell A. Poldrack of the University of California, Los Angeles, explained to me, these fields are minuscule and can be measured only by using an extremely sensitive superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) in a room heavily shielded against outside magnetic sources. Plus, remember the inverse square law: the intensity of an energy wave radiating from a source is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from that source. An object twice as far away from the source of energy as another object of the same size receives only one-fourth the energy that the closer object receives. The brain's magnetic field of 10-15 tesla quickly dissipates from the skull and is promptly swamped by other magnetic sources, not to mention the earth's magnetic field of 10-5 tesla, which overpowers it by 10 orders of magnitude!

Basically put: even if your thoughts escape your skull, they’re not going anywhere. They’re not going far enough away to get to the Ferrari dealership to pick up your new unnecessary mode of transportation. They’re not entering your bosses mind.

Pagans and magical folk these days say that the Law of Attraction is merely what magical practitioners have always known: our thoughts manifest reality. Our thoughts become the things around us. But, sick people aren’t sick because they thought about being sick. The gorgeous aren’t gorgeous because they thought about being gorgeous. If our thoughts manifested our reality, if what we thought truly formed our universe, wouldn’t there be a world full of swimsuit models and cover boys running around living in multimillion dollar homes without a care in the world? There would be no disease, no hunger, no oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, no hole in the ozone, and we’d all be vibrating with ecstasy over being our own personal Gods.

Hate to burst the big ol’ Law of Attraction bubble, but it just can’t be. And, there are other kinds of magic besides the kind that attracts. There is repelling magic such as banishment and impelling magic such as bindings. What about those? I’m not attracting a person by sending them away from me?

I’ll tell you what, though. I’m going to keep wishing for an evergreen money tree that has an endless supply of hundred dollar bills and blooms gold coins daily. If you hear that I’ve moved to a big house by the ocean some place warm, you’ll know I was wrong about the Law of Attraction.