Suze (pronounced "Suzie") Orman, you see, wants to heal your scared, wounded inner Daddy Warbucks. Her message: "Money is attracted to people who are strong and powerful, respectful of it, and deserving of it." Our collective money trauma, our "shame, fear and anger," is what keeps us from reaching our goals. The subtitle of her new bestseller: "Creating a Life of Material and Spiritual Abundance." It's a good angle if nothing else. People have heard, "You gotta spend money to make money." They haven't heard, "Our responsibility in life is always to keep money flowing, for in the flow is purity and, ultimately, richness." The uplifting message is that by conquering your fears and living a full spiritual life, you can master your money; likewise, if you're doing well, you must have done something to deserve it. Which appeals to the spirit of the '90s, whose spiritually-questing wealthy can make one positively nostalgic for the '80s "short-fingered vulgarians"; if there's anything more disgusting than someone who wants to have everything, it's someone who wants to deserve everything. And yet Orman is not writing for billionaires; not even exclusively for guilty bourgeois PBS viewers. Orman is not the sharpest of writers, nor the best-credentialed -- a cutting Forbes piece shows she misrepresented her professional record as well as her story of a legal run-in with a former assistant that she trots out constantly (as I discussed in a 1997 column).

But she has touched a nerve in a market thick with beat-the-street primers that would bloodlessly detach money from messy life. Continuing a tradition of moral financial advice that runs back to Poor Richard and beyond, her mix of New Age liberalism (wealth flows from charity), victimology (hardships stem from childhood psychic wounds) and conservative empowerment-speak (anyone can better themselves with "courage" and "gumption") speaks strongly to a readership weaned on Oprah and CNBC.

Orman's cafeteria spirituality, expressed in "Courage," is part power of positive thinking ("Still the thoughts that say you can't because you can"), part religious pastiche (she refers to Hindu tradition, a monotheistic God and undefined "scriptures"). It sometimes sounds pleasantly daft ("introduce the vocabulary of richness into your relationships"); other times, it verges on bizarre pseudoscience. She asks, "Have you ever run into an acquaintance or friend ... and thought to yourself, My God, how old this person looks ... (This) may be determined in part by genetics, but you're also seeing the external effects of his impure thoughts, his impure words and especially his impure actions."

Somebody needs to show Suze Orman a Dorothea Lange photograph. Leaving aside disease, what she's describing here is often the outward manifestation of, among other things, poverty -- the best instant-aging aid known to man. Conversely, access to a health club, plastic surgeons and pricey emollients can go a long way toward covering the tracks of impurity.

Next page | Calvinism for the Gilded Age