"Two years ago, I heard about a therapist in Hawaii who cured a complete ward of criminally insane patients without ever seeing any of them," writes Dr Joe Vitale in the opening pages of his new book, Zero Limits: The Secret Hawaiian System For Wealth, Health, Peace, And More, currently selling handsomely on both sides of the Atlantic. "The psychologist would study an inmate's chart, then look within himself to see how he created that person's illness. As he improved himself, the patient improved." The tale defied medical science, and Vitale was sceptical. "It didn't make any sense," he says. "It wasn't logical. So I dismissed the story." And that's the end of the book.

Only kidding! Vitale is one of the co-authors of the record-breaking self-help phenomenon The Secret, which argues that you can use the "law of attraction" to visualise and thereby obtain the things that matter in life, such as cars and necklaces and large piles of money. So naturally he was intrigued by the events in the Hawaiian hospital, and ended up writing a 256-page book about them - though unfortunately, presumably due to space limitations, he seems to have been unable to include any solid evidence that they actually happened, other than the say-so of the therapist in question, who is an advocate of the ancient Hawaiian belief system known as Ho'oponopono.

So far, so head-smackingly ridiculous. But in one way, Vitale's book is only the logical extension of a principle that underlies swaths of self-help: the insistence that we're each entirely responsible for the quality of our lives. This idea is there, in modest form, way back in Dale Carnegie's How To Win Friends & Influence People. The Secret goes further, arguing that our thinking creates everything that happens to us (the book's primary author, Rhonda Byrne, is on record as saying that people get fat because they think fat thoughts). Vitale takes the next obvious step: we're 100% responsible for everything that happens, not only to us, he reckons, but to everyone else, too.

The intriguing thing about this is not that claptrap sells books, but that there should be such a market for the message that we've only got ourselves to blame. It's a fairly right-wing outlook on life - it denies that our socioeconomic circumstances can ever limit us - and taken to an extreme, of course, it's offensive, implying that the victims of abuse or murder or terminal illness have brought their fate on themselves.

Perhaps the appeal of books like these is that we realise, deep down, they're only about 90% claptrap. Most of us could do with taking more responsibility for how we experience our lives: doing so might make us realise that every day we toil in a job or relationship we hate is a day we've chosen to spend that way. That choice might still be the right one to make for now - the point is to recognise that it is a choice. You can take this to heart without believing in magic, whatever Dr Joe Vitale says. (By the way: his doctorate is from the University of Metaphysics in Arizona.)

oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com