Now the point isn't its all Oprah's fault–after all, it's hard to blame the world's problems on one celebrity. That said, Oprah does provide a good illustration of how common sense can make you believe things unsupported by hard evidence. The implications of this are important, not least for understanding why we continue to live in a world more interested in ourselves as individuals than organising together for social change.
Human beings are storytellers, and storytelling or narratives are important ways we make sense of our everyday reality. Oprah Winfrey is one of the most popular and well-known storytellers in the West, and probably the world.
Her stories carry a lot of weight in how many people come to understand things like happiness, health and work.
At first glance, Oprah's stories do not seem problematic. On the contrary, they often seem like keen insights and practical solutions for how to navigate the world and feel empowered.
For fans of Oprah, many of these stories are familiar and inspiring. There is the oft-told account of how Oprah herself made it and overcame insurmountable odds.
There's the story Oprah tells that she is doing God's work. There are Oprah's stories about her many philanthropic efforts and giving back. There are Oprah's many stories about the power of any individual to overcome any obstacle in their life.
Oprah is also great at empathy and making viewers and listeners of her stories feel they are supported and loved by her. Her storytelling style is quick to confirm how hard life is for many. And she always acknowledges the stresses, anxiety and uncertainty of this world to her fans.
Oprah's message, whether it is about your job, love life, personal relationships, dreams or whatever else, emphasises that the solutions you are looking for come from within you, and if you don't believe Oprah, she offers you her life, her motivational anecdotes or some other life guru's tale as evidence.
The moral of any Oprah tale is if you listen to what she says, and follow the attitude she has, you can improve your life too.
If only life were that simple. The reasons for crime, the issues of dead-end jobs, the social destruction of poverty, the depression of alienation, the solutions to ecological degradation, and the problems of massive and historical economic inequalities across Western societies cannot be solved by Oprah's suggested individual strategies for success. And never will be without collective action.
Oprah helps to conceal the real reasons behind societal problems and rather than asking for people to use their individual powers to come together and work for political change her solutions ask individuals to modify themselves rather than modifying the capitalist system.
There is no acknowledgement that most of the social and economic obstacles people face in a class-based society have little to do with mental attitude or working harder and everything to do with history and biography.
Instead, Oprah suggests your lot in life is about your own shortcomings and outlook rather than anything else.
No matter that Oprah's message is accepted and believed by hundreds of millions of people around the world, it is still a boldfaced lie. Yet, with so many believers, Oprah's prophecies and the story about the world her industry sells should worry us all.
Essentially Oprah and other prophets like her, for all their good intentions, are helping to turn their fans into depoliticised and atomistic individuals who no longer recognise the world's problems as structural and systemic as most social science demonstrates it is, and instead believe that in fixing themselves the world around them will change.
Or put another way, instead of wanting to change the class system, Oprah fans believe the solution to society's problems comes from better adaptation to the class system.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of social and political change under capitalism. By becoming hollowed out political subjects, disinterested in voting, politics, collectivism or the truth about global inequalities, we are seduced by ideology and storytelling, to protect the wealth and lifestyles or those with immense privilege; those already with wealth.
Oprah in this sense is still an angel as her fans believe, but she is an angel on the side of the powerful–the side of capital. She seduces her fans with simplistic stories playing to the ideas they want to believe about the world–say meritocracy and fairness–rather than hard truth.
She makes fans believe the reasons why certain opportunities and life outcomes are denied and beyond them is because of failures within themselves, even if such explanations are incorrect and misleading.
Oprah is not the reason for the world's socio-economic problems, but she is a mythmaker whose tales support the status quo and hamper our ability to organise with others to change it.
It would be great if we all lived in a society where a positive attitude and hard work did support social mobility, but that just isn't true for many people in our unequal world.
n Dr Dylan Kerrigan is an anthropologist at the UWI, St Augustine campus.