It is only by understanding the religious and occult tradition from which the concept of manifesting descends that we can see it for what it truly is: a spiritualized gloss on the same deluded logic that suggests that poverty is a choice, and that underpins so much political disinformation.
"I am opulent. I have everything. I do right. I know." You might be forgiven for thinking that the above mantra is a contemporary one — one of hundreds of similar spiritual affirmations ubiquitous on social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok. Today's culture of wellness — predicted to be an $8.5 trillion industry by 2027 — is suffused with the pseudoscientific language of positive thinking, manifesting, useful and toxic "energy" and, above all things, the power and the potential of the self to create its own reality. If we can dream it, much of contemporary wellness language tells us, we can have it — so long as we focus our energy hard enough. This phenomenon is more prevalent, and visible, than ever before, in part because the internet does, in fact, allow us to create our own reality — at least when it comes to shaping public opinion. Stock prices have risen and tanked based on Reddit memes; elections have been lost and won based on the proliferation of disinformation and conspiracy theories. The alienation and isolation of the coronavirus pandemic years, likewise, have only intensified the discomfiting sense that reality is transformable, constantly shifting to reflect the latest algorithmically generated viral headlines. But the history of the relationship between wellness culture, spirituality, capitalist individualism and "positive thinking" is hardly a new one. The quote at top is not from Instagram but from Charles Benjamin Newcomb's 1897 book "All's Right With the World," one of dozens of similar books published during the Gilded Age, another era of vast American inequality. Newcomb and his contemporaries were inspired by a movement — equal parts science, spirituality and self-help — called New Thought, which claimed that our minds and desires alike could shape our material, biological and economic realities. Little-known today, despite its many popular successors (including Rhoda Byrne's 2006 smash "The Secret"), New Thought is among the most influential religious movements in the United States and an underrated key to understanding much of contemporary wellness culture, if not American capitalism more broadly. My recent guest essay for Time Opinion offers a glimpse into the strange history of New Thought — and what it can tell us about America today.
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Saturday, March 16, 2024
Opinion Today: The long, strange history of manifesting
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