The phenomenon of manifestation has been reported upon extensively since 2020, and has also landed beneath the scrutinizing gazes of culture critics who note the practice’s logical fallacies or potential harms. For some, manifestation is self-help, just positive thinking; for others, it engenders circling thoughts that can wreak havoc on people’s thinking patterns, especially if they suffer from anxiety-related disorders.
Manifestation is the “law of attraction” by another name; the term was used as a shorthand for putting the law to practice as early as 2007. Technically a pseudoscience, the law was made popular by a 2006 self-help documentary called The Secret, written by Australian TV producer Rhonda Byrne. According to the film, we’re a magnet: everything that comes into our life is attracted to us by us, “by virtue of the images [we’re] holding in [our] mind,” says writer Bob Proctor. If thoughts manifest our material circumstances, a person ought to work toward having only positive thoughts to have a good life. The modern practice of manifestation is much the same: through a diligent and thoroughgoing practice of visualization, a person can make their goals and desires a reality.
The law of attraction can be traced back to the late-1800s, to New Thought, a religious movement in the United States that psychologist William James, writing in 1902, observed as being grounded in optimism. According to James, New Thought became so popular by the turn of the century, that, after about 25 years, it couldn’t be ignored as an object of scrutiny. The core tenet of New Age, wrote James, was a belief in “the all-saving power of healthy-minded attitudes as such, in the conquering efficacy of courage, hope, and trust, and a correlative contempt for doubt, fear, worry, and all nervously precautionary states of mind.” A positive attitude brought about a positive life, the religion taught.
The documentary was described upon its release as a “culture phenomenon.” When the book came out in late-2006, it was featured by Oprah, and by February 2007, it was the fourth bestselling nonfiction book on The New York Times Bestseller list. The popularity is matched by modern-day manifestation, which feels tough to escape. In the workplace, co-workers jovially talk of manifesting a good week, on a night out your friend manifests a good time, when someone’s going through it, you tell them you’re manifesting goodness for them. The word “manifesting” has entered the everyday vocabulary to the extent that it's moved beyond being a meme to an interjection. People say it ironically, but they also say it reflexively, and expect you to know what it means.
For years, the idea of positive thinking possessing the power to manifest material goodness has maintained a hold on American consciousnesses. Why? Its critics bemoan the practice’s inefficacy—“No, manifesting doesn’t actually work” declares a subheading in a primer on manifestation from 2020. Are we really that gullible? Do we all want desperately to believe in something more powerful and mysterious than us?
Taking a closer look at the principles upon which manifestation turns, it’s easy to see why this ideology is so comfortable. For most living in North America have been ideologically primed for the law of attraction since first consuming popular media. Manifestation and the law of attraction are the American Dream by another name.
Manifestation, and the rationality behind it, is no different to the mechanism on which the myth of the American Dream functions. The only difference between the two is their dress—while the law of attraction and manifestation focus on the work of an individual’s mind, metaphysical labor, the American Dream hinges on an individual’s labor. Both sell a dream to focus on, living for an imagined future, when really they manufacture the persistence of the status quo. They lead to the same end: isolation, alienation, and the subsistence of decayed societal structures.
In an article called “The Resilience of Myth: the Politics of the American Dream,” historian John Archer discussed the American Dream. Though the term was first coined by writer James Truslow Adams in 1931, the American ideal itself goes back to the early-1800s and colonialism. For Thomas Jefferson and his contemporaries, the existence of America depended on “independent gentleman farmers” owning their own farmsteads.
By the mid-1800s, these farmers were “celebrated as agents of American political and economic triumph, the nation's manifest destiny,” says Archer. Farming’s physical, and so it was schematically easy to ground the country’s identity in the idea of achieving ambitions through personal effort and work; it was a quick metaphorical leap to talk about reaping the fruits of one’s labor. The idea of a “self-made man” was born. Rags-to-riches stories allowed for the self-made man to become an archetype. By the 1860s, such stories were selling millions of copies, and a few years later, New Thought took hold.
By the 20th century, Adams found a psychological rationality for the archetype. The American Dream, defined by Adams in 1931’s The Epic of America, is “a dream of a social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.” Adams was writing during the Great Depression, but because he made the American Dream a part of the psychology of the brain, he allowed anyone the right to believe they could overcome devastation; indeed they should believe it. The dream gave people hope, something to strive for, during an economic crisis. The Epic of America became a bestseller.
The American Dream is linked to individual homeownership. In the early-1920s, Warren G. Harding’s administration, working in the interests of capitalist enterprise and fearful of Bolshevism and the revolutions attendant to it, launched a campaign to have as many Americans in homeownership positions as possible. A single-family detached house measured a person’s achievement of the dream, the campaign said, but it also meant a bondage to the American economic and political machine: “capitalism could not prevail without widespread ownership of property,” notes Archer. Homeownership, or its dream, ensured a person remained an individual: busy working under and serving the aims of capitalism, they remained far away from collectivization.
The “dream home” as a marker for success was propagated and sustained through popular culture for much of the 20th century. Soon, appliance manufacturers marketed their wares as “dream objects.” Stories of failure, the dream being a lie, were seen as an exception to the rule of success through hard work. It wasn’t until the real estate collapse and the recession in the new millennium that people became disillusioned.
Because we live in a capitalistic and patriarchal society, the American Dream establishes a person as a citizen beholden or accountable only to themselves and to the political system that governs them. Though disillusioned, people still didn’t fully abandon the American Dream, people didn’t abandon capitalistic and patriarchal ways of thinking. “Instead, what happened bespeaks not only the power of this particular myth, anchored as it is in two centuries of American social and political history and wedded to private-property-based American capitalism, but also the potency of myth itself as a fundamental and necessary component of the American polity,” writes Archer. The myth justified the existence of society itself, at least the version of society that had persisted for decades; patriarchal capitalism is all many people knew or still know.
Archer argues that the aftermath of the financial crisis saw various responses to the American Dream—everything from declaring the dream a mere myth, redefining it, justifying it, critiquing it and calling for the masses to wake up from the dream, its politicization, and hijacking by commercial enterprises—but none fully abandoned it. Even as many people questioned whether a person could move up in America, they were still thinking within the dream’s meritocratic framework, they were still, for the most part, thinking in terms of the language of capitalism.
The law of attraction and manifestation are a part of the “redefining” response to the recession. Redefinitions of the dream turned away from the universal drive in every American to own a home and toward “individual stories of people pursuing their own personal hopes and ideals based more in their particular life trajectories than a collective social enterprise,” writes Archer. What is manifestation if not a personal hope and ideal?
The Secret is rife with vignettes of people pursuing goals, from small to grand. One person wants an expensive necklace—as she looks through a shop window admiring it, clever angling of the camera places the necklace, reflected in the glass of the pane, around her neck, suggesting that if she believes hard enough, she can get it. Another man wants a sports car, so he goes home and acts out driving it, soon he gets it. Another man, a talking head and apparently not an actor this time, recounts making a vision board early in his life covered in his desires for the future. He puts the vision board away and when he returns to it years later, he finds that he’s achieved everything on it.
The film’s careful not to mention physical labor. It skips over the years the man with the vision board (whose job title is merely “entrepreneur”) spends working and making money so that he can afford everything on his board. The man who wants the car spends an intense moment visualizing it and then goes about his life; when we meet him again, he’s living his dream. The film doesn’t concentrate on any religion, and instead asks that we turn to “the universe” as though it were a genie and list our desires out for it. A crucial part of this asking is active visualization, which leads, in no determined length of time, to the manifestation of desires. As each talking head stresses the importance of asking the universe and visualizing, they also avoid talking about the space between asking and receiving.
This lack of clarity on what to do while one waits for their manifestation is part of why some critics take issue with manifestation. “Humans are inherently skeptical, and even the most naive among us understand that a person who sits alone in their home doing nothing all day will not miraculously become a millionaire,” writes Rebecca Jennings for Vox. Jennings goes on to interview a psychologist who notes that in focusing on nothing but our dreams, we lose the energy to “implement our wishes,” we put in less effort toward achieving our goals, and ultimately become depressed for not achieving what we visualize.
The Secret doesn’t recommend inactivity. “You might get some inspired idea, some action to take,” says one talking head. As you wait for your manifestation, they’re careful to say that you ought to go about business as usual. That’s the most instruction we get because the film takes our capitalist society for granted or as a baseline. You can come home to visualize driving your dream car, but you still have to leave it so you can make enough money to pay your rent, or for other necessities to keep you alive, so you can visualize some more. It’s crucial that one of the final stories of successful manifestation shared is the entrepreneur’s. He says that in the years before rediscovering his vision board he worked and invested in companies, he went about his everyday life. He worked toward his dream. The Secret isn’t recommending idleness, rather, it’s showing how we can suffer through our laboring hours all the easier. If you’re thinking about future pleasure, the present doesn’t hurt so much.
“The ‘hows’ are the domain of the universe,” the film says, and “the universe” feels like a shorthand for capitalism. The message here is that if you put in enough work—visualizing, laboring—capitalism will reward you. It’s a significant part of manifestation to live your life with the belief that your wishes have come true: you have to live your life, you have to go to work. You have to imbue the present with future pleasure. If you lament or notice that you haven’t received your dream car yet, you radiate negative energy into the universe and that could jeopardize the wish’s fulfillment.
The American Dream and manifestation encourage hyper-individualism and materialism, teaching us to work for things that have the power to make our lives better. Single-family houses were meant to keep people from collectivizing, and so long as you’re laboring to make enough money for a house, you’re not able to turn to community—you don’t have the time or might be too tired after a day’s work. Likewise, so long as you’re spending energy visualizing, and spending your days working a job, you’re not thinking about the bigger picture, you might not even want to, because the things you want and have devoted hours thinking about are only valuable within the context of capitalistic society. Even if we get too tired to achieve our goals, as the psychologist interviewed by Vox says, we still have to go to work. These ideologies keep us beholden to a future that in turn keeps us beholden to the traditional rigors of an exploitative society. Self-obsessed and self-serving, we turn away from ourselves and from each other.
It’s no coincidence that The Secret came along at the same cultural moment when the American Dream was redefined to promote a striving for individual dreams. Manifestation is an alluring explanation for why things happen because it allows us to feel we have control over our lives when things are spinning out of control; it’s a myth that keeps the system functioning, however falteringly. It’s comfortable to believe in a meritocracy; belief in it elides everything that’s painful to think about: the various structural problems that require a lot of work to fix or eradicate.
It has become difficult to focus on the self in the face of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the Masalit genocide in Sudan, the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar, the persecution of Uyghur people in China, the Russian war crimes against Ukrainian civilians, the crumbling of American systems under Trump. And it seems insensitive to talk of manifestation in the face of these crimes against humanity.
We can’t manifest a better future right now, but we can fight for it.
