The Cambridge Dictionary has declared that the word of the year is "Manifest". It was looked up 130,000 times, the publication says, and hence is one of the most curious words of the year.
The word jumped from use in the self-help community and on social media to being widely used across mainstream media and beyond, as celebrities such as singer Dua Lipa, Olympic sprinter Gabby Thomas and England striker Ollie Watkins spoke of manifesting their success in 2024.
Ah. Manifesting is not about manifesting this or that. It is about manifesting success. In this it resembles the unintended consequences of Adam Smith. The unintended consequences were not any old unintended consequences, but good ones: consequences we would have intended if we had been able to intend them. Hopeful, we humans.
The article about this on the Cambridge University website continues:
Mentions of it gained traction during the pandemic and have grown in the years since, especially on TikTok and other social media, where millions of posts and videos used the hashtag #manifest.
They use “to manifest” in the sense of: “to imagine achieving something you want, in the belief that doing so will make it more likely to happen.” Yet, manifesting is an unproven idea that grew out of a 100-year-old spiritual philosophy movement.
I like that “Yet”. In fact, I like “an unproven idea”. What is a “proven idea”? Well, I suppose we must be in the condescending and contemptuous world of J.
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This is positively the worst article The Daily Sceptic has ever had bordering on verbal diarrhoea
I beg to differ. Articles by Alexander and McGrogan make my day and this one is ‘up there’
My earliest memory of using ‘manifest’ comes from a hymn whose first verse, being appropriately seasonal, is as follows:
Songs of thankfulness and praise,
Jesus, Lord, to thee we raise,
Manifested by the star
To the sages from afar,
Branch of royal David’s stem
In Thy birth at Bethlehem:
Anthems be to Thee addressed,
God in man made manifest.
Not sure “covid” was much to do with manifestation. It was mainly based on evil and lies. I suppose some people wanted to believe it was real, for their own weird reasons, but a lot of it was achieved by a combination of carrot (pay people to do nothing) and stick (fine people for breaking lockdown rules).
Almost everybody lives in fiction, by narratives, by stories. Money works, car drivers will drive on the correct side of the road, my loved ones love me, and so on. We might call these useful fictions because the stories help us live in the world. They guide our actions. In the pleasant sense ‘manifesting’ is like Captain Pickard issuing a command ‘to make it so’. But even though the fiction of Captain Pickard’s competence is ‘useful’ he cannot command or manifest a friendly fleet to appear out of nothing.
And now the Dark Side. As Richard Dawkins says when we communicate with others we are trying to influence their brains (including our own). But if we convince ourselves that we can manifest to fly unaided we may plunge to our deaths. If we convince ourselves that we can manifest social prestige by following some social trend we may do health threatening things. These are dangerous fictions.
Governments used to be (mostly) aligned with useful fictions, trying only to manifest useful outcomes. Now they make a virtue of being able to manifest only useless or dangerous fictions because achievement is beyond them. Government bureaucracy initially helps manifest useful fictions, but… Read more »
Event 201 was part of the Corona Coup and plandemic.
Their agenda in October 2019: How to manage the media, online platforms and the messaging.
This is really what the Americans are good it. Marketing and information manipulation.
There is no ‘bat virus’. You don’t ‘spread’ a ‘virus’ by sneezing.
Your diaper is anti-health.
Your stab is poison (but highly profitable).
It was a test pilot.
In New Age the equivalent term to this “manifesting” is “visualisation,” and on the Christian fringe, the “word-faith” movement. I’m no fan of either.
But what is it that sports psychologists drum into elite athletes, apparently with significant results, if not the power of positive thinking? And is it not self-evidently true that what causes armies to succeed is largely belief that they will, and the loss of that belief is the beginning of a rout?
What doesn’t seem to work so well is governments screwing up things in practice, whilst “manifesting” beliefs in economic growth, cheap energy and so on. This rather suggests that confidence only aids the competent.
“confidence only aids the competent”
Brilliant.