The idea that one might magically manifest wealth is an old one. In today's unequal society, 'manifesting' tells us to double down on ourselves instead of working to create a more egalitarian society.
It is clear why The Manifestation was one of the worst films of 2024 from the moment you meet its protagonist: a down-on-his-luck cryptocurrency day trader who finds himself on an unprecedented stint in the black after he starts to trust in his baser instincts when it comes to short selling. Ringing in his ears is the guidance of the professional self-help guru who led the workshop where he first met his now-wife, Roni. The rhetoric that returns to Stephen in his darkest hours is generically familiar:
You cause everything. There is no accident. There are no coincidences… If you don’t like what your life is reaping, ask yourself this question:… When did I sow this into my life? The moment you ask that question, you move from victim to victor.
The inciting moment in the film, then, is that Stephen begins to think differently about his life and the role he plays in it. “I’m a new man,” he tells his disconcerted wife when she gets home from her unpaid law internship that afternoon. “I tried out a new system, babe, and it worked… I’m the system. It’s like I access this core part of my mind that just works on a quantum level.”
“Oh my God,” she says.
The film only gets bleaker from there as the voices in Stephen’s head start appearing to him in the corporeal form of a younger version of his wife, this one in an ill-fitting red wig, who coquettishly encourages him to cash out his 401k, steal from his real-world spouse, and siphon money from a line of credit to continue trading crypto until the markets close each day. Wigged Roni might be a construct of Stephen’s imagination, but she has very real acumen with financial markets; together, they somehow pull Stephen out of debt and allow him to buy all the luxuries available to crypto barons for his increasingly wigged-out real-world wife. But Stephen’s manifestation soon proves nefarious: the mixture of sensuality and success that wigged Roni brings to his life spells destruction. The film ends with Stephen broke, single, and in jail. That’s what you get for trying to get rich quick, the film seems to proffer. Manifesting appears as a cheat code to capitalism—one that works but demands consequences down the line.
For all its modern accoutrements—crypto! unpaid internships! PMC self-help workshops!—this film is ultimately about avarice, whose 3rd-century status as a “deadly” sin is taken oh-so-literally. But is greed the right framework for understanding the attraction of the belief that our minds have the power to change our material circumstances?
This is not, after all, a marginal belief. Nearly one-third of Americans believe in the power of manifestation and twice that accept the related premise that “we create our own reality.” In that sense, we live in the world that Rhonda Byrne’s 2006 book The Secret wrought—The Secret’s garden, if you will. Its promise that thought alone has the power to transform one’s life circumstances revived a century-and-a-half-old pseudoscientific belief in the so-called “law of attraction.” But the world was primed for its promises: the Human Potential Movement (HPM) of the 1970s had left behind a popular sense that "the individual will is all powerful and totally determines one's fate,” an idea of spiritual bootstrapping that cultural critic Christopher Lasch argues only intensifies the “isolation of the self” in its deification thereof. In time, many of the contributions of the counterculture would be taken for granted by mainstream culture, perhaps this among them, squeezed in somewhere between meditation and alternative medicine. By the time The Secret was released as a documentary and book—the latter of which sold 35 million copies—HPM and the wider New Age movement had long since retreated from the streets of San Francisco, but New Age religiosity remained quietly pervasive in American culture.
The Secret landed on shelves just two years before the Great Recession, which in New Age lingo we might describe as an economic “vibe shift.“ But economic peril had already been the horizon for Byrne’s youngest readers for decades. Gen Xers (born in 1980 and onwards) would be less likely than any previous generation to out-earn their parents, with only half outdoing Mom and Dad by 30. With that in mind, perhaps popular enthusiasm for “positive thinking” has less to do with desire than it does deprivation. Today, three in four Americans describe feeling financially insecure—and one in three suspect they will remain that way for their whole lives. Given that reality, the “greed” framework begins to seem unduly harsh: obviously money is necessary to survive (and even, if such a thing is possible under capitalism, thrive) in the U.S.—but at the same time, class mobility is at its most immovable place in the past 150 years. Maybe economic stagnation has made it such that manifesting magic seems as likely a route to means as American Dream-ing ever was. The problem is that this enchantment of capitalism conceals its true rapacious nature, its utter unresponsiveness to the existential needs of working people.
New Thought for the New Age
In 1922, a young British-Barbadian actor and dancer by the name of Neville Goddard migrated to New York for work and found God instead. First he sought Him in the occult, in metaphysics, and in the Christian gnostic tradition of Rosicrucianism, with its amalgam of alchemy, astrology, and other esoteric knowledge. Then he sought God in the passed-down Afro-Hebraic teachings of an Ethiopian rabbi who may or may not have existed; then in the Kabbalah, Scripture, and number symbology, all taught to him by that same rabbi over the course of five years of study. But ultimately, he found God in himself: in the human imagination. He went on to write ten books, give hundreds of talks and lectures, and shoot two mid-’50s seasons of television expounding on this central idea: “Change your conception of yourself and you will automatically change the world in which you live.”
Some of the posts on the subreddit dedicated to Goddard are so reminiscent of the plot of The Manifestation that one might be tempted to accuse the screenwriters of lurking online. “I was one of those extremely unsuccessful people,” begins one such post:
I had never succeeded in anything and I had just dropped out of college for a second time at the age of 21. I knew I had a huge problem at hand and it all started with my mind and how it was conditioned when I was young… I hated my life and felt trapped in my own mind as well as in my parent’s house. I didn’t know who to ask for help, I had no money, no support, and no solutions… Every morning I bathed my mind in these unwanted ideas unconsciously and my life out-pictured these ideas back to me with mathematical precision. I recognized this was the root of all my problems. My mind created my attitude and that created my life. Everything from my financial brokenness, depression, and my physical chronic pains were coded in my mind and I woke up in it every day, completely immersed and bathed in it which blinded me to any other possibility.
It is a neat, NEET little tale, and luckily for us, does not end in a school shooting. In fact, it has a happy ending: “I manifested $250,000 by practicing wealth affirmations in 90 days,” the author goes on to tell us, attributing their success to a combination of guidance by Goddard and Paramahansa Yogananda, an Indian American Hindu monk who mainstreamed meditation in the U.S. They describe the intensity of the “mental battle” between the attitude of a winner and the attitude of a loser, the thrill of waking up to the thought that “success is inevitable,” the certainty of the knowledge that “something was right around the corner.” And it was: the COVID-19 pandemic, which allowed them to start an extremely lucrative Etsy business selling hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of face masks.
Their story is framed as a testament to the power of the law of attraction—though whether in order to attract COVID-related wealth they also had to manifest the literal pandemic is unclear. All that matters with manifestation is the end result, never the means; even if COVID is necessarily what made this money-making scheme possible, our poster still locates their path to success in the mind alone.
Illustration by Emily Altman
The law of attraction is like Newtonian mechanics for the New Age: the idea that negative thoughts—because they, like all people and things, are made of “pure energy”—have the power to bring negative experiences into one’s life, while positive thoughts have the opposite potential effect. It first appeared in an 1852 text by the Spiritualist clairvoyant Andrew Jackson Davis, the “Poughkeepsie Seer”—later the “John the Baptist of Spiritism”—but would be the subject of wide purchase and permutation in the heady occultist air of late-19th century America, which had everyone from Mary Todd Lincoln on down intoxicated on its ethers.
One such thinker who further developed the notion of the law of attraction was folk healer, mentalist, and mesmerist Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, who theorized that all afflictions of the body are “the effect of a false direction given to the mind” for which “the Truth is the cure.” One of his acolytes, Mary Baker Eddy—who claimed Quimby healed her of a spinal disease in 1862—would go on to found the Church of Christ, Scientist, based on the belief that material reality is illusory and that one need only pray in order to be healed of disease. Her former associate Emma Curtis Hopkins would helm a separate strain of the same belief system, hers under the moniker Christian Science, from which emerged many others of the leading ladies of the New Thought religious movement—like Melinda Cramer of Divine Science and Helen Van Anderson of the Church of Higher Life—whose distinct traditions were united in the belief that the divinity of the human mind meant it could, with “right thinking,” triumph over physical constraints and material obstacles. In time, these thinkers would form a bridge between the spiritual and secular realms, much as they had drawn connections between the mind and body; whether consciously or not, the secular would be indelibly transformed by the belief system of the Spiritualists. The New Age of the 20th century was in many ways a Christian Science redux; only God got left behind.
As the long 19th century became the long 20th century, the never-monolithic New Thought movement expanded to include many variations of the law of attraction: positive thinking, creative visualization, personal power, and so forth. Books like Norman Vincent Peale’s 1952 The Power of Positive Thinking and Byrne’s The Secret, though published decades apart, would follow similar trajectories: while excoriated by reviewers, both were received with rave enthusiasm by readers—and both remain in print today as prime members of the pseudoscientific canon. Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking uses a series of anecdotal case histories to propose that positive thought has the power to transform practical affairs when honed and channeled through daily affirmations and visualizations. The book’s main affirmation is “I can do all things through Christ who strengtheneth me,” but its top three rules are nondenominational and ready for you to apply to your own crypto-related ambitions:
- Formulate and stamp indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding. Hold this picture tenaciously. Never permit it to fade. Your mind will seek to develop this picture. Never think of yourself as failing; never doubt the reality of the mental image. That is most dangerous, for the mind always tries to complete what it pictures. So always picture “success” no matter how badly things seem to be going at the moment.
- Whenever a negative thought concerning your personal powers comes to mind, deliberately voice a positive thought to cancel it out.
- Do not build up obstacles in your imagination. Depreciate every so-called obstacle. Minimize them. Difficulties must be studied and efficiently dealt with to be eliminated, but they must be seen for only what they are. They must not be inflated by fear thoughts.
Famous fans of Peale include plenty of people who should have visualized more and done less in their lives, Richard Nixon chief among them. Michael Jordan also attributes his success to the power of positive thinking—that, as opposed to the power of being 6’ 6” and practicing basketball for seven hours per day.
But perhaps the most avid fans of the practice today are to be found online, swearing they healed chronic pain using the law of attraction; made Crohn’s disease, irritable bowel syndrome, and other conditions more manageable; or even defied the odds and cured cancer. Sometimes the order is tall: “I have akathisia, protracted benzo withdrawal, SSRI withdrawal syndrome, gut dysbiosis, nutritional deficiencies, possible mold and Lyme,” says a poster to Reddit. “Is it possible to use the LOA/manifestation etc to heal from [these] issues?”
“Absolutely,” reads one response, “you would [just] have to understand on the molecular level what your ailments are and focus on the appropriate cellular mechanisms working as they should.”
Health, the primary fixation of Quimby, Eddy, and Hopkins, clearly never ceased to be part of the equation—but wealth had certainly vaulted up the priority list by the time Byrne published The Secret in the early aughts. In her foreword, she explains, “[I] have received thousands of accounts of The Secret being used to bring about large sums of money and unexpected checks in the mail,” apparently as much as ten million dollars, though Byrne herself is worth as much as $100 million off her books and films. “People have used The Secret to manifest their perfect homes, life partners, cars, jobs, and promotions, with many accounts of businesses being transformed within days of applying The Secret,” she asserts.
The Politics of Positive Thinking
In 1911, a Christian socialist by the name of Wallace D. Wattles quietly passed away of tuberculosis and was lamented by socialist leader Eugene Debs as a “comrade beloved… [and] a very brother in flesh and blood and spirit.” Wattles had had a hard life, described by his daughter Florence in a letter to the editor of the now-defunct magazine Nautilus. “His life was cursed by poverty and the fear of poverty,” she wrote:
His death is one of the tragedies of our modern civilization. We were compelled to live in a God-forsaken factory district and the thing which took his life very probably found its way into his system there… Our own neglect in permitting such conditions to exist has cost us the life of the gentlest among us. It is the price we pay for our inhumanity to men.
Wattles’s death was only surprising in that it abruptly ended several years of enormous productivity on behalf of the Socialist Party of the jailed Debs. Between 1908 and his death, Wattles had made two unsuccessful runs as a Socialist candidate for office in Indiana, served as an Indiana organizer, and regularly travelled around the Midwest as a Party lecturer. “His passionate devotion to the cause of the working class left him little time to think of himself,” explained Florence. “The master passion of his life was the establishment of just relations among men.”
Given that, it is not without some sad irony that Wattles is best-known today for his role in inspiring Byrne’s The Secret, with its emphasis on using the “power of positive thinking” for personal financial gain. In the last year of his life, Wattles published the book that Byrne would cite as her primary reference a hundred years later: The Science of Getting Rich, in which he explains how to overcome mental barriers (like the competition mindset) in the accrual of wealth. The theory he outlines, he had already begun to explore in other works, including his 1909 Making the Man Who Can:
When you desire a thing, and your mind and the Mind of things are one, that thing will desire you, and will move toward you. If you desire dollars, and your mind is one with the Mind that pervades dollars… dollars will be permeated with the desire to come to you, and they will move toward you, impelled by the Eternal Power which makes for more abundant life.
The abundant life, according to Wattles, included the whole of Maslow’s yet-untheorized hierarchy of needs and more: “good food, comfortable clothing, warm shelter… [and] freedom from excessive toil,” “books and time to study them… opportunity for travel and observation… intellectual companionship… [and] recreations,” as well as “[means for] the bestowal of benefits on those he loves… [for] love finds its most natural and spontaneous expression in giving.” But it was not simply that Wattles believed that “it is not possible to live a really complete or successful life unless one is rich,” but that industrial capitalism had made this so. And in order to intervene into and overthrow capitalism, Wattles believed, man first had to believe that intervention and overthrow were possible. For, he wrote, “the wage slaves really own the world; they created it all, and they could take possession of it tomorrow if they would. They can begin at any time, to use the factories to make things for themselves, instead of turning out wealth for their masters.” In the socialist future to come, he writes elsewhere, “all that a man may need for the soul-growth of himself and his, he shall own and use as he will.”
But in the century between Wattles’s writing and The Secret, any semblance of politics—like the vision of utopian socialism so dearly held by Wattles that his daughter believed his efforts to “move the world forward faster than the force of evolution wanted it to go” were what ultimately killed him—was stripped from the “law of attraction” he helped theorize. The ethos he puts forward, “What I want for myself, I want for all,” would be displaced by Byrne’s “I am receiving now. I am receiving all the good in my life, now, I am receiving [fill in your desire] now.” And it is Byrne’s ethos that thrums through culture today: manifestation practices that stop far short of envisioning the utopian socialism Wattles spent his life working toward, the law of attraction stripped of any concurrent or future revolutionary action. Instead of imagining a way out of capitalism, self-help gurus peddling the power of positive thinking for money have practically come to symbolize the system itself.
Of course, the idea that one might magically accumulate wealth is an ancient one. Between the 100s B.C. and the 400s A.D. in Greco-Roman Egypt, for example, hundreds of spells and rituals were preserved on papyrus and compiled, upon their rediscovery in the 19th century, into what is known as the Greek Magical Papyri. One of the included texts is “a charm for acquiring business and for calling in customers to a workshop or house or wherever you put it,” promising its practitioner that “by having it”—it being a waxen figurine of Hermes with a tiny money bag hidden in the wall of your house—“you will become rich, you will be successful.”
More than a millennium later, not much has changed. Absent Hermes, it is perhaps his born-in-the-wrong-decade supplicants who have turned to widespread TikTok trends like “lucky girl syndrome” in their quest for riches and success. The videos rack up tens and even hundreds of thousands of views with eye-catching claims like “HOW I MANIFESTED 100% OF MY EXES BACK” and “HOW WE CHANGED OUR LIFE WITH LUCKY GIRL SYNDROME.” “Start living like you’re the luckiest girl in the world and everything works out for you,” advises one poster to Reddit, “and I promise you, it will.” The things that apparently happen as a result of this mindset range from finding wanted clothing on sale to securing new employment. “Whatever I want presents its self [sic] to me,” another Reddit poster describes reminding herself daily. “Its [sic] like I ordered from Amazon and I'm just waiting for the package. Already claimed and paid for, now waiting on arrival.”
The phenomenon has also earwormed its way into the music industry. One TikTok creator converted the phenomenon into a terrible song that is no doubt ruining someone’s savasana in a hot yoga studio near you right this very second. “I don’t chase, I attract / Universe has got my back,” she brashly declares. “I decided, it’s a fact / Everything I want, I have / La-la-la-lucky me / Must be my energy.” This is reminiscent of another song, “Lucky Girl” by Carlina: “I'm a lucky girl / And all good things come to me / Flow to me, move through me / Everything works out for me.” There is unfortunately no room in either rhyme scheme for the revolution—but one Reddit poster describes singing along to Carlina’s affirmations whenever she feels nervous or anxious, to great effect. “Ever since then, things go outrageously well for me regardless how little or big the situation is,” she says.
How do you—a self-declared lucky girl—know your manifestations are working? “I started practicing Lucky Girl Syndrome/Affirmations and the next day I literally got invited to a rich guys [sic] home in Dubai [with] all expenses paid,” exclaims another post to TikTok. It is one of TikTok’s favorite topics: Instagram models who get flown to Dubai in not-quite-sex-work schemes to party with the scions of the Gulf’s wealthiest families. Her commenters are accordingly skeptical of the innocence of the offer. “That invitation may be a lot of things,” reads one such response, “[but] lucky aint [sic] one of them.” The “lucky girl” trend might profess harnessing your inner power to bring about desired goals in the external world; at its core, however, would seem to be a pervasive sense of social and economic powerlessness—so much so that, joke or not, escorting in the Gulf appears, conceivably, as a beacon of hope.
Poor Little Rich Girls
It is perhaps unsurprising that, for every piece of positive thinking content online, there is an equal and opposite pastiche or put-down. On TikTok, self-declared “lucky girls” are the target of decidedly unlucky ire. “The universe is rigged in my favor. [But] [i]t’s not because I’m rich or white or able-bodied or pretty in a non-threatening way,” snipes one parody video, whose “lucky girl” is a legacy graduate from Harvard with an über-wealthy father. The joke implies that positive thinking only goes as far as privilege allows—that the possibility of luck in life is a matter of luck in birth. And there is something to that. So much of life comes down to chance with a heavy serving of circumstance—so much so that the lottery might be the last bastion of truly equitable unlikely odds. But luck is not the only problem with positive thinking.
Others critics have pointed out that there is something patently offensive to the very thought that our thoughts control our material circumstances. This line of critique is applicable as far back as Ernest Holmes’s 1926 Science of Mind, which includes (in earnest) the following passage:
If I say, “I am poor,” and keep on saying, “I am poor,” [my] subconscious mind at once says, “Yes, you are poor,” and keeps me poor, as long as I say it. This is all there is to poverty.
This is the “ugly flipside” of the law of attraction, write two investigators for the Skeptical Inquirer. “[I]f you have an accident or disease, it’s your fault” for attracting calamity into your life. Mitch Horowitz, author of Occult America, notes the same: What of slaves and sickly children?
Accidents happen and children get sick regardless of whether one manifests the catastrophes or not; they are facts of life—but their associated costs are not. It is a social construct that with them should come medical bills that have inspired at least one high-profile assassination of an insurance CEO. Such costs conspire to keep people locked in debt: the average American carries $104k in debt across credit cards and personal and auto loans, and the 14 million Americans with medical debt have an extra $1k-plus on top of that. Millennials are saddled with a whopping $125k on average, while Gen Z approaches an average of $30k long before they can even dream of a subprime mortgage to call their own. Gen X might be the first downwardly mobile generation in American history, and their younger siblings and children are not far behind them in the downward spiral. The reasons for this are at once extraordinarily complicated and extremely obvious: stagnant wages, skyrocketing home and childcare costs, increased precarity in employment, and the erosion of both the social safety net and the parental safety net, plus the Great Recession, COVID, and a veritable hit-parade of geopolitical crises in between. Facing odds like these, and with little external help to rely on, what is one to do but try to focus on the bright side? It’s worth just about as much as the COVID relief payments—which is to say, not much at all.
In a passage I cite often, the cultural theorist Fredric Jameson attributes conspiracy thinking to popular inability to comprehend the logic and workings of contemporary capitalism, a system whose reach and complexity can scarcely be visualized—especially with the added complications of globalization, technologization, and financialization. In a “desperate” attempt to make sense of such a world, says Jameson, those disenfranchised by it revert to a mode of storytelling that offers no meaningful critique of the system. QAnon, for example, attributes all suffering in the world to the machinations of an evil child sex- and adrenochrome-trafficking ring. Positive thinking is perhaps the closest thing such a world has to praxis, i.e., the conversion of theory into action. It is one of the few means at anyone’s disposal that costs absolutely nothing—although self-help gurus have ably monetized the practice where they can. Unlike going to college and accruing debt along the way, searching for a second job in a tight employment market, or reallocating nonexistent assets into equity-building enterprises, manifesting requires no startup investment except for faith, trust, and pixie dust.
That is not to vindicate manifestation culture outright: stripped of politics, absent even Wattles’s encouragement to “wish for others what you wish for yourself,” it is a dead end as far as meaningfully reallocating wealth goes. In fact, in the language of manifestation manifestos, a woeful lack of understanding of capitalism becomes apparent. There is Amanda Frances’s 2020 Rich as F*ck, written by a guru who describes a gut feeling that she was “made for opulent environments,” asserting that there is an “energy and frequency” to money that responds “to your vibration, and your thoughts, feelings, and patterns” toward it. (In this framework, debt, too, is a “vibration.”) Then there is Denise Duffield-Thomas’s 2013 Get Rich, Lucky Bitch! telling readers, “Want to be a millionaire? Do it,” while Jen Sincero’s 2017 You Are a Badass at Making Money chides, “[P]eople who complain and blame—blameplain?—[the economy] stay stuck.” In these books, economic responsibility rests with individuals alone: every American must manifest their own destiny—with, I dare say, all the implications that accompany that phrase.
These writers simplify and smooth the complexities of capitalism, but also deify it. If Citizens United made corporations people, then these books do their best to make capital a god—and a vengeful one at that, imbued with energy, omnipresent and omnipotent, giveth-ing and taketh-ing away according to its own whims. It demands worship like the following, posted to Reddit in the form of a recommended daily affirmation:
Money loves you. Money appreciates you. Money loves being in your world. Money loves being in your bank account. Money loves being in your wallet and in your purse. Money enjoys circulating in and around your life. Money supports you. Money looks out for you. Money has your back. Money is your friend. Money is your confidant. Money elevates you. Money cares about you. Money is good to you. Money absolutely loves you.
For Wattles, manifestation was about the opposite entirely. It was about acquiring riches through creation instead of competition—so, in spite of the capitalist system—and eventually toppling the god that is capitalism itself. “If the workers of America chose to do so,” he asserts in The Science of Getting Rich, “they could… establish great department stores and co-operative industries; they could elect men of their own class to office, and pass laws favoring the development of such cooperative industries; and in a few years they could take peaceable possession of the industrial field.”
But since his time, the clarion call of personal empowerment has displaced worker power as the “isolation of the self” that accompanies New Age spirituality has rendered inaudible any call to mass action. The manifesting of means has displaced the seizing of means as an instinctive response to financial suffering. That is not to say that leftists ought to devote energy to dismantling these beliefs; but rather, to see in them the degradation of popular understanding of capitalism. In that sense, the law of attraction poses a challenge to the Left: How do we teach people to understand a system as complex and slippery as global capitalism without assigning Capital, Volumes I-IV or the complete Karl Kautsky? And perhaps more importantly: How do we de-deify capitalism, strip it of its place in both New Age spirituality and the secular rhetoric it has inspired, and remind people that it is a system like any other—one that can be overthrown and dismantled?
Only then will people be able to read The Science of Getting Rich and see past the title to Wattles’s embedded reminder: that all the world belongs to the workers, owes its very form to them, and is theirs for the taking, if only they could just envision it.
