Nothing Manifests

CAMBRIDGE DICTIONARY’S word of the year is manifest, which it tells us is: “to use methods such as visualisation and affirmation to help you imagine achieving something you want, in the belief that doing so will make it more likely to happen.” The meaning should make it self-evident the delusion of the exercise. Cambridge chose to crown it because on its website, manifest was looked up 130,000 times.

In addition, it jumped from being a social media phenomenon into a real-world trend. They stated, “When famous performers, star athletes, and influ­ential entrepreneurs claim they have achieved something because they manifested it, they are using this verb in a more recent sense: to use specific practices to focus your mind on something you want, to try to make it become a reality.”

But how is manifesting any different from wishful thinking? Words that sound elegant are good to coin a make-believe phenomenon. For example, there is now a new online breed called “manifesting influencers”. It just would not sell if they called themselves “wishful thinking influencers”. That label breaks while rolling off the tongue. Manifest does not.

Unfortunately, it does not do anything more than that. If manifesting makes something more “likely to hap­pen”, then the activity being performed involves probability, a statistical con­cept. Its efficacy should also be evaluated under the same umbrella. Suppose, you do a double blind experiment in which half the people manifest for a thing to happen and the other half do not, what are the odds that it will be proved? No serious scientist will conduct such an experiment because it means ridicule.

There are possible pathways by which manifesting might still stand a chance. Wanting anything with great fervour could lead to action towards that end which then translates to an outcome. But that is not how mani­festing is interpreted. This is the easy way out. It is a mental crutch for when something is out of reach. It makes you feel better and, occasionally, the object of your wish might even be got but that is just chance, not causation.

Imagine the chaos that would follow if manifesting were actually true. Human beings would be gods who have the right to ownership without effort. If everyone started manifesting, then it would run against each other’s wants, and you would then have to come up with an intricate reasoning system for what makes one person’s manifesting more powerful than another. Any idea can be imagined and incremental details added onto it until it becomes a delicious ideol­ogy. It will still have no truth value until tested with objective standards. Mani­festing is too low a bar even for that.

Those who find solace in it are welcome to it. Human beings need large doses of irrationality to wade through the sufferings of life but they ought to do so with their eyes open. Like people who swear by homoeopathy but go to an oncologist instead when they have cancer. Delusions are useful but know them as such and choose them wisely.

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