I went to the type of school, common to the Midwest, where we relied on the use of popular television programs in lieu of actual education. In high school, we didn’t sit around and debate critiques of Manifest Destiny the way some schools I have worked with in cities do. Instead, we watched a reality TV survival show where contestants had to live like an American pioneer and, if they could survive the winter, they would win a million dollars.
The contestants were organized through monogamous partnerships. Each couple had to dress like an old school colonizer and live in a wood cabin. They were obsessed with having enough firewood and with keeping the firewood dry. The show was like Survivor and held the same material promise: a million dollars for completing the whole charade.
We didn’t learn about the genocide of indigneous people which is still continuing to this day. We didn’t learn about how Manifest Destiny also expanded slavery. We didn’t learn about how the doctrine is still used today as the United States continues to expand its influence.
The word “manifest” is not a positive word. It’s built from two words: man and infest. The word man, which also appears in manufacture, means to strike by hand. Infest means to attack or to invade. Manifestation is a doctrine about invading by force. It’s actually right there in the name. Manifest Destiny imagines the destiny or destination of brutal attack.
Manifestation has continued to be very popular in the United States. Prosperity gospel promises financial abundance to its believers, promoting the idea that God will bless his people by giving them a lot of money. Under prosperity gospel, poverty is a curse that can only be broken through faith. Believers are asked to visualize money and to donate to the church so that they can invite more money in.
This is a fantasy. The idea that someone can become rich by visualizing money is a fantasy.
The idea that fantasy has the right to force its will upon reality is fascism.
Fantasies don’t work like this. Manifestation isn’t a normal or healthy use of fantasy.
Fantasies do a lot for us. They show us what we wish for. If you have a fantasy about receiving a million dollars then that fantasy might illuminate very real needs you have around paying off bills and building stability. The million dollars isn’t the real fantasy—what you imagine yourself using the money for is. You might find, through fantasizing, that you wish for nutritious food, that you want stable housing, that you want flexible housing, that you want to live closer to your family, or that you want more education to uplift your imagination.
You might also find that you have very real fears about living in an environment that is hostile to you and that the million dollars represents the promise of security. You might find that you have very real anxieties around isolation and that your wish for a million dollars is actually a desire for recognition and dignity, a desire that hides under a wish for status. You might find that the fantasy of receiving a million dollars is about a real need for spiritual validation, the idea that your wish to live life is not unjust but good.
In that social studies classroom, we watched contestants dress in colonial garb and talk about their desire for a million dollars. They talked about what that million dollars would do for them as they chopped wood and role played little house on the prairie.
Fantasizing is a part of play and fantasizing is an incredibly important phase of childhood development. Fantasies show us what we wish for but fantasies, if they are to function as authentic play, if they are to uplift our political and spiritual imaginations with credibility, must also be tested against reality.
Our fantasies are supposed to brush up against realities and we are supposed to use the friction of fantasy against reality to find truth. The reality is that the United States has never stopped genocidal policies against indigenous people and against so-called immigrants who are indigenous to this land. The reality is that the United States relies on imperialism to keep the prices of consumer goods and oil low so that employing people at unlivable wages remains excusable. The reality is that human beings are suffering habitat loss, along with other living beings, in a Capitalocene.
If all of this is true and if your fantasy of receiving a million dollars is also the echo of a true emotional need, then what does this tell you? What happens when the reality of your emotional truth lives stunted by the banal wish for a million dollars? When your wishes for friendship and pleasure and rebellion lives a half life, summed up by the tidy promise of a million dollars the way those contestants on reality television shows are?
What does this tell you about your imagination, about how it has been limited and uninspired?
Where in your life do you feel the most desire for real and credible conversation?
I skimmed over The Mandate for Leadership document that Project 2025 put out. This is a handbook for the next president with instructions on how to consolidate power. There was something amidst the plan to install a conservative authoritarian in government that stood out to me. The document claims that one of its key principles to “Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people.”
This is how authoritarians define freedom—freedom is no longer real play lived conversationally with other people and beings, a part of life itself. For authoritarians, freedom is about self governance. It’s about self discipline, self protection, and personal authority. Authoritarians tell their people that we, too, can be authoritarians of our own lives and manifest our destiny in the world around us willfully. We just have to be willing to punish ourselves and keep our psyches pure from the world.
Of course, this is a recipe for violence. The document also shows a severe paucity of imagination. I imagine that this is because fascism misuses and devours our fantasies. Fascism is uninspired and lacks vision. It is only able to articulate stark lines of defense.
What person grows while wishing for a world where every decision they make must be predicated upon whether their choices are financially responsible or not? What person grows while imagining that their security is only granted by the state through the willful destruction of other people? When imagining the world not as the world but as an enemy?
Getting older is not real growth. No wonder people claim that Americans have childlike mentalities. This isn’t a compliment.
Manifestation, the idea that you can only receive from the world what you are currently able to imagine because your fantasies must be defended against reality, is not a brave spiritual pursuit. If your positive thinking need to be protected from reality, then you're not really thinking at all. It is a half spirituality that can only spread in a world run by cowards. The word coward has fallen from fashion but I think we need to bring it back. We need to call these imperialists who send drones to kill children what they are—cowards. These are people who hoard nuclear weapons because they are scared of kids with rocks.
If we have half spiritualities, then we also have half imaginations. None of us want to live in a world that is articulated through finance and war. None of us want to be surveilled and policed or for our imaginings of the future of fungi, trees, and rivers to be guided by economic projections. Humanity is not convincingly represented by statistics.
If you are feeling tired, then you are feeling the disillusionment. We tend to get tired when our imaginations are killed.
Freud believed that the West suffered three types of blows to the ego—the disillusionment with the cosmos (man is not the center of the universe), the disillusionment with species (man is not the origin of all species), and the disillusionment with the world (man is not the master of the land). He wrote about this and he wrote about his four dreams about Jerusalem, about the nightmare of nationalism as the doing and undoing of self by place. Manifestation tries to answer for disillusionment but in a half hearted way and lazily too. If you don’t have a sense of self, then manifest one. You can try but, if you can only sustain a belief in the world with the power of your own hand, then you will eventually find that hand carrying a big stick.
Destiny is bigger than your imagination. It is bigger than any one person’s imagination.
Destiny is formed by our ability to perceive nature. That perception is not just fantasy but fantasy meeting reality. Reality is not an enemy and we should not allow our fantasy to predict it as such. It's cowards who fear reality, who fear other people and land and life.
So, contest manifestation the way your innate courage already contests learned cowardice. Feigning satisfaction with half of an imagination is cowardly. You are better than this. There is an element of delusion in cowardice, in the learned sensitivity and in the catastrophizing, that can only be cured through embracing life.
