I've seen lots of YouTube videos listed and ads encouraging this new trendy thing of "manifesting" things into being. I never really watch them, but occasionally one auto plays. I seriously don't understand how we've now gotten to the point at which we as a species, think we can manifest physical objects or money into existence with the power of thought.
There was a very long gap between the idea of atoms, and our recent understanding of how they cohere. The breakthrough was A.A. Griffith's experiments with very thin fibers, and consequent search for the reasons that most things were weak, not strong like simpler chains of atoms. Before his time, the best steel was sometimes treated with the urine of goats fed on ferns, which was not entirely superstitious nonsense, but very laborious and not fully effective.
I think that to understand human society, we have to dig out the hidden communications as well as look at the physical manifestations. During our early years, we are a danger both to ourselves and others, and incapable to understand adult complexities. So, we are told white lies about Santa Claus, inspired with young, fictional heroes, and allowed to dream of fame and fortune. It helps us grow. Next, we develop a natural preference for "a good story." If we want apprentices to remember a safety rule, it is more memorable if embellished with exaggeration or a funny story about a violation. We also seem to be readily convinced by anything in rhyme, because that was the best way to keep a story from being changed in memory before we had writing.
So far, fiction is better than truth. However, children are also unable to fight with grownups, and so nearly all children experiment with lies as their only defense when they misbehave. If a talented kid has a gullible parent, they may make deception central to all their subsequent development. Gangs form up around mutual concealment and blackmail. The more the honest, cooperative people have been successful, the greater the rewards for the liars. However, I think we are quite overwhelmed by the vast riches they can accumulate even under agriculture, let alone industrialization.
The brain is a pattern-recognizing system, and it errs both in missing many, and in seeing others that are not true. Various cultures, and even some modern people think that the wind is caused by trees waving their branches. The American West used to have traveling "Rainmakers." They'd set up some fancy gadget to make it rain, and, if they didn't get run out of town, claim the credit when it did rain. Scientific observation is simple, but also rare and fragile. If it conflicts with an established lie, it has to wait a long time for an opportunity. Rather incongruously, that opportunity often involves humour - it is the surprise juxtaposition of two conflicting ideas that may finally get them a fair comparison.
Where there is a lot of money at stake, we are seeing the application of Herman Goering's maxim that if a lie is big enough, people will assume nobody would dare tell it if it was not true. I've seen dozens of government programs, and also some popular rallying cries that are actually about their exact opposites.
