What Happened Today: January 25, 2023

American tanks, German interests; Home values tank-ing; RIP Victor Navasky

Jan 25, 2023

The Big Story

Following a flurry of phone calls with European leaders, President Joe Biden announced on Wednesday that he would send 31 M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine. Though it could take at least a year for the American-made tanks to arrive on the battlefield, the announcement opens the door for Finland, Poland, and other Western nations to send their tanks as well. Several of the countries use German-built Leopard tanks, which German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said as recently as Wednesday morning that he would not allow to be sent to Ukraine unless President Biden was willing to send tanks in kind.

The U.S.-led decision to provide Ukraine heavy artillery that’s primarily offensive rather than just defensive decisively escalates the tension between Russia and the NATO alliance and adds new complications for Germany. Already, Russia’s embassy in Berlin warned Germany that its “extremely dangerous decision” to send Leopard tanks to Ukraine “destroys the remnants of mutual trust” and could drag Germany into the conflict. Moscow’s belligerence aside, Scholz’s refusal to send tanks without first having the promise of parity from German allies left some analysts wondering what he could gain from causing so much political tension with the United States only to capitulate at the eleventh hour.

“Our own best explanation is a hidden agenda: a game plan to reestablish relations with Russia as soon as possible,” EuroIntelligence wrote on Wednesday, noting that German private and state companies have made big investments in Russia already. So too has Germany continued aggressive investments in China, Russia’s “friend without limits,” despite German officials making much of their decoupling from Beijing-linked business. Indeed, in the first two quarters of 2022, German entities made record-breaking investments in China, according to the German Institute for Economic Research. More recently, the German-run bank Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau lent more than $67 billion to a major railway project connecting Beijing’s international airport to North China’s Tianjin city.

In the Back Pages: Among the Spiritual Psychotics

The Rest

→ Ahead of the new shipments of heavy artillery from the United States and Germany, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is cleaning house, accepting the resignation of several top Ukrainian officials to stem concerns over government corruption in Kyiv. “We have made personnel decisions … regarding officials of various levels in ministries and other central government bodies, in the regions, and in the law enforcement system,” Zelenskyy told Ukraine in a televised address on Tuesday night. Ranked 122nd out of 180 nations in Transparency International’s latest Corruption Perceptions Index, Ukraine has long been criticized for misused public funds and the influence of oligarchs across the government. Along with five regional governors and a deputy head of administration who stepped down from their posts, Deputy Defense Minister Vyacheslav Shapovalov, who was recently tied to inflated food shipments for Ukraine forces, tended his resignation to Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov, a move the ministry said “will preserve the trust of society and international partners and ensure objectivity during additional clarifications and possible investigations.”

→ Number of the Day: 25%

That’s how far home values will drop from their record peaks in San Jose, Austin, Phoenix, and San Diego, according to a new Goldman Sachs analysis sent to clients this month. That prediction comes after the chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, Ian Shepherdson, predicted last October that 2023 would see a nationwide fall in home prices between 15% and 20%. Both forecasts see trouble brewing in mortgage rates that could remain around 6.5% by year’s end. Even though the decline in prices is sharp, rivaling the housing bubble burst that sparked the 2008 Great Recession, it shouldn’t kick off similarly widespread foreclosures this year, the bank predicted, though cities like Austin and San Diego could see localized housing market distress because of home prices that became so inflated during the COVID-19 pandemic.

→ TGIF could have new meaning in Maryland as both chambers in the state legislature take up the Four-Day Workweek Act of 2023, the latest step by government and private officials toying with the idea of shortening the workweek by a day. While government offices would be encouraged to shorten their week for the pilot program through 2028, Maryland’s bill would incentivize the private sector with tax credits up to $750,000.

→ Tens of thousands of dollars in unnecessary fees and expenses, excessive testing and treatment, and invasive and at times traumatic interactions with law enforcement were just some of the highlights one Arizona family encountered upon turning to the state’s mental health system to help their aging mother. As Dan Jones writes in a recent op-ed about what happened after his family arranged for an involuntary psychiatric evaluation of his mother when she began exhibiting significant signs of cognitive decline, “I hope that you and your loved ones will never have to endure what we went through,” including a $17,000 bill to cover the legal expenses of the public attorney at the family conservatorship hearings. Echoing Tablet Editor in Chief Alana Newhouse’s recent essay on “brokenism” that analyzed the failure of systems across American society, Jones, who identifies himself as a brokenist, writes, “Our system is broken (so much is broken anymore): instead of helping the afflicted and their families who are undergoing tremendous financial and emotional strain, it exacerbates their pain and leaves them shattered.”

→ The healthcare system isn’t faring all that much better in Canada, despite Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s efforts to convince the electorate that everything is fine. “Let me be very clear for the record: Canada is not broken,” he said. The prime minister was responding to Conservative party leader Pierre Poilievre, who’s noted both the fraying healthcare system, particularly for children, and recent struggles to manage the waitlist of 2.2 million immigrants as part of his rallying cry that “everything feels broken.” Indeed, for Canada’s famed healthcare system specifically, things aren’t going so well. A new Fraser Institute study found that patients encountered an average wait time for health care of 27.4 weeks in 2022, the longest average ever recorded and “195 per cent higher than the 9.3 weeks Canadians waited in 1993, when the Fraser Institute began tracking medical wait times,” the institute said.

→ Serving as both editor and publisher over a nearly three-decade stint at The Nation, and as part of Tablet’s inaugural political commentary team, Victor Navasky, 90, died on Monday. An iconoclast who’s own irreverent tone in his writing inflected those he edited, Christopher Hitchens and Alexander Cockburn included, Navasky explained something about his editorial sensibility in a 2002 interview with The Brooklyn Rail: “I think it was Walter Cronkite who used to end his nightly newscasts by saying, ‘That’s the way it is.’ Well, I wanted to put out a magazine which would say: ‘That’s not the way it is at all. Let’s take another look.’”

→ Of the 173 mass attacks in which three or more people were injured in the United States between 2016 and 2020, roughly half were set off by either workplace or personal disputes, according to a new report out Wednesday from the Secret Service. A total of 513 people were killed and 1,234 hurt in the attacks and in 73% of them, firearms were the weapon of choice, the report by the Secret Service’s recently formed National Threat Assessment Center, said. The Center analyzes how trends in violent behavior could prove a threat to the presidents and other public officials who they’re charged to protect. Though ideological motives against the government, antisemitism, and other biases animated about a quarter of the attackers, the average perpetrator was a 34-year-old male who’d turned violent after a romantic dispute, personal grievance, or workplace dispute.

→ What’s 27 feet wide, traveling as fast as 9.26 kilometers per second, and could come as close as 3,500 kilometers as it buzzes past Earth? The answer is the asteroid known as 2023 BU, the latest Near Earth Object that was recently spotted by NASA as the space rock continues a trajectory that will likely mean it passes Earth on Friday, with the slight chance of making direct contact. Though some asteroid collisions with Earth have been known to end badly for those dwelling on this spinning marble, the eight-meter 2023 BU is small enough that most of the asteroid would burn up as it made its approach. Other similarly sized asteroids have recently made their way through the atmosphere, including the 2022 EB5, about half the size of a giraffe, that was spotted just a few hours before it landed without incident in Iceland. Those who want to see just where 2023 BU ends up in real time can tune into the Virtual Telescope Project.

TODAY IN TABLET:

The UNIFIL Follies Turn Deadly on the Israel-Lebanon Border by David Schenker

The recent murder of an Irish peacekeeper in southern Lebanon exposes the U.N. peacekeeping mission there as a costly failure

The People With Purple Triangles by Maggie Phillips

Jehovah’s Witnesses share the story of their unique experiences during the Holocaust—and the lessons that can be applied today as they face continued persecution in Russia and elsewhere

SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

Among the Spiritual Psychotics

Social media users trying to magically ‘manifest’ their desires are running into the hard limits of reality

By Katherine Dee

Mass delusions—this sense that you can speak your reality into existence—are everywhere in our digital-first world. To quote the writer Matias Viegener, we exist only in words, “less in the spirit of total revelation than total text.” We are transforming from embodied, biological beings into digital entities composed of zeros and ones, data sets and social media posts. The strange thing about a world subsumed by the digital is that we’re simultaneously aware of being under constant surveillance and yet convinced that we have complete agency over our self-defnitions.

One striking feature of writings about early digital communities like Multi-User Dungeons, a type of text-based role play, is that people could say they were anything, and everyone would accept the terms of their narrative self-defnition. For example, if you identifed as “sexy,” nobody would litigate it. You were what you said you were. There was an unspoken, shared sense that “in-game” (online) reality had diferent rules than the physical world. In the digital universe, you could simply speak yourself into the existence you desired.

Satirized by the famous 1993 cartoon in The New Yorker, “On the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog,” this aspect of the internet was both a threat and promise. Of course it opened the door to deception–stories about malicious “catfishes” have circulated time immemorial–but it’s also what, in conjunction with the promise of global connectivity, underpinned the utopian vision of the web. The internet gave everyone the freedom to be whoever they wanted to be; we would no longer be slaves to the limitations the physical world imposed upon us. In Life on the Screen, sociologist Sherry Turkle wrote of this unique feature of the web. “You can be whoever you want to be. You can completely redefine yourself if you want. You don’t have to worry about the slots other people put you in as much. They don’t look at your body and make assumptions. They don’t hear your accent and make assumptions. All they see are your words.”

But as the internet grew up and—saliently—became commercialized, things began to change. The boundaries between URL and IRL blurred. Social media was supposed to showcase who we really were, not mask it. Identity-play belonged in games like Second Life or else was considered a sort of deviant behavior. (Think of how trolls evolved from an annoyance to a potential danger in the public imagination.)

The idea that we could play with our identity wouldn’t disappear completely, though. It’d be suppressed, rechanneled into ideas like “curation.” Only post your best photos, but at the end of the day they’re still you. The “avatar,” textbased or not, was no longer a separate entity; an astral body foating above your physical form. Your online self and your offline self were, at least allegedly, coming closer to being one-in-the-same.

I open up TikTok. The first video on my For You Page, TikTok’s algorithmically customized landing screen, begins with a woman speaking into her phone, determined: “When your partner is saying things you don’t want to hear, and you want to use manifestation to fix it, you tune them out, respectfully, of course.” She continues, “You stop listening, and what you start doing instead is saying in your head what you want them to be saying.” As I continue to scroll, dozens of these come across my feed—videos touting the possibilities of “manifestation,” a New Age self-help strategy that suggests that one can will their ideal reality into existence through techniques like visualization.

“If there’s one video you save from my entire account, please, God, let it be this one,” another woman proclaims, sitting cross legged on the floor. She goes on to offer tips on how to change your mindset and thereby call your ideal life into existence. The videos continue. From user @manifestationliveinyou2: If you’re seeing this on the 18th or 19th of January, you are about to receive the best news of your life… All you have to do is focus on your intentions. Others offer affirmations. Some provide tips, like how to keep a manifestation journal or how to visualize what you want. Visualization is key.

And then, finally, there’s a video from Allie Priestly, another young white woman who’s gained popularity talking about manifestation on the app. Priestly, though, has a different tone from the rest. She’s talking about spiritual psychosis.

“Spiritual psychosis is a real term, and someone who is in a true psychosis is going to be different from someone who’s experiencing a spiritual delusion, which most people are experiencing,” she explains. “But long-term spiritual delusion, while technically being sane for a long-term period of time, can lead people to psychotic breaks […] You can also have true psychosis that has a religious or spiritual bent.”

Priestly isn’t a mental health professional—by the looks of it, she’s a full-time content creator. But her point is compelling even if it’s not a clinical diagnosis. “Manifestation” often looks like a kind of willful delusion. The first video I saw instructed viewers to imagine that the person they’re speaking to is saying something different, with the explicit goal of willing the idealized speech into existence. It’s not a form of manipulation exactly, because the point is not to change the other person’s mind but to overpower the effect of their actions. That’s closer to witchcraft than it is to persuasion.

Contra its more moderate defenders, manifestation is not just about changing your mindset to be more confident. It’s about trying to “reshape your reality.” An affirmation here and there might help you shift your perspective to a more positive one, but what happens when it’s a sustained insistence that you can change your life with your thoughts, a la “tuning out your partner and imagining them saying something else”? Priestly’s theory that it can lead to a psychotic break, or at a minimum, a mental health disturbance, doesn’t sound so outlandish. Manifestation is not new. It’s also not, as people sometimes assert, “secular” or “New Age” prayer. It dates back to the 19th century and has ebbed in and out of popularity in American culture since then. It arrives in different guises. The popular Law of Attraction, which states that “positive thoughts bring positive results,” is more than a century old. The concept got a nationwide boost from Oprah in 2006 when she popularized Rhonda Byrne’s book The Secret.

Every time manifestation reappears in the national psyche, it’s greeted with the same criticism. Manifestation is “toxic positivity.” This is the New Age side of “hustle culture.” It’s Ayn Randian libertarianism for the spiritual set. Setting aside the potential danger of relying on what’s essentially magic to change your life, its critics argue that it places an undue burden on the individual. If you subscribe to something like the Law of Attraction, you’re implicitly minimizing the structures and systems in place that prevent people from reaching their goals or, more broadly, leading happy lives. Popular counterarguments today might evoke race or class: Is it a lack of positive thinking that keeps certain people down, or systemic racism? A psychologist might worry that it prevents people from ever facing up to and making peace with the truth of their own lives.

Manifestation is not an alternative expression of religion. For it to be religious or even ‘spiritual,’ there would need to be something deeper there—some desire for truth, for something greater than oneself. But watching the TikTokers preaching manifestation, it is clear that few who’ve newly discovered this dressed-up prosperity gospel have even a passing thought about a Higher Power. The most modest proponents of manifestation want answers; the more ambitious want “to rebrand their lives.” It is as transactional as it comes.

The 2020s fixation on manifestation feels less like an extension of “hustle culture”—that go-get-them, lift-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps attitude characterizes so many American self-help fads—and more like an expression of maladaptive daydreaming. It is about reaffirming that the world is defined by you and you alone, that you speak reality to existence. We are all living in a lucid dream, it insists, and like dreams, the real fun begins when you know how to manipulate your environment.

The way we’ve been conditioned to manipulate our environments—and ourselves—is by way of the digital. On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. This is true everywhere online, but it’s particularly true of digitally native communities where there isn’t necessarily an expectation of meeting in person. Social media, supposedly tied to our non-digital identities, has made us forget how easy it is to fabricate things. If somebody tells me they live in Cincinnati and are a paralegal, I have no reason to believe they’d be lying. But the scary thing is, online, people lie about these things all the time. Maybe it’s for opsec concerns: they want to throw of the scent, and keep their identity under lock and key. But more likely, I’ve found, it’s because the lies they’re telling reveal an “emotional truth.” They may not literally work as a paralegal in Cincinnati, but they are “spiritually.” They feel like their identity is best expressed through this avatar, so the lie begins.

That’s where manifestation comes in. It’s what happens when you log of and learn once more that you’re a dog, and that you can’t eat at the dinner table with all the humans. Manifestation emerges as a coping mechanism. Not some libertarian entitlement, but rather an attempt to negotiate the gap between the physical world and the digital world.

The physical world is filled with limitations, where it’s not always as easy to express your “emotional truth.” The obsession with manifestation feels like an expression of running up against that wall–a desperate No! It is a desire to project my inner world onto an intransigent reality.

And of course, I write this only after visiting a psychic to ask about my identity as a writer, journaling about how I will be a writer, indeed that I am already a writer (that’s the Law of Assumption), visualizing being a writer, and anointing a candle with cinnamon oil in the hopes that it speeds things up.

Alan Sager

Jan 26, 2023

Canadians spent 85 percent as much per-person as Americans on health care in 1970. In 2020, that figure dropped to 49 percent as much. So the health care problems Canadians face today stem mainly from a combination of having less money to spend and choosing to spend money on other things.

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