On Radical Audacity

The other day, a friend asked me what I thought of the “money manifestation” courses she keeps seeing online. Maybe you’ve seen their ads, too: Relatable-feeling, straight-to-camera videos featuring people who promise to rid you of your “money blocks,” using scientific-sounding language and vague assurances about forthcoming abundance. This type of material usually triggers my patent-pending NEOLIBERAL GRIFT internal alarm system, so despite feeling as though I was vacuuming all the hope out of the room, I told her as much.

If you’re unfamiliar with the world of money manifestation courses, allow me to acquaint you: The general operating principle is that your beliefs are preventing you from “receiving” or “attracting” all the money that’s attempting to “reach you” (or something to this effect; I’m fighting for my life in NewAgepedia). It’s very The Secret–coded, a worldview for which I used to have a lot more patience. Look, I told her, I feel pretty strongly that the only way these instructors are “attracting money” is by charging a high fee to “teach” others how to attract it. The 4D chess of business plans.

But my friend, who’s recently divorced, worries she’s suffering from financial constipation. It wasn’t until she got out of her marriage that she even realized she was “blocked”: Her husband, who earned a high income, made frequent references to her station as the ‘supported’ partner (and himself as the supporter). It was treated as a given that she’d forever require his largesse, as her talents were, apparently, doomed to be less remunerative. After many years, she said, the sentiment seeped into her psyche like a poison. She was lulled into acceptance: “It’s like I forgot I was even capable of supporting myself on my own,” she said. And so: Could it be worth paying for this course?

When she mused that maybe her struggle to find a new, higher-paying job was due to limiting beliefs, I wanted to shout, “It’s not your mindset, it’s accelerated capitalism!” (This statement can be used, annoyingly but accurately, as an all-purpose explanation for the most maddening elements of modern life.)

And yet, having experienced a shift firsthand, I couldn’t deny that beliefs are powerful. I had long felt my earning potential was necessarily constricted by my public relations degree. After befriending several women with the same level of education, each of whom had devised ways to earn hundreds of thousands of dollars, I had no choice but to recognize that my personal narrative wasn’t just untrue, but materially holding me back. It wasn’t some cosmic traffic jam or supernatural force at play—just the banality of undermining your own desires and avoiding action.

To chalk up my friend’s challenges to nothing but the extractive nature of capitalism is to ignore that many women are on the receiving end of malignant financial scripts. In a recent personal essay on Dana Miranda’s Healthy Rich, guest writer Lia Jane wrote about the way her marriage corroded her relationship with money. Despite getting together while they were mutually broke, she witnessed her ex-husband bend financial reality to his will. It wasn’t the money he earned (sometimes by dubious means) that shook her—it was his unflappable faith that he deserved to be rich. “It broke my brain,” she reported, the way he felt entitled to become wealthy, and the fact that it actually worked.

Enabled by a steady liquid diet of rise-and-grind motivational material, he existed in a frenzy of “millionaire mindset” catchphrases that provided the thrust for his (eventually successful) business. “Men are often socialized to aim higher, no matter what it takes,” she concludes. “Far too many women are socialized to believe success is either luck or comes in the form of a man.”

These beliefs are powerful not because they are obvious, but because they’re so embedded as to be nearly undetectable. French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu developed theories about how the habits and preferences we learn in our upbringings and adolescent experiences begin to feel like instinct—unnoticeable, natural. These instincts, in turn, determine how we perceive ourselves. These perceptions shape our decisions, and our decisions influence our reality.

Crucially, Bourdieu believed this functioned like a two-way street: Your cultural context influences how you behave, but then your behavior reinforces that cultural “truth” for yourself and others. He called this “the means by which social structures are internalized” and reproduced through generations. It’s why progress often happens slowly: Because it requires a critical mass of people defying what feels like their very nature. If your sense of entitlement feels instinctual, you’ll stop at nothing to get what you believe is rightfully yours. The opposite is also true.

In her book Down, Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, philosopher Kate Manne describes research in which the authors analyzed the differences between girls and boys in classroom settings. They found that when both raise their hands, boys are called on at a rate of eight to one (!), and girls, who are less likely to be called on, are more likely to be corrected—not just proportionally, but in absolute terms.

In another study, researchers found that 5-year-old girls and boys are equally likely to report believing someone of their gender could be “really, really smart.” This effect “drops off rapidly” for girls by age seven, part of a body of research that indicates even very young children learn to associate brilliance with being a boy. For my part, I was deluded in my self-confidence thanks to parents who relentlessly gassed me up at every turn, until I reached high school and learned, however briefly, to feel self-conscious about having opinions and a loud speaking voice. Now she has a podcast, folks! The free market giveth!

But when we’re talking about the direction of causality, things become slippery: Men are probably more likely, on average, to believe they’re entitled to be paid well. Women are probably more likely, on average, to attribute their successes to luck (or other factors outside of themselves). These realities are the cause and also the effect of the related observation that the marketplace is more likely to reward men who display brash self-assuredness, while punishing women who do.

In money manifestation circles, these facts of our cultural conditioning congeal into a swamp of personal empowerment exercises. Chicken? Egg? Who cares! Meditate about why you deserve both. Practices like these, intended to help a person recognize the money stories that might be holding them back, are potentially too earnest; too genuinely introspective. People like billionaire Adam Neumann, who willed his way to vast wealth by deluding himself (and everyone around him) that he was a once-in-a-generation genius with a standard real estate business tech company, made billions not from deep self-knowledge, but profound self-deception. The fact that so many people accepted (and continue to accept!) these delusions of FyreFest-level grandeur is evidence that there’s a certain avatar from whom we are willing to endorse reckless overconfidence (male, 6’5”, bombastic; meanwhile…). It is both upsetting and instructive that people like Adam Neumann are among the most successful players of all time in our economic home run derby.

Observing distressing tropes like that of the Charismatic Billionaire Fraud (especially as it becomes more common), we often feel we have no choice but to tunnel deeper into the oppressive domain of the self, clinging tighter to the rationale of spiritual individualism.

Consider the first comment on Lia’s piece: “As a 52-year-old woman dependent on her husband for money, it is draining me. I have worked hard [on] abundance, prosperity, and worth this past year. I filled journals, invited good fortune to flow to me, and attempted to manifest it. All of that was beneficial and healing, but it didn’t put money into the bank.” This touching, vulnerable missive was a word search of jargon from the money manifestation world, and it’s here that some of the philosophy’s core lexicon might betray its underlying incompatibility with the marketplace: It describes a process of passivity; a gentle invitation by which something “flows to you.” But the logic of modern capitalism mostly rewards the audacity displayed by those who move through life never questioning whether they’re entitled to go out after it.

Taken together, these studies and anecdotes sketch a compelling theme: We absorb “truths” about ourselves from the way authority figures treat us when we’re children, to the way our intimate partners regard us as adults. This is—obviously!—going to influence our self-concept, and the decisions that follow.

These “truths” fertilize the ground for seeds of conventional wisdom like “Women work for personal fulfillment, not money” and “A man should be a breadwinner,” ideas that flourish in economic data sets as gendered inevitabilities, outcomes of our historical moment impersonating divine principles.

As a schoolteacher, Lia earned $44,000 per year. To whatever extent you could argue her salary is reflective of her personal mindset, it is at least as attributable to the mindset of the market at large, which insists people are always paid according to their inherent value. These terms will continue to be reinforced for as long as we collectively accept them as “natural.”

After our episode last week about improving labor conditions in the US, a listener emailed and advised me to “just give all my money to poor people” if I am “so onboard with socialism.” Apparently, interrogating mass layoffs engineered to juice profitability for Wall Street and highlighting the median $1.3 million lifetime earnings premium for union members angered her. Fair enough! I had insulted the holy logic of the market, the belief system that says things like collective bargaining for fair wages interfere with its righteous, rightful claim to our time and energy. (Predictably, she told me to “stick to money.” Gesturing at poor people, mumbling something incoherent about socialism, and telling me to stick to money? This is the dark triad of feedback.)

What feels most useful, then, is making the invisible visible: exposing the stream of signals we consume from our peers, media, and authority figures that produces people who believe they are not only deserving of financial security, but singularly capable of achieving it, and others who do not. It’s the world’s most potent and insidious brand collab, Capitalism x Patriarchy (a new Stanley Cup color, only at Target®).

So who’s permitted—expected, even—to behave audaciously? Having a little more audacity can be a radical act if society has decided you shouldn’t have any. Since this interplay between individual behavior and gender norms is mutually reinforcing, a behavioral sea change is all but necessary to interrupt these cycles and shift culture.

The prevalence of stories like my friend’s makes me think we haven’t come as far as late 2010s pop feminism would suggest, though it seems the rumbling shift is underway—young women are now more likely than young men to aspire to stereotypically prestigious professions like law and medicine, indicating there’s not as much an ambition gap as a slow, grinding professional atrophy: A study that controlled for hours worked, clinical revenue, practice type and specialty found that female physicians were estimated to earn, on average, $2 million less than male physicians over their careers. In law, an assessment of 3,000 US firms found billable hours assigned to women were between 10% and 12% lower than those billed for men. Even those who achieve the top jobs in their firms are paid less, with women partners earning an average of $784,000 to men’s $1,130,000.

In the absence of socialization that treats prosperity as your birthright, the ability to wield audacity like a weapon is a byproduct of—and here, I cringe at the echo of the very self-help genre I’m critiquing—taking action and seeing results. It’s the reason why I’ve long believed the best business advice is “start doing something,” and how I maintain an indelible faith in the healing powers of a spreadsheet.

The bigger, more difficult question is, do we wish to dominate a system that privileges self-serving hubris, or dismantle it? Will we recommit to the self as the highest fundamental good, or subvert its tyranny?

Regardless, I wish I could bottle the feeling I get when I see rich men confidently tweeting totally out-of-pocket commentary about subjects they very clearly know next to nothing about (here, I could tag the entire cast of the All-In podcast). I would sell it on the black market to women with PhDs who doubt their qualifications and ex-wives of high earners who have been quietly convinced they’re doomed to be supporting characters. Consider this my formal plea for more audacity, solidarity, and for the love of God, fewer $997 money manifestation courses.