The Essence of a Manifesto
What turns a document into a "manifesto"?
A most famous one is by Marx and Engels, the one that set off the communist revolutions in Europe. You will see, for a document to 'manifest' anything it has to find resonance with how the audience feels. It's by giving a voice to those feelings how the document brings things into happening. Manifestos are documents that manifest themselves onto something other than themselves, documents that blossom into happening.
How do you make an appeal to people's feelings?
It is only in retrospect that documents become manifestos, when they become of consequence, significance, and transcendence. Consider the Satoshi whitepaper, the document that originated the Bitcoin movement by chain reaction. Things are what they are by the way they do... by the way they are received, by what they set off and unleash upon the world. You can name any document a manifesto but that doesn't make it one in-the-facts, which is to say a document's name doesn’t necessarily speak to its functional nature. When there is a mismatch the name is mere embellishment.
The mystical allure of the manifesto comes from its power to make things happen. But how to imbue such power into a document? You have to speak to something inside the reader, a conversation that awakens, that shakes into action. You have to fill them with a sense of duty, you have to inspire a sense of opportunity. Consider the Declaration of Independence of the United States. It is by giving a voice to mass feeling that a manifesto gives way to movements and revolutions.
How do we give a voice to our collective feelings?
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