Its kind of like they see themselves as practictioners of a kind of counter spelling magic, like anti hexes.
A good number of them literally believe the legal system functionally actually is word magic.
And they functionally believe they can counter the false and binding evil magic (legal) words with the /true/ form and nature of /true/ legal verbiage, basically by studying/inventing/misinterpreting various legal documents, precidents and history.
In a way many of them see themselves as … i guess yould say arcane etymologists of legalese, working against a vast conspiracy unknown to the masses by uncorrupting the very magic used by their hated foes.
Yeah they fail to understand one of the fundamental truths of our world: that political power grows from the barrel of a gun. There are three ways to get a government to do what you want: appease it via its rules or myths, deal with it by offering what it wants but cannot comfortably take, or force it in some way.
The first one is what most of us do most of the time because it works and if the government is functional it’s not that bad and generally results in the stability that people prioritize, the second is more typically done by other governments and the rich, and the third is shit like strikes, revolutions, wars, and mass protests. It’s high cost high reward.
The first though has one major drawback: it’s bullshit, but it’s bullshit that enough people agree to abide by life is better and easier so we do it. And that’s what sovcits don’t understand. They can’t make up the rules, only propose rule changes. Full overhauls result in only the latter two existing until a new government is formed to appease and that is just generally a huge gamble that sucks for everyone especially people who are delusional, annoying, and unsympathetic.
Most forms of magical thinking can usually be exposed by relatively mundane and common place events that are essentially unthinkable, or impossible, to the magical thinker.
Ie, you probably are not going to be able to stop someone from mugging you by expounding a whole bunch of rhetoric about the non aggression principle within the context of say stefan molyneux’s universally prefferable objective transactional moral imperatives, or some nonsense like that.
In same vein, try explaining to a serious practitioner of some kind of wicca variant or modern witchcraft or warlockracy (sp?) that uh, no, doesnt matter if you read your horoscope, did a tarot card reading and a purification sage burning ritual on your apartment… youre still gonna get evicted if you cant figure out how to pay rent.
The actual reality of actual evil forces in world requires actual study and knowledge of a wide variety of complex and nuanced concepts and phenomena that all interplay with each other in objectively definable and testably real ways…
… but that shits complicated yo, what if like, things that i dont like are bad, and, so, i know this (insert magical thinking worldview here) seems crazy at first, but then it all //makes sense man!//.
Basically my hypothesis here (not really my hypothesis, this can actually be seen happening in many comparable/analagous situations in human history) is that as material conditions in a society deteriorate AND there is basically no way for the masses to escape or avoid these garbage conditions, magical thinking takes hold, takes more forms, and eventually leads to more and more dangerous cults.
Best possible example of this? QAnon.
That being said, i very much like your summary of 3 ways to deal with a government. Thats very succinct and generally very accurate!
Unfortunately… it seems those rules also apply, though currently with more exceptions, to very large corporations as well.
I agree in general but I think one important thing to remember is that there’s a varying degree of magical thinking at play. Where sovcits and qanon scare the shit out of me is that they’re whole hog into it. There’s “these beliefs help me in some way” magical thoughts they can be everything from me celebrating Beltane tonight because having a holiday every eighth of the year has helped me feel less like time slips away without me noticing to that hogfather quote about justice.
Magical thoughts get concerning in my opinion when they’re prioritized without concern for their effects. But then at its worst it becomes a cycle, when it’s your escape from or attempt to claim power over a bad situation that it leads you to actively make worse. That’s where we see folks like sovcits, qanon, fundies, certain gambling addicts, and the people who treat fruit as chemotherapy. It’s a different beast to a silly belief that helps you live a life you want.
I would say though that when you take those otherwise harmless beliefs that bring you comfort /so seriously that you actually make important functions necessary to daily life as either less important than said silly beliefs, or you believe those silly beliefs actually impact reality more than obvious and/or actually scientifically valid concepts/, thats when you cross over into functional delusional, magical thinking.
So, for example: Horoscopes. As they pertain to either yourself personally or your judgements of others, can be seen as just silly things to indulge in from time to time, or you can actually take them seriously and use them to guide important decisions in your life, and you might actually take them so seriously that you either do this very, very often, or consult them when faced with extremely important and impactful situations.
Theres your gradient from harmless, to possibly harmful, to quite likely to be harmful.
All based on absolute bullshit.
By the time you arrive at my previous example of … what im just going to call ‘serious wiccans’ even though i know an actual serious wiccan would say ‘thats not wicca’ and the people im actually talking about all refer to themselves by some kind of personal special title according to their personal favorite esoteric occultists theyve blended into some unique name for some kind of spirituality generally resembling what i struggle to find a better word for than wicca or witchcraft…
By the time you arrive at that you /are/ dealing with people who believe in harmful delusional nonsense.
This kind of stuff, falling into a worldview of delusional magical thinking, is usually associated with the right wing, and for very good reason, but it can happen on the left, or be basically politically neutral as well.
For examples of delusional harmful magical thinking associated generally with people whod consider themselves leftists or at least not conservative…
Breatharianism has a lot of leftists, though im not sure if theyre a majority.
Same deal with certain … basically Eastern Spiritual Gurus that get people to believe in magical nonsense of some kind or another that often leads them to reject established science cures and treatments for serious illnesses, or people who /seriously/ believe that they can ‘manifest’ positive things in their life basically by thinking positively.
Again, both of those kinds if things do not exclusively draw in right wingers, there are significant numbers of left if center people that get drawn into that.
Falling for MLM/Pyramid Scheme cosmetics or health products (used to be more oriented toward domestic consumer goods aimed at housewives) cults is a thing you see a lot of self avowed left of center people do, and that shit will ruin your life and the lives of those you pull into it bad as a bullshit crypto currency scheme will ruin a right wing male incel’s life and everyone he convinces to invest in along with him.
And both of those I’d argue constitute delusional magical thinking.
For a basically non political related thing… Have you ever heard of the final fantasy house?
Long story short, in the late 90s to early 2000s, a number of people basically believed or were brainwashed by mutual group reinforcement and literal physical starvation, sexual assault, physical assault, financial exploitation and dependency, confinement and isolation… into believing they literally were or were soulbonded to various video game characters.
Very serious harm was done to certain people, some moreso than others and some more often perpetrators than victims, by what i can only describe as essentially a cult, again, based around delusional magical thinking.
But, to round this all out:
Dear /fucking god/, covid deniers, vax skeptics, actually just shove horse dewormer up your butt or inject bleach into your veins people, holy fuck.
Theres basically no possible way I can disagree that when right wing aligned people fall into delusional magical thinking, its far, far worse for society overall than when non political, liberal or leftists do. Its very clear that when this kind of stuff happens to a right wingers brain, it happens to a looot of them, and theyre more likely to do very, very harmful things.
I wrote all this to attempt to show that it isnt a wholly right wing phenomenon, but yes, in its totality, its rational to be generally more concerned about delusional magical thinking when its heavily associated with right wing culture/ideology.
And the reason why its more impactful when right wingers fall for it is that all of their delusional nonsense generally dovetails with all their other delusional nonsense, and falling for one of their insano beleif systems easily leads to falling for more of them.
Whereas non political or leftist occurrences like this usually are silo’d off from each other and do not lead to this kind of snowballing of falling for a gamut of other nonsense.
In the mugging example, that person is clearly not playing by the rules though, and I think Wiccans are smart enough to stick to things that can’t be categorically proven false.
Its kind of like they see themselves as practictioners of a kind of counter spelling magic, like anti hexes.
A good number of them literally believe the legal system functionally actually is word magic.
And they functionally believe they can counter the false and binding evil magic (legal) words with the /true/ form and nature of /true/ legal verbiage, basically by studying/inventing/misinterpreting various legal documents, precidents and history.
In a way many of them see themselves as … i guess yould say arcane etymologists of legalese, working against a vast conspiracy unknown to the masses by uncorrupting the very magic used by their hated foes.
Yeah they fail to understand one of the fundamental truths of our world: that political power grows from the barrel of a gun. There are three ways to get a government to do what you want: appease it via its rules or myths, deal with it by offering what it wants but cannot comfortably take, or force it in some way.
The first one is what most of us do most of the time because it works and if the government is functional it’s not that bad and generally results in the stability that people prioritize, the second is more typically done by other governments and the rich, and the third is shit like strikes, revolutions, wars, and mass protests. It’s high cost high reward.
The first though has one major drawback: it’s bullshit, but it’s bullshit that enough people agree to abide by life is better and easier so we do it. And that’s what sovcits don’t understand. They can’t make up the rules, only propose rule changes. Full overhauls result in only the latter two existing until a new government is formed to appease and that is just generally a huge gamble that sucks for everyone especially people who are delusional, annoying, and unsympathetic.
Most forms of magical thinking can usually be exposed by relatively mundane and common place events that are essentially unthinkable, or impossible, to the magical thinker.
Ie, you probably are not going to be able to stop someone from mugging you by expounding a whole bunch of rhetoric about the non aggression principle within the context of say stefan molyneux’s universally prefferable objective transactional moral imperatives, or some nonsense like that.
In same vein, try explaining to a serious practitioner of some kind of wicca variant or modern witchcraft or warlockracy (sp?) that uh, no, doesnt matter if you read your horoscope, did a tarot card reading and a purification sage burning ritual on your apartment… youre still gonna get evicted if you cant figure out how to pay rent.
The actual reality of actual evil forces in world requires actual study and knowledge of a wide variety of complex and nuanced concepts and phenomena that all interplay with each other in objectively definable and testably real ways…
… but that shits complicated yo, what if like, things that i dont like are bad, and, so, i know this (insert magical thinking worldview here) seems crazy at first, but then it all //makes sense man!//.
Basically my hypothesis here (not really my hypothesis, this can actually be seen happening in many comparable/analagous situations in human history) is that as material conditions in a society deteriorate AND there is basically no way for the masses to escape or avoid these garbage conditions, magical thinking takes hold, takes more forms, and eventually leads to more and more dangerous cults.
Best possible example of this? QAnon.
That being said, i very much like your summary of 3 ways to deal with a government. Thats very succinct and generally very accurate!
Unfortunately… it seems those rules also apply, though currently with more exceptions, to very large corporations as well.
I agree in general but I think one important thing to remember is that there’s a varying degree of magical thinking at play. Where sovcits and qanon scare the shit out of me is that they’re whole hog into it. There’s “these beliefs help me in some way” magical thoughts they can be everything from me celebrating Beltane tonight because having a holiday every eighth of the year has helped me feel less like time slips away without me noticing to that hogfather quote about justice.
Magical thoughts get concerning in my opinion when they’re prioritized without concern for their effects. But then at its worst it becomes a cycle, when it’s your escape from or attempt to claim power over a bad situation that it leads you to actively make worse. That’s where we see folks like sovcits, qanon, fundies, certain gambling addicts, and the people who treat fruit as chemotherapy. It’s a different beast to a silly belief that helps you live a life you want.
I also generally agree with what youve said.
I would say though that when you take those otherwise harmless beliefs that bring you comfort /so seriously that you actually make important functions necessary to daily life as either less important than said silly beliefs, or you believe those silly beliefs actually impact reality more than obvious and/or actually scientifically valid concepts/, thats when you cross over into functional delusional, magical thinking.
So, for example: Horoscopes. As they pertain to either yourself personally or your judgements of others, can be seen as just silly things to indulge in from time to time, or you can actually take them seriously and use them to guide important decisions in your life, and you might actually take them so seriously that you either do this very, very often, or consult them when faced with extremely important and impactful situations.
Theres your gradient from harmless, to possibly harmful, to quite likely to be harmful.
All based on absolute bullshit.
By the time you arrive at my previous example of … what im just going to call ‘serious wiccans’ even though i know an actual serious wiccan would say ‘thats not wicca’ and the people im actually talking about all refer to themselves by some kind of personal special title according to their personal favorite esoteric occultists theyve blended into some unique name for some kind of spirituality generally resembling what i struggle to find a better word for than wicca or witchcraft…
By the time you arrive at that you /are/ dealing with people who believe in harmful delusional nonsense.
This kind of stuff, falling into a worldview of delusional magical thinking, is usually associated with the right wing, and for very good reason, but it can happen on the left, or be basically politically neutral as well.
For examples of delusional harmful magical thinking associated generally with people whod consider themselves leftists or at least not conservative…
Breatharianism has a lot of leftists, though im not sure if theyre a majority.
Same deal with certain … basically Eastern Spiritual Gurus that get people to believe in magical nonsense of some kind or another that often leads them to reject established science cures and treatments for serious illnesses, or people who /seriously/ believe that they can ‘manifest’ positive things in their life basically by thinking positively.
Again, both of those kinds if things do not exclusively draw in right wingers, there are significant numbers of left if center people that get drawn into that.
Falling for MLM/Pyramid Scheme cosmetics or health products (used to be more oriented toward domestic consumer goods aimed at housewives) cults is a thing you see a lot of self avowed left of center people do, and that shit will ruin your life and the lives of those you pull into it bad as a bullshit crypto currency scheme will ruin a right wing male incel’s life and everyone he convinces to invest in along with him.
And both of those I’d argue constitute delusional magical thinking.
For a basically non political related thing… Have you ever heard of the final fantasy house?
Long story short, in the late 90s to early 2000s, a number of people basically believed or were brainwashed by mutual group reinforcement and literal physical starvation, sexual assault, physical assault, financial exploitation and dependency, confinement and isolation… into believing they literally were or were soulbonded to various video game characters.
Very serious harm was done to certain people, some moreso than others and some more often perpetrators than victims, by what i can only describe as essentially a cult, again, based around delusional magical thinking.
But, to round this all out:
Dear /fucking god/, covid deniers, vax skeptics, actually just shove horse dewormer up your butt or inject bleach into your veins people, holy fuck.
Theres basically no possible way I can disagree that when right wing aligned people fall into delusional magical thinking, its far, far worse for society overall than when non political, liberal or leftists do. Its very clear that when this kind of stuff happens to a right wingers brain, it happens to a looot of them, and theyre more likely to do very, very harmful things.
I wrote all this to attempt to show that it isnt a wholly right wing phenomenon, but yes, in its totality, its rational to be generally more concerned about delusional magical thinking when its heavily associated with right wing culture/ideology.
And the reason why its more impactful when right wingers fall for it is that all of their delusional nonsense generally dovetails with all their other delusional nonsense, and falling for one of their insano beleif systems easily leads to falling for more of them.
Whereas non political or leftist occurrences like this usually are silo’d off from each other and do not lead to this kind of snowballing of falling for a gamut of other nonsense.
In the mugging example, that person is clearly not playing by the rules though, and I think Wiccans are smart enough to stick to things that can’t be categorically proven false.
At least in my personal experience of knowing Wiccans/Witches/Magic Practitioners in real life, this is absolutely not the case.
Sounds like a good plot for an anime.