Magical thinking, a deep dive into woke minds

A return to prehistoric thinking

We’ve all had those moments, were we read or hear a headline, and just shake our heads at the sheer insanity of what we just heard. How can people seriously think that? Or how can they not see the glaring hypocrisy or inconsistency of their position?

Coming from the ‘woke’, we’re now expecting that.

But what is that, actually?

A few months ago, I stumbled across an article, written in 2019, titled Magical thinking is a threat to Western civilization.

It sheds light on this woke phenomenon we see all around us.

Let’s walk through his thesis. He starts by pointing out how we have been talking about how our mind works, in particular those ideas that come from our unconscious.

“To magicians (and some therapists), you can be controlled by these entities that rise from the unconscious – or you can control them. Jungians call them Archetypes: the Hero, the anima, the animus etc. To the secular, the entities are not real but may be symptoms of a disease – psychosis, schizophrenia, dissociative identity disorder. To the religious, they are real and are malevolent – demons. Artists see Muses.”

 This is, of course, a simplification: one can be religious, and still see normal mental processes of your own, and not only or immediately demons, but it sketches the different views correctly.

Next, he defines ‘magical thinking’ as a view that assigns causation to correlation: because 2 things ‘seem’ related (they happen at the same time, are in the same location, they look alike,…), they ARE related!

It was the genius of the Greeks that put an end to that, when they introduced their emphasis on logic in thought. (This has been a long process, where the place of the Church cannot be ignored: it offered a specific worldview that made the rise of theoretical science possible, not just the observation based empirical science – which is still a few degrees closer related to magical thinking. This role the Church played in the development of science and western civilization cannot be overstated, and I’ll get back to that later when we’ll be exploring society, civilization and ideology in more detail)

The author explains that this new logical way of thinking is obvious to us, but not to everyone. He cites the crazies, children, uneducated, and the unintelligent, as groups of people who still mostly work by association. But he adds one extra class: the fanatic, and so introduces the Social Justice Warrior as the standard bearer of woke, magical thinking.

They operate not only through ‘guilt by association’, the author points out, but this method of association permeates everything they do. Their ideology, they art, their memes.

He makes another interesting observation:

“Associative thinking can be burned into the mind by trauma, sex, substance abuse, and narcissism (being a spoilt bastard). That’s why SJWs are such a strange bunch: they are made of a mix of the genuinely traumatised, the sexually abused or addicted, the mentally ill, and the plain selfish.”

If you look at a collection of mugshots of people arrested during the violent antifa-protests 2 summers ago, you can see those different groups well-represented.

While I am not making any judgement on any individual by themselves, we see a wide range of markers that something is ‘off’. Keep in mind that all those mugshots were for violence related arrests during those riots. They externalized their out of proportion focus on superficial resemblances and links.

The article continues:
In the mind of an SJW, once a *word* is associated with something bad, it will always remain linked to that bad thing, and it becomes a trigger (reinforced if the person hearing that trigger word had a genuinely bad experience, directly related or not). “Bad magic spell?” the author askes.

And similarly, once an *idea* is associated with something bad, it will always remain linked, as well. The idea itself compulsively makes the person think of the bad thing, taking over their mind. “Demonic possession?” the author asks.

He explains how this works:

“Magical thinkers are ‘triggered’ by words or ideas because they can’t resist the magical incantations the rest of us perceive as merely words. The association of the word triggers the ‘spell’ or gives life to the ‘possessing entity’ (the compulsive idea) inside the SJW’s mind.

Multiple triggers = multiple spells or multiple entities attacking their minds. This fragmentation is very much like psychosis, schizophrenia or dissociative identity disorder.”

This is another key word: fragmentation. Besides that often being a consequence of trauma, this fragmentation of the mind shows a lack of logical, unified structures in our thinking to align our different thoughts and observations into a rational, cohesive whole. This is pushed outward as intersectionalism, gender-ideology, even racism (where they, ironically, classify people ONLY on the basis of their outward resemblance, contradicting their self-stated anti-racism, and where they reject as racist the very notion to look at character, not skin), to recreate that inner fragmentation in their actual world.

(Cargo cult: a very interesting sociological study of the impact of Western Armies on native Islanders. Look it up, very insightful!)

The author gives the example of transgenderism. “This is cargo-cult, magical thinking,” he wrote, “Give the body the appearance of the other sex, and it becomes imbued with the essence of the other sex. It even _becomes_ the other sex.”

“This is ‘A = not-A’.

This Man is not-a-Man.

This Woman is not-a-Woman.

It’s also the Magical Law of Similarity. Change A to resemble B, and it becomes B.”

The author explains how magical thinkers always project. As normal reality is too painful for people with damaged minds, they are constantly exposed to trigger words and ideas, infecting their minds. As it reveals their craziness, they either seal themselves off from that reality, or they attempt to change reality itself, to escape the conclusion of their craziness. You certainly have noticed this constant projection already, but now you know why they do that.

It is also interesting to note that while people themselves haven’t really changed much, our circumstances have. Drastically. Even a mere 25 years ago, people could seal themselves from reality much more easily, as communication was still much slower. Or in a society were draconic euphemisms weren’t socially enforced yet, the confrontation with reality acted as a buffer to keep the emotional burden and personal damage limited. On top of that, it was impossible to really change reality around them on sufficient scale to make it a viable option.

Today, with the internet and social media, and the ubiquitous smart phones and very cheap data plans, it is a whole lot easier to change your reality, than it is to change yourself, or even than to hide from reality. We see it in the typical ‘instagram’ or ‘Facebook’ lives: people posting a much more glamorous version of their lives, for the world to see. With the vain hope or expectation that this changed perception has actual value, and changes the reality, too. It doesn’t, of course, but many are trapped in this thinking, and do everything to change the outward perception and reality. Together with a slowly shifting ‘acceptance’ of ever increasing classes of ‘protected statuses’, they started to impose a change in reality.

The author explains:

“Transgenderism is an attempt to do this. If magic won’t change a person’s essence, then reality itself must be changed. The endpoint of this thinking is the destruction of the sane world. It replaces our logical reality, which is painful to damaged associative minds, with a fractured and disordered reality where they will never be exposed to triggers – their safe space.”

The illusion of this enterprise is shown by actual reality, as the article continues:

“Of course, this safe space ‘reality’ will never remain safe because the deluded will fight each other over their visions for it. A transgender person’s Heaven is a radical feminist’s Hell.”

That is what we see happen, now.

More and more, the overreach in trying to force a fragmented mind on actual reality, not just for the person suffering themselves, but demanding everyone around played along, created an ever growing conflict with reality. People could no longer hide it, nor could they ignore it.

This article, ‘The Week the Trans Spell was Broken’, lines out how in the UK the whole transgender debate has reached a turning point, and people finally feel safe and comfortable to openly say that the transgender emperor is stark naked. (Notice also how the title borrows from the magical language: this is not coincidence).

Hadley Freeman, the author of this article, explained brilliantly how that happened:

“So I always knew it would start with sport. The great advantage sport has over, say, prisons and refuges is that it happens in public: people can see it and they are interested in it. That’s why when historians write about that relatively brief but extremely toxic time when gender extremism gripped western countries, and they describe the moment when that grip loosened, they will start with the photos of Lia Thomas, the Ivy League trans swimmer, towering over her teammates. These caught the mainstream interest in a way feminist arguments about trans women in prisons never have: here is an issue where even Homer Simpson can see the obvious problem.”

Try to tell a feminist how it is ok, that biological girls get literally beaten by stronger biological males, simply because they now identify as ‘women’? Where is the fairness in that? Is that the equality feminism has fought for?

Back to the article on Magical Thinking:

The author lays it out:

“This ‘A is not-A’ and magical thinking is the desire to replace a logical world, where something cannot be its opposite, with a magical world where an item can be transformed into anything through the laws of magic (association) and rhetorical ‘spells’. Impose a code of conduct that enforces ‘preferred pronouns’ and hey presto, a man becomes a woman and a woman becomes a man. Or they become agender people, or Otherkin. (Look them up.)”

He ends his article with this thought:

“The religious will have different ideas to the secular about the status of magic and possession. However, whether you believe magic and possession are objective or whether you believe they are just psychological phenomena, one thing is clear and unites all parties:

The West has spent over 2500 years moving away from childish, deluded, irrationality. The victory of magical thinking (EG legislation based on it to enforce ‘preferred pronouns’) would be, and is, a return to the intellectual prehistory of Western society, and it is an existential threat to our civilisation.”

This is the core. It is a regression, a return to a much more primitive state of thinking. Does it surprise anyone, then, to also see a return of rank tribalism? Of cannibalism, where we see groups eat their own? (Ask how J.K. Rowling is doing, a staunch feminist and openly supporting LGBTQ+ ideas, after she dared question transgenderism, see for example this article ‘Harry Potter and the Author Who Failed Us’. You have to give it to them, they have an incredible sense of flair and drama!) (Her original essay is actually worth a read, providing five reasons for being worried about the new trans activism).

While our civilization and science was founded on logical, rational thought, within a very specific framework that the Church provided (namely, that of a finished, ordered creation, that was knowable and in our power to manage and subdue, as stewards), we have to realize that turning away from either that framework or that way of thinking means to step away from our science and our civilization.

The chaos that would cause, is perhaps the goal of certain elites, as it would provide an unbound and rudderless humanity that they can then shape as they see fit. They will fail, though, as they misunderstand human nature and reality, as I explained in earlier articles.
Their foundational assumption is wrong.

That assumption is this:

Humans are purely material beings, and are malleable. Meaning that there is no such thing as spirit or soul or ‘self’, and that intellect and emotion alike are merely the result of electric or chemical processes. Find the right formula of stimuli, and you can change and induce whatever thought or behavior you want, as it is simply a matter of scientific cause and effect, effectively chaining us, nothing more, however complex our lives (exterior and interior) appear to us.

The whole idea of ‘social engineering’ is largely based on that.

Now, to a degree, as we do have a material body, such impulses and techniques HAVE a certain effect. (Think about my article on Middle Grove, exposing that reality is not as simple as the much more famous ‘Robbers Cave’ experiment would suggest…) But is that really all there is to it? (See The War for our Minds Part 6 for the full explanation).

The irony is now that the groups that used to employ ‘we are the party of science’ as a way to oppose ‘the party of religion’, are now relinquishing even the bedrock of science, to push into a reality shaping ‘magical’ discourse. The more we understand that, the sharper we can dissect their attempts to influence us all, and the more effective our counter can be. As a bonus, it will give peace of mind: we are not going crazy, we are not missing anything, what they say and hold up really, simply, just doesn’t make sense.

And, despite the mighty media and government apparatus they had built up to force us all to play along in that charade, that spell can be broken by mockery. Brutal, open and courageous mockery:

The emperor is naked!

All is well.