The unbearable lightness of magical thinking
From online spellcasters to motivational speakers, the superstitious way of life is everywhere
A recent issue of the Air Mail online magazine describes a boom in the online sale of spells: curses, rituals to bring back estranged lovers, charms for sunshine (on your wedding day) or rain (on the wedding of your nemesis). Witches are doing brisk business on Etsy, the e-commerce platform primarily associated with handicrafted merchandise and vintage items.
Besides giving an account of the burgeoning spellcasting market, the Air Mail piece also presents glowing testimonials from happy customers: people who invested anywhere from US$ 3.74 to US$ 7.99 on a spell and feel that they got their money's worth.
Psychologists, philosophers, and social scientists have been investigating the complicated relationship between humans, magic, and superstition for centuries. Magical thinking is usually defined as the belief that things that are not physically or logically connected can affect each other, even when there is no rationally viable way for them to do so. It tends to fall into some well-known patterns:
The Law of Attraction: Thinking directly affects reality, without requiring physical action. Thinking about something makes that thing happen. Thinking goes to the very fabric of reality. Thinking is doing.
The Law of Contagion: Things that once were in touch, or part of the same whole, stay “connected” in some way, sharing essential properties, and may affect one another, even at a distance.
The Law of Sympathy/Homeopathy: Things that are “alike” each other — in terms of shape, name, color, or because of symbolic or semantic associations — share essential properties, have a “connection” and may affect each other, even at a distance; besides, whatever is done to/with a symbol can come to affect the thing symbolized.
The Intentional Stance: Things, even accidents and natural phenomena, luck or misfortune, always happen for a reason, because someone (or something) intended it this way. Also, intentions and meanings are pervasive in the universe; even inanimate objects can be said to participate in them to some extent. Once identified, such intentions and meanings may be exploited in various ways (through propitiation, negotiation, bribery, persuasion, etc.).
When exposed like this, these “laws” or “principles” can sound foolish enough, and we may pat ourselves on our backs for being too smart to fall for all that crap. But, be careful: such a frenzy of self-congratulation could prove unwarranted.
The principles of magical thinking are deeply embedded in what passes for common sense in big swathes of modern society, from the rabid aversion of the corporate world to “negativism” and its inordinate faith in the powers of motivation (shades of the Law of Attraction) to a lot of pop-psychology, psychotherapy and even high-sounding social discourse that, once one peels off the layers of jargon and rhetoric, reduces to pseudo-sophisticated apllication of the Law of Sympathy and/or the Intentional Stance.
Contagion and Sympathy are principles that govern much of alternative/integrative healthcare. They also help explain many of MAHA's obsessions, from its aversion to vaccines to the dogma that synthetic chemicals are intrinsically evil.
Also, behavior that aligns with the Laws of Superstition can be pretty satisfying, in a sort of narcissistic way. It won't accomplish anything in the real world, but it may nonetheless bring a sense of accomplishment —the feeling that you are taking action. For the same reason, it can create a sense of control over things that, really, are out of our hands. When we recognize the pervasiveness of magical thinking in everyday life, the Etsy witchcraft boom seems much less puzzling.
Very few people, of course, consciously embrace the Laws of Superstition. These principles simply become part of our inherited mental toolbox as we grow up. Much like the basic grammar of a mother tongue, they are first apprehended by unconscious social intuition long before any systematization occurs. And like grammatical rules, one doesn't need to know them explicitly to follow them flawlessly.
We half-consciously infer the Laws from standard religious practices, such as prayer. We are impressed by coincidences that seem meaningful; we fall for the post hoc fallacy, which takes temporal sequence for causality (“after that, hence because of that”).
We see the Laws exemplified in the popular stories we tell: from lovers sensing each other from afar to the voodoo dolls of old horror movies, all the way down to Obi-Wan Kenobi detecting “disturbances in the Force”. Their supposed effectiveness is reinforced by cognitive biases in our thinking, such as the confirmation bias and the sunk cost fallacy (“I paid for it, of course it worked!”).
Mainstream society may laugh at witchcraft when it comes dressed in starry robes and pointed hats, but dress it up in the psychologizing rhetoric of a Freud, a Jung, in the discourse of a prosperity coach, as “quantum” this or “neuro” that, and see what happens. Even the secularized mysticism that has been accruing around AI harks back to the Intentional Stance.
In the end, almost everybody consults or hires witches of one kind or another. But, at US$ 7.99 a spell, those who do it explicitly seem to be getting the best of it.