It worked for Satan, the author of technocracy, in the Garden of Eden, and it is still working. Convincing men (and women, in the case of Eve) that they can be little gods. Can make up the rules, and believe, say and do literally anything.
Satan presumably knew all about “magical thinking”. Magical thinking has been defined in the psychology literature as follows:
[It] means that a person believes their thoughts, feelings, or rituals can influence events in the material world, either intentionally or unintentionally.
Some examples of magical thinking include:
Superstitions: Superstitions are a form of magical thinking in which a person believes that specific behaviors, such as wearing the same shirt during every baseball game, can influence unrelated human events.
Rituals: Many people perform rituals to gain a sense of control over life. For many, it is not harmful or a sign of a mental health condition. But extreme, rigid, or anxiety-driven rituals, such as excessive handwashing, can be a sign of a mental health condition.
Unusual religious beliefs: Although some religious beliefs may have similarities with magical thinking, the two are differentTrusted Source. For example, some Christians believe that praying can affect the physical world, but because this is a typical part of a religion with a widely accepted belief system, psychologists may not consider it to be harmful. However, they may consider extreme or atypical religious beliefs to be the result of magical thinking.
Childhood thoughts: Young children are still learning about how the world works, so they may assume that their internal and external worlds are more closely connected than they are. For example, a child might believe that something bad happened to a family member because the child was angry at them.
Delusions: Some delusions involve magical thinking, such as the belief that a person can control others with their thoughts, or that they have godlike powers.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/magical-thinking#definition
Magical thinking is sometimes linked to “delusional disorders”.
Joan Didion, America’s dame of the new journalism spawned in the 1960s (mainly) by Tom Wolfe, called a book she wrote a couple of decades ago following the death of her husband The Year of Magical Thinking.
The title of the book refers to magical thinking in the anthropological sense, thinking that if a person hopes for something enough or performs the right actions then an unavoidable event can be averted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Year_of_Magical_Thinking
Henry Ergas, Australia’s reigning journalist-scholar in residence, has also written recently in The Australian about magical thinking and its recent manifestations.
If today's zeitgeist has a defining feature, it is magical thinking, in which premonitions of disaster are combined with utopian fantasies (emphasis in original).
… Little wonder then that so many now bow to strange gods: what surer evidence of collective madness could there be than the many thousands of inner-city lefties, who, having denounced Australia’s founding fathers as murderers, daily “pay their respects” to past Indigenous elders who rained violence on women and children? Convinced, like the European romantics of the 19th century, that their own civilisation is rotten to the core, our cultural elites have found its replacement among rose-coloured visions of noble savagery.
And little wonder too that magical thinking, whose woolly-minded appeal is entirely to the emotions, has become so widespread – with devastating effects on the quality of the public debate.
(source paywalled)
One can think of many examples from the ideological world that we now inhabit. For example, believing that driving an electric car will reduce the number of droughts and floods. Or thinking that squirting hand sanitiser about your person will stop a virus. Or that voting yes in a referendum will stop racism. Or all the rubbish about “making a difference”. Or that if I get someone “silenced”, no one will believe what I take to be bad things any more. Or thinking that if cows are made to wear masks, the earth’s air temperature will cease to increase. Or that if Welshmen all drive at 20 miles an hour, that it will make a difference to anything other than the mood of the Welsh.
You get the picture.
In the created, modern, post-God world, where men and women have removed from the Creator decisions over what is to count as virtue and vice, in effect re-writing the Ten Commandments and the cardinal virtues along the way, they have sought to create utopias on earth – immantenising the eschaton, in Eric Voegelin’s memorable phrase – and to ensure that the only voices allowed to be heard in the public square are those of the keepers of the new virtue and their acolytes. Out with adultery and such like, in with racism and homophobia.
Chesterton was right when he (was reputed to have) said that once men stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing; rather, they believe in anything. Enough examples of that abound. But perhaps more importantly, it is now MAN who creates the “what” of belief. Armed with Eve’s booty (so to speak) from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the first Garden of Eden. Now that we-the-technocrats know everything and can do anything – like run centrally planned economies, control the climate and contain viruses – there can be no stopping us. As the World Economic Forum believes, we should rule ze world!
But it is still naïve, magical thinking. Delusional. Or, in other words, bullshit. In F A Hayek’s term, “a fatal conceit”.
Unfortunately, those with the magical thinking currently have all the power. They occupy the commanding heights of the institutions that matter in our world. The bureaucracies, the universities, the corporations, the school education departments, the churches, the non-government organisations (NGOs), the political parties, the globalist hangouts, the deep state. And yet they want even more power. And in a post-truth world, power alone matters.
Let us call the new Eves, armed (they believe) with knowledge of good and evil bequeathed by their spiritual godmother, the “elites” or “the ruling class”. Global technocrats. Experts. The new philosopher kings.
But this is not all.
Not content with running the world and controlling all of our lives, the new Eves wish to endlessly and publicly lecture us and proclaim their virtue. Having themselves defined virtue. Virtue signalling (VS), a term first used by a British journalist called James Bartholomew in 2015, is the close relation of magical thinking.
This is the elites’ need to project. As a further weapon of control and domination. No, it isn’t just about feeling good.
And never think that VS is the sole preserve of the new-left progressives. There is another VS tribe among us. Call them the right-of-centre in-group or establishment. While occasionally taking up the issues and causes of the deplorables, aka we-the-people, they still feel an underlying urge to VS. They are the self-proclaimed keepers of rational thinking on the “right”.
Three stand-out examples of this class are Toby Young, Brendan O’Neill and Andrew Neil, all connected to The Spectator magazine, a venerable organ to which I have regularly contributed. This is a bit of a coincidence, since Bartholomew first used the term VS in the very same august journal. The usual cause of their inner VS tendency bubbling to the surface is their apparently deeply felt need to distance themselves from “conspiracy theorists”. Nothing seems to exercise the minds of a certain subset of right-of-centre pundits more than this need.
Young often refers glowingly to “Hanlon’s razor” in his explanation for things like Covid policies, so blatantly evil, not just stupid, and coordinated, not accidental, that Young must almost twist himself into contortions in order to remain “rational” and conspiracy-free. (Hanlon’s razor suggests that if something, such as a government decision, can be explained by stupidity, then there is no need to deem it a conspiracy).
For Young, it has been Covid. The responses to the virus were dumb and bungled, not evil and coordinated.
For the other two, they have been VS-triggered by (of course) Russell Brand. Brand, seemingly, is one of those people about which calm, middle-of-the-road opinions are impossible. See also under Joh Bjelke-Petersen (for older readers), Vladimir Putin or Daniel Andrews. The Brand rationalists are not to be confused with those who just loathe him, for a range of reasons, or believe him to be guilty. From all accounts, he is eminently loathable, and possibly guilty of some or all of the alleged incidents. No, it is the potential tainting with being conspiracy-theorist-adjacent that disturbs the VS rightists.
Neil referred to Brand’s “ludicrous defenders”. Many of these aren’t actually defenders of Brand but opponents of State and corporate control and the censorship of free speech. Something that I would have thought Neil would be cheering from the rafters. And they probably contain more than a few me-too sceptics.
Ludicrous defenders? What, like Elon Musk? Tucker Carlson? Michelle Dewsbury (on GB News)? Paul Joseph Watson? Katie Hopkins? They got the Brand affair exactly right on most points. “Disgusting” conspiracy theorists? What, people who believe that Big Tech routinely de-platforms convenient targets? Err … within nano-seconds, Brand was de-platformed. Closely followed by political class pressure. Had anyone in the world heard of Dame Caroline Dinenage MP until she attempted to have the CEO of Rumble de-monetise Brand?
https://www.gbnews.com/politics/caroline-dinenage-rumble-russell-brand-rumble
Speaking of which, O’Neill stated, in his otherwise principled critique of YouTube’s cancellation of Brand:
Criticise any aspect of the censure of Brand, following the publication of very serious allegations against him, which he strongly denies, and you risk being damned as a Brand defender. Worse, his weird online army, that ‘scamdemic’ mob that views Brand as a Jesus-like slayer of ‘the Covid regime’, might mistake you for a fellow traveller. Guys, please don’t.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/youtube-is-wrong-to-rush-to-judgement-on-russell-brand/
You can almost smell the sneering.
But, wait, there is a fourth horseman of the Brand conspiracy theory apocalypse. Yet another Spectator figure, Sam Leith, who thinks Brand “defenders” are “naïve” and “hasty”. Err, no.
Brand’s pre-emptive line of defence – he put a video out on his YouTube channel a few hours before the Channel 4 programme went out – appears similar to the one that Donald Trump routinely advances, that the misogynistic influencer Andrew Tate fell back on when clapped in irons, and that the GB News anchor Dan Wootton used when he too was facing allegations – which he denies – of sexual impropriety.
… You’d think most sensible people would simply eye-roll this line of defence. But here’s the thing: in their many many thousands they did not.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-naive-cynicism-of-russell-brands-hasty-defenders/
Ah, Trump. Of course, Sam. Most “sensible people”? Like you, you mean. People with their heads someone else than sniffing the political breezes. “Eye-roll”? This is dripping with superiority.
James Alexander at The Daily Sceptic has another angle on this, referencing Leith:
The phrase ‘post-truth’ was invented, it seems, about 10 years ago. As usual, books were published with it in the title five years later – by Matthew d’Ancona, Evan Davis, Julian Biaggini and others. Davis and d’Ancona used the language to defend the establishment. And so has Sam Leith this week in the Spectator in a piece about Russell Brand. The central assumption of these concerned establishment gate-keepers – those writers who keep the shutters on the Overton Window to prevent the breaking of the glass – is that Brexit, Trump, Climate Denialism, Vaccine Scepticism etc. are signs of favouring ‘emotion’, ‘clicks’, ‘monetisation’ over against ‘facts’, ‘evidence’ and ‘truth’.
We can understand why they write this way. But this way of seeing things is spectacularly unreflective. It is, in a word, reactionary. Not reactionary in the good sense of the word, but in the bad sense of the word, where it denotes a jerk of the knee. Sam Leith, for instance, jerks his knee against those who are at least questioning why it happens to be now that Russell Brand’s activities are being subject to first media and then police and legal scrutiny.
In the 1960s Hannah Arendt proposed that politics has never been about truth. If this is so, then the phrase ‘post-truth politics’, which has been used heavily in the last decade, is not a useful way of making sense. The establishment can use ‘post-truth politics’ as a way of stigmatising the sort of politics they dislike; they can also use it to imply that they are on the side of truth, facts, evidence, reason – all those high prestige winning-the-argument terms. But if Arendt is right – and she is right – then this is, in short, complete rubbish. The ostentatious anti-bullshitters are just producing a more sophisticated type of bullshit than the bullshitters they inveigh against (emphasis added).
Indeed. More magical thinking, you might say. And gate-keepers for the establishment is a very good metaphor. For the history buffs, it is all a little reminiscent of Wat Tyler’s Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. Perhaps they were the first wave of deplorables. The Brexiteers and the “no” voters of yore. But the Spectator Four are no facsimiles of John of Gaunt, Simon Sudbury and the others who were Richard II’s gate-keepers back then. (And, yes, the attackers of the so-called Brand army would wish to point out that Trump and Brand are no Wat Tylers; we mostly don’t get to choose our heroes).
https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofEngland/Wat-Tyler-the-Peasants-Revolt/
Another useful corrective and defence of Brand-related conspiracy theories can be viewed here, with the inimitable Paul Joseph Watson speaking truth to Brand. It was never about justice for “victims”. It was about control. And all went according to script. And it played out just as the British parliament was passing dystopian laws that ill allow the corporate State better to silence dissent. Just as the Albanese Government is planning in Australia. And just as Biden wants in the USA, notwithstanding the current Supreme Court matter (Missouri v Biden). And just as the Canadian fascists are about to do. All merely a coincidence!
https://summit.news/2023/09/21/the-truth-about-brand/
O’Neill is almost begging his readers to not confuse him with “them”. He sees himself “at risk”. Of “being damned”. Of being linked to weirdos. To those (like me) who recognise Covid to have been a “scamdemic”. All this is a bit like those who always preface a statement about some topic or public figure known to be a target of the in-brigade with words like, “of course, I don’t condone x, but …”
This conspiracy theory sneering is its own brand (no pun intended) of elite magical thinking, a state of mind involving projection and based on a person’s (often outsized) sense of self-worth. And always based on a person’s sense of virtue. In this case, being above all of those nutters and cookers who believe in conspiracies.
And, worse, perhaps believe there is a Satan and recognise his works of evil when they see them. And the prince of the world’s greatest intervention in human affairs – and my, was it a telling intervention – occurred back in the Garden of Good and Evil (with apologies to another target of the me-too brigade, Kevin Spacey).
Paul Collits
24 September 2023
Yes too easy.
Thanks Andrew. Great quote. My nephew married a descendant of CJ.