Simply Puzzled
July 7th, 2007, 09:00 PM
I was reading the unbinding thread, and (really no offense to the poster intended) wondering exactly how powerful of a wizard a kid who doesn't know how to unbind and with no friends could be, when I started thinking about the nature of magic.
Gardner said that witches are leg-pullers. He wrote that if a person thought only nasty tasting medicines were effective, the witch was sure to give them the worst concoction they could mix. Of course, today we have a name for this: the placebo effect. You can open medical journals and find long, scholarly papers on it with esoteric titles and confusing language that would put A.E. Waite to shame. It is a psychological effect based on how the immune system responds to....blah, blah, blah.
Except, our magical ancestors couldn't exactly walk down to Barnes & Noble; grab a double iced low-fat grande vanilla latte with one sugar and one spenda, extra foam; and browse through the psychology section. To them, it was all just....magic.
Onto sociology:
Sociologists like to say there are two basic world views that cultures have: magical and natural. That is to say, some cultures will tend to look for supernatural causes of unexplained events, and some will look for natural causes. They tell us that our culture embraces natural causes, leaving out that the second medical science fails to explain the recession of a disease it's a "miracle". The theory also tends to create a hierarchy where we are "better" than those with a magical worldview, leaving aside that they tend to be highly sensitive to natural events. The whole thing is quite condescending and, frankly, bullshit. But I think there is something there we can use.
Onto magic:
Somewhere along the way, I think we have adopted a natural worldview that compartmentalizes magic. When we look at the placebo effect, we don't see magic. We see psychology. We define magic so much more narrowly that our spiritual predecessors that we don't see magic. We see another force that operates under specific principles that can be replicated, just like we can replicate an experiment with magic. We've lost the view that life *is* magic.
Which brings us back to my opening remarks. I, if you can't tell from this post, have a lot of training in the social sciences. If you think that the more you learn about people, the more you understand about the rational operation of the human mind, you are absolutely wrong, and possibly an economist. Human beings are fundamentally irrational, fundamentally magical. And using magic, you can have a great deal of influence over how they interact with you. I'm not talking about spells in your home. I mean in the field. When you are with them, your words, your actions....magic. People watching would think it was psychology, but, well, we've been over this. Psychology is magic. Everything is magic. Of course, you could take the opposite view that psychology is science. Everything is science. But what fun is that?
Gardner said that witches are leg-pullers. He wrote that if a person thought only nasty tasting medicines were effective, the witch was sure to give them the worst concoction they could mix. Of course, today we have a name for this: the placebo effect. You can open medical journals and find long, scholarly papers on it with esoteric titles and confusing language that would put A.E. Waite to shame. It is a psychological effect based on how the immune system responds to....blah, blah, blah.
Except, our magical ancestors couldn't exactly walk down to Barnes & Noble; grab a double iced low-fat grande vanilla latte with one sugar and one spenda, extra foam; and browse through the psychology section. To them, it was all just....magic.
Onto sociology:
Sociologists like to say there are two basic world views that cultures have: magical and natural. That is to say, some cultures will tend to look for supernatural causes of unexplained events, and some will look for natural causes. They tell us that our culture embraces natural causes, leaving out that the second medical science fails to explain the recession of a disease it's a "miracle". The theory also tends to create a hierarchy where we are "better" than those with a magical worldview, leaving aside that they tend to be highly sensitive to natural events. The whole thing is quite condescending and, frankly, bullshit. But I think there is something there we can use.
Onto magic:
Somewhere along the way, I think we have adopted a natural worldview that compartmentalizes magic. When we look at the placebo effect, we don't see magic. We see psychology. We define magic so much more narrowly that our spiritual predecessors that we don't see magic. We see another force that operates under specific principles that can be replicated, just like we can replicate an experiment with magic. We've lost the view that life *is* magic.
Which brings us back to my opening remarks. I, if you can't tell from this post, have a lot of training in the social sciences. If you think that the more you learn about people, the more you understand about the rational operation of the human mind, you are absolutely wrong, and possibly an economist. Human beings are fundamentally irrational, fundamentally magical. And using magic, you can have a great deal of influence over how they interact with you. I'm not talking about spells in your home. I mean in the field. When you are with them, your words, your actions....magic. People watching would think it was psychology, but, well, we've been over this. Psychology is magic. Everything is magic. Of course, you could take the opposite view that psychology is science. Everything is science. But what fun is that?