Of all of the chapters in this book, this is the one that I have most wanted to remove. It is also the chapter which those who have peeked behind the curtain have most demanded that I keep in.
There are only a few words in daily use that most people cannot sensibly discuss the meaning of. The top five that I am aware of are ‘money’, ‘violence’, ‘God’, ‘justice’, and ‘magic’. I spent four years talking to Colorado citizens, journalists, elected officials, economists, and business owners about their conception of money. Most people don’t even have a clear idea of what they believe money is. This mostly becomes clear when they attempt to describe what it isn’t, where it comes from, or how it can be functionally measured. Still, people do seem to have a strong sense that they want money and that they don’t want to want it as much as they do. People know when they have it, when others have more, and when it’s causing them problems.
Even fewer people know what they mean when they use the word ‘magic’. There’s kind of a gut feeling about what it means. And, just like money, nearly everyone has an intensely emotional sense of what people like them are supposed to say about it. It is our identities that prevent us from forming functional frameworks for interacting with money, violence, God, justice, and magic. And, I side with Basquiat on this one. It isn’t who we think we are; it is who we think we are not that holds us back.
For the scope of this work, what matters regarding magic is its historic role in the craft of social design. Through unknowable ages, those who have determined the shape and course of sovereignty have relied on esoteric understanding and closely guarded methods of social steering. What we now describe in terms of game theoretics and behavioral economics were subjects of close scrutiny in the intimate meetings of King Solomon and Hiram Abiff. Contemporary sciences and fields of exploration have democratized much of what used to be the domain of lofty courtiers. And there are some major wins in that. However, we owe our widespread access to sciences, maths, and social philosophies mostly to the affordances of the reductionist approach. It is through reductionism that we are freed to approach any field atomically — without the necessity to be a scholar of everything at once. It is a boon for many aspects of life. However, reductionism has important costs to consider. And, perhaps, there is no place where the harshness of these costs becomes more clear than in the fragmentation of the social roles of the mystics and the priests.
Through the coming pages, we’ll look at some dysfunctional ideas about what magic is or could be, along with how those ideas impact society on the whole. We’ll divide magic into a set of easy and less easy to swallow claims. And, we’ll look at the social design implications of both sets.
If I haven’t spooked you, and you’d like to stay abreast of this project as it evolves, jump on the mailing list. I don’t send out very much, just little updates about how it’s all going.