The New Magic Economy

Part 1. “Magic”

 What have I been studying lately?

The many-tendriled beast that is the New Magic Economy.

 Oh, does that require further explanation or something? Yes! Sure. Sorry. I have most definitely been down a rabbit hole on this one.

 I’m trying to decide if I am seeing something that isn’t there. Or just renaming the proverbial wheel, talking about something apparent as if it were new. You let me know.

 I’ll just say it. In 2019 I’ve become convinced that Magic is Real Again. As in, forces outside our ken are once more playing an active and significant role in people’s decision-making. If God has Died, Gods have awakened a century later, taking His place. I don’t mean ghosts or zombies or dragons or white walkers. Nothing supernatural, except in that we’ve confined the current definition of ‘natural’ to that which we can understand scientifically.

 What I mean is that more than ever, I see people respecting intangible, irrational, unprovable, symbolic, and relational fonts of wisdom as equal to the known, the logical, the known and conventional pathways through life. And beyond an increasing overt support for non-empirical values, these forces have become more prevalent in how we all live our lives.

This latent swell is creating new niches, new opportunities, new ways of life for people within our society with their own systems, languages, tropes, and patterns. The ecosystem these forces and their purveyors operate in is what I am naming the New Magic Economy, and I’m going to explore each part of this in a blog post series, to outline what I am witnessing unfold, and think about how this applies to the world’s current challenge of adapting our society to something that survives climate change, and even comes out better for it.

 So first:

The Magic Part

 This makes intellectual folk uncomfortable, to be sure, but I have to start here. I am aware talking about Magic as a force (outside a fantasy book) consigns me to the woo-woo shoebox, the gutter of addled pseudo-thinkers, the tier who seek to explain their society as irrational because they failed to find a place for themselves within it.

I mean to say I understand any skepticism you may have reading this. The modern world is packed with mystically-flavored lobster traps and the people who have been trapped within them. Those who would turn to tarot, to crystals, to alien planet-seeding, to notions of message-bearing spirits traversing an arbitrary divide between this world and the next for their guidance. Those who seek their soul mate, their twin flame, the platonic ideal of their true self.

Zodiacophiles.

Yogi chakra mechanics.

Athletes meditating to reach peak performance.

Guru/shaman/cult figure/jam band worshippers.

Frat boys who endure ritualized hazing. Vision boarders, sage cleansers, affirmationers. Wiccans. Satanists. Neo-Pagans. Not even mentioning Christians and followers of other conventional religions, still the prevailing source of magical thinking among the populace.

We all know or know of people who place stock in these idolatries. And if we don’t share the same cherished delusions, we disregard them, interact with the parts of the person we do agree with and understand. I personally have had many opportunities to practice this reflex, so I believe that you must have as well. So when your friend Ben starts saying he believes in Magic now, I fully accept that you will do the same to me.

But this speaks to what I’m saying. A worldview that includes non-empirical, mystical values is more pervasive now than ever. Which means it wields economic heft. People are acting on, motivated by, basing their lives around magical forces, consciously or not.

I don’t think any of this is actually the supernatural. More like the superempirical. Sources of power that explain themselves with relational wisdom, instead of straightforward cause-and-effect. Modern interpretations of ancient patterns that still manage to grasp into some root code in the human genome. These ideas have survived, adapted, proliferated, partially because the feeling of self-transcendence has always been a necessary and sought-after part of human life.

And it is taking an interesting form in this lifetime. Over the last thirty years the Information Age had dawned, wealth consolidation has reached its highest heights, and technology plays an ever-greater role in daily functioning and communicating with one another. Yet even as the these empirically-driven systems and technologies have proliferated, one end result has been a strengthened interest in the non-empirical, Magical systems of thought, both as a reaction/rejection of these postmodern trends and as efforts to synthesize with and adapt to them. In a lot of ways, because of these empirical systems, Magical principles and concepts are a lot more widespread now, you can see them in:

The increased public importance of environmental, social, and individual justice

Every activist movement to-date has added up to a heightened mainstream cultural consciousness. Recent movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter among many others have made a tangible shift in government and corporate America by opening space in people’s heads for values that challenge the status quo, bringing to light banal injustice that requires structural change to truly address. Comparable gains have been made by environmental groups working against and building awareness around deforestation, fossil fuel dependency, factory agriculture, etc. The complex, historical questions these and other activist groups have brought to the public eye demand answers that cannot be solved without fundamentally altering the structure of the current world economic system. Or looking outside its bounds.

 Even though the current administration is determined to undo the advances of these movements, this only proves further the progress they have made, and the true threat they represent to businesses that exist at the expense of communities and the environment. The fear-based response that elected Donald Trump is fear of the new way social justice represents.

Technology itself

Functionally, digital technology and social media have had a tremendous effect on allowing non-empirical value systems to spread by lowering the investment required to mass publish ideas, organize, and highlight societal ills in parts of the world to which we are otherwise unconnected.

Fitting this function, the form of the internet itself prepares the mind for Magic, composed as it is of conceptual ‘sites’, ‘platforms’, ‘forums’— representations of spaces that are both real and unreal simultaneously. ‘Navigating’ the internet requires the brain to accept that real action can occur in space that is non-Euclidean and created by forces invisible to the end user. This conditions the brain to receive influence from sources beyond its immediate, physical reality.

Drug culture

With the mainstream American introduction to marijuana, LSD, psilocybin, MDMA, peyote, DMT, and other psychoactive drugs now at least 50 years behind us, more grown adults in positions of power have had experiences in psychedelic mindsets than ever. Though the ‘wisdom’ gained from drug use is its whole own genre of comedy, the butt of many jokes, I think even the soberest of judges will admit that drug use has been a formative experience to many and that the collective mindset is expanded because of this. It is impossible to write off the influence, the headspace of drugs as ‘unreal’ at this point when it has touched the lives and minds of so many. This means more than ever individuals are having what we’d recognize as a ‘vision-quest’ in a tribal culture, using drugs to venture into different-yet-also-real spaces to retrieve knowledge that is incorporated into their thinking thereon, at least as much as any lived experience in the physical realm.

Trauma/Hurtspaces

Without getting laboriously into it, the reward system of global capitalism has created a vast amount of trauma that people alive today must contend with. Both on a societal level, by creating and displaying to us horrendous circumstances over which we have no control, and individually, by making it more likely people live in desperate, stressful circumstances, and exercise the worst of human nature to inflict trauma on one another.

 This has advanced the New Magic Economy two-fold. First by exerting pressure on the average person to find solutions to their pain beyond the mainstream systems that created them in the first place. And secondly, by forcing more people to explore dark, challenging parts of their minds and personalities. These ‘hurtspaces’ are non-Euclidean mental spaces within each person where the trauma feelings are kept, internal wars waged with ourselves. These mind-arenas can transport people away from reality even more than drug use, and infuse similar kinds of internal ‘non’-logic into people’s thinking. In both ways, a traumatized person becomes more in touch with internal and external means to survive their trauma (if they do) and become acquainted with non-Euclidean mental spaces to justify and overcome their experiences.

Government and Corporate Usage of Magical Forces

Lastly and most ironically, I believe Magic is Real because the government and corporate entities we are most closely bound to use it on us every day. If they can use it, so can we.

 I’m going to keep this very non-conspiracy-theoryish. My basic premise is that very smart, very well-paid people have figured out ways to make millions of people they do not know buy things, vote for things, say things, and act. In often undetectable ways—ways that are designed to be undetectable. The applied sum of knowledge in the fields of sociology, group psychology, marketing, and other studies of human behavior has allowed major corporations and governments to target our subconscious minds directly with messaging that changes our behavior.

 This, to me, is indistinguishable from what you would call mind control if you read about it in a book. It is mind control. It is a form of Magic. You can study it at Stanford. We see it every time Donald Trump uses his own brand of Twitter Shock Doctrine to simultaneously distract and enthrall his enchantees (us)

 The tacit admission of the government and corporate entities on the effectiveness of these tactics demonstrates that it is possible to achieve action at a distance, to use ‘inexact sciences’ (eg. Non-empirical science) to achieve business and governance goals. And it causes all of us to exercise the same muscles that we use to take guidance from other forms of the unknowable.

 What I’m trying to get at is, every day, “normal” people are basing their actions off of forces they cannot fully understand, interact with, or even know to exist in many cases. Sometimes those forces are external, sometimes they originate entirely within one’s head.  And the growth is accelerating, even moreso in our high technology era, with its highways directly in and out of our neural cortex.

But does all this add up to Magic is Real Now?

That’s what I’m asking. For me it’s a “if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, a duck it must be” type of situation.

 I think most people would accept that these forces are real, but would disagree with using the term Magic to link them. I think this is based off of the negative connotation our society has placed on accepting non-empirical forces as equal to the empirical; it is consider a sign of mental weakness, or illness.  But I am okay with living on that line, and I will ask this question, because to me we are checking the boxes on every definition of magic I can find, and if it is true than further decision-making and strategy should note as much.

 I am going to leave off on some of those definitions. Like the rest of this post I expect to update this as my thinking grows, and once again I invite you to argue with me and supply your own definitions lest you think I am just confirming my own biases:

First the dictionaries:

Merriam-Webster:

the use of means (such as charms or spells) believed to have supernatural power over natural forces.

 Oxford:

The power of apparently influencing the course of events by using mysterious or supernatural forces.

The ‘apparent’ and ‘believed to have’ parts are crucial. This is the important shift. There is more room in the average person’s head to consider Magical ideas as worthy of their time and energy. I’m not saying the laws of physics are changing, but our belief systems are. We every day assign beliefs to the major affectors of our lives that do not reflect the mechanical reality of how those things affect us— we hold our own mythical, simplified images of how things like the internet and the federal government operate, because these systems and the complex, interlocking impacts they cause are too large for one human mind to hold. These systems, these means, mysterious as they are, tap deeply into motivation centers in our brain to affect how we feel and act.

And some of the popular cultural definitions:

Arthur C. Clarke:

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

 Aleister Crowley (Thelema):

"The Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will"

 So Onward

It has become apparent to me these ‘supernatural’ forces are not marginal, rather, the collision of these values and those of 21st century America is a defining mark of our generation. Gosh. I am sure I am not the first to write about this. If you have anything you think I should read that would help shape these thoughts better that would be nice of you to send as well.

You can call it something else if it feels better. But Magic to me evokes the new fusion of dream-worlds and the capacity to fulfill them we have currently. The blend of ancient wisdom and modern intelligence, the crossroads of conscience and raw processing power at the tips of our fingers now. Philosophers might call it a new subjectivity— A different value system that diverges from that of the prevailing society.

I am going to cut myself off here but that is what part two of this will be about, more on exactly how these ideas are, in new and different ways, becoming part of how people make a living and sustains themselves, and what that means for anyone looking to make change in society.

 More soon!

-Ben

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