THE RETURN OF MAGIC

We're all seeing it, right? The weirdness. The world is getting stranger and stranger. And people are coming up with more and more bizarre ways of explaining what's going on. Here’s a glimpse of what's been happening recently.

A video circulated on Tik Tok showing Justin Bieber seemingly signaling that there's an elite group of Hollywood pedophiles or something. This led to an explosion of posts by teenagers about a related conspiracy theory called Pizzagate, where it's claimed a group of Washington elites sexually abuse children while communicating in codes about pizza. 

The clip that started this looks like an obvious scam. Here's the comment and here's Bieber touching his hat, as requested by the comment. But this is a simple trick.

First issue, he’s always touching his hat in this video. This hat is obviously not comfortable. 

Second issue, the comments aren't moving. It appears the person who recorded this clip saw Bieber touching his hat all the time, posted this comment, then scrolled back up to it and waited to get a hit. 

This clip is a terrible piece of evidence but among teenagers, who are way smarter than I was, this was enough to trigger an outbreak of interest in one of the most ridiculous conspiracy theories -- which is saying something.

An even more absurd theory about Wayfair also went viral recently, thanks to a community called QAnon, which has emerged as the dominant force in conspiracy culture. I'll get to what QAnon is in a bit.

In this one someone noticed that expensive cabinets being sold on Wayfair had people's names, and if you search for the names and you find missing children. Y'know, when you ignore all the non missing children. 

So… you can buy a human in public on a popular e-commerce site for the price of a 2012 Honda Civic? Twelve grand does not seem like enough money for this level of crime. And the evil doers kept the names of the children they'd abducted? I just don't know where to go with this. 

Anyway, turns out, almost all the missing children… aren't missing. And some didn't much appreciate being involved. 

They also brought scathing common sense to the matter. 

On the up side, this conspiracy theory did produce some quality jokes. 

And lastly, Chrissy Teigen was targeted and harassed by the QAnon community and accused of being a pedophile. It's always gotta be pedophiles. This happened because somebody went spelunking in Teigen's Twitter feed, looking to drum up a case for their predetermined conclusion. The evidence is just a bunch of obvious jokes or goofy statements. Chrissy Tiegen is a woman, a person of color and a liberal. Her being targeted is not coincidental. I'll return to this later. 

This episode with Chrissy Teigen was the latest in a long string of harassment campaigns by the QAnon community and it probably led to a crackdown on QAnon by Twitter. 

These are just the latest viral lunacies. There’s a huge assortment of nonsense widely circulating about COVID, about vaccines, about 5G, about pedophilia pedophilia pedophilia. Some of the videos on these topics have been seen tens of millions of times.

These things aren’t just goofy internet fads. The weirdness is breaching the levees and flooding the real world. 

There's a guy running for Congress who's into QAnon.

He got a bunch of attention for claiming Beyonce is not black and is part of the Soros Deep State and is… a different person. This last one is based on a Twitter joke which also claimed Beyonce’s daughter is Arianna Grande.

Will this guy win, no. But he's not the only Q follower running for Congress. There are currently sixty-nine of them and counting. Some of them have won primaries, and a few might get to congress. 

Topping all this off, we’ve got a deeply eccentric US president who loves the weirdness and believes in a bunch of bizarre stuff himself.

He tweets things like this and this and this. Lately he's blaming the increase in COVID cases on too much testing.

This guy will not be pulling us back from precipice. He wants to hold hands and plunge into the abyss.

And the weirdness isn't just American. It’s on the rise in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, the UK, Western Europe and beyond. 

A lot of us are now wondering: is Western civilization losing it? Are we drifting into the arena of the unwell? 

In this video we're going to take a deep dive into the weirdness. Trigger warning: there is some dark and disturbing stuff coming up. But if you stick with me, I think I can shed some light on what's happening and I'm even going to try my hand at forging a path forward, through the weirdness. 

If you find this topic interesting, you can get my documentary feature, This is Not a Conspiracy Theory, for just five bucks. This is the best documentary there is on conspiracy theories, but it also unveils the real unseen forces that shape our lives. Buy my stuff. 

Okay. So... what is happening? 

Short answer: all this is primal.

You see, our minds… are the same as these minds. Things might seem scary now, but you're not gonna get devoured alive by a cheetah. I think we could all express more gratitude for not being ripped apart by a wild animal. These people had it way worse. Our prehistoric ancestors had to survive in highly unpredictable and uncertain circumstances and they had no clue why anything happened. Had no clue why anything happened. 

And a peculiar thing happens when you subject the human mind to scary and unpredictable events it can't explain. It explains them anyway. 

The mind uses its built-in programming to come up with answers. And these answers make you feel better and give you the illusion of control. We conjure up imaginary forces and invisible entities that we can channel and influence. We conjure up magic. 

Magic only truly exists in one place -- the human mind. 

None of this stuff is real and none of it works. But it doesn’t hurt us, mostly, and even more importantly, it eases our anxieties.

Magical thinking happens when people are afraid or uncertain and we use instinctive reasoning to make sense of it all. And the goal isn't the truth, it's to make us feel better so we can go chase that boar. Or have the boar chase us.

As recently as the middle ages, magic was still a major force in Western culture. People believed in spells and incantations and warlocks and unfortunately for a bunch of women, witches. 

But for several centuries now magic has been in retreat. There was a new kid on the block called science and science could actually do many of the things that magic claimed to do but pretty clearly couldn't. With science you could cure disease, you could predict the weather, you could move faster than a horse, you could fly through the air like a dove.

But magical beliefs persist because magic comes pre-installed in the human mind. 

We see it in children. Children's fantasies are filled with magic, and so are ours. The force is magical, Game of Thrones is magical, and all those superhero films that dominate the box office, they are magical.

But magic isn't walled off in our fantasies, it seeps into reality. We see it in our superstitions. If you knock on wood, that's magical thinking. If you believe in luck or karma or destiny or the law of attraction, that’s magical thinking. If you believe in astrology or you have a thing for crystals or you think you're gonna be reincarnated, those are all magical thinking.

And at the core of all religions is magical thinking. All gods are magical entities. 

Nonetheless, for a long time, magic hasn't been a major force in public life. The mainstream was secular and rational… or at least fairly. 

But right now, magic is waging a comeback. It's waging a comeback because we are afraid and uncertain. And when people are afraid and uncertain, magical thinking kicks in. We see patterns that don't exist, we see connections that aren't there, we see hidden meaning in the meaningless.

There are endless reasons to be scared right now. There's a blur of alarming events, custom-tailored to your particular anxieties, speeding through the palm of your hand 24/7. Pandemic, recession, upheaval, polarization, and looming back there in the shadows, climate change. Sleep tight kids!

Something is brewing in Western society and we don't know what it is. Future generations might, but we, alas, don’t.

People are afraid and when people are afraid and they don't have answers, magical beliefs fill the void.

We now have a major schism between two tribes. This idea is taken from J. Eric  Oliver's book, Enchanted America. 

We have a large community of magical thinkers. These are people who follow their gut and rely on instinctive reasoning to make sense of things. And this group seems to be growing and gaining influence as social conditions degrade. 

And we have a group of evidence seekers, who are still plenty irrational and magical, but they mostly defer to science and empiricism.

All sorts of people think magically, but it now appears there are a lot more of these people among conservatives. Magical beliefs are clearly on the rise in the Republican Party. And of course, the president is a magical thinker and bases decisions on his gut, which is a more masculine way of saying he bases his decisions on his feelings. 

I think this divide between Magical Thinkers and Evidence Seekers is a major rift in society right now. We've got two tribes making sense of the world in different ways and perceiving different realities. These two communities do not understand one another. And I’m afraid the magical thinkers will never understand the evidence seekers. They're gonna think we're lizard people. It’s up to the evidence seekers to understand the magical thinkers and forge a way forward.

You, dear viewer, are probably an evidence seeker, so it's up to you. I think this video will help you better understand what is happening and how, so that we can start working on solutions.

And to the magical thinkers who somehow stumbled in here by some twist of algorithmic fate, I’m sure you’re already uncomfortable and I’m sure you're not gonna believe any of this.

Just try to hear me out and please know that I don't question your heart. I question your methods.

So without further ado, what is this magical way of making sense of reality and how does it work? And ultimately, what can we do about it? 

Magical thinking is emotional, it's not rational. It's all about feelings. Although people who think this way often talk about skepticism and rationality and critical thinking, they don't actually do this shit. That's labor intensive and leads to a bunch of confusing, unsatisfying nuance and ambiguity. This is about quick, efficient decision making. Magical thinkers follow their gut, which, again, is a macho way of saying feelings. 

They feel fear, anxiety, apprehension, discomfort -- something unpleasant -- and unconsciously, they summon up instinctive reasoning to make themselves feel better. Poof, magical thinking. 

There are lots of different ways to think magically, but I'm gonna focus on six that are common right now, particularly among people who believe in conspiracy theories, which are the dominant form of magical thinking. 

1. SYMBOLS & CODES

This cannot be overstated: Magical thinkers are really into symbols. I mean, they are really into symbols. One last time: they like symbols. 

The source of this is one of the most basic of all animal functions, not just people: spotting patterns. Bees do it, dogs do it, all living things do it. In order to survive, to get what you want and avoid what you don't want, you gotta spot patterns. Humans are extremely clever at spotting patterns, even when they don't mean anything.

Symbols are visual patterns. Magical thinkers place an enormous amount of meaning on symbols. Often the only “argument” they present is that they saw symbols. Or what they thought were symbols. 

Masks are often perceived in a symbolic way. They're often seen as virtue signaling, as an indicator of subservience or just a sign that you're a smug liberal. 

QAnon, Pizzagate and the Illuminati are three popular conspiracy theories of the last decade, and all of them are built on a foundation of symbols. 

The Illuminati crowd is really into eyes and triangles, which are absolutely everywhere, so anybody you want to be in the Illuminati, they're in. Who was most commonly accused of being Illuminati? Women, in particular divas. So these are symbols of female strength and they're also overtly sexual. And the other major group was black people, who have immense influence over pop culture, are a rising political power and are also not white.

Did anybody go looking for Illuminati symbols in the videos of Florida Georgia Line or Toby Keith? Course not. They don't want that answer, so they didn't go get it.

Alright, little detour while I introduce QAnon. QAnon is a conspiracy theory that was born on the anonymous messageboard 4chan. This is actual footage of that historic moment. Q is supposed to be an intelligence insider with Q security clearance, which is like top secret, but he clearly doesn't know much of anything. And Anons are the anonymous followers who analyze Qs cryptic posts and weave narratives. 

QAnon is like political fan fiction. They take real characters and create new and almost completely imaginary plots with them. QAnon's main premise is that "the world is run by a cabal of satan-worshipping, child sacrificing elites."

As a social movement, it is impressive what QAnon has achieved. They are getting heard, they are providing people meaning, and their message is resonating. That's a bunch of people reciting a QAnon oath. Here's retired general Michael Flynn doing it. 

As a body of research and analysis, their work is credulous, sloppy, illogical, and often unintentionally funny. Nothing is too absurd for QAnon. Tom Hanks is an evil monster, JFK Jr is alive and he's this guy, there's mole children under Central Park. Plot twist: that’s a theory from this guy. Fantasy and reality blur. Speculations about clones and time travel are treated with seriousness.

I'm going to focus on QAnon a lot because it's the hub of radical magical thinking right now and also because it incorporates many other conspiracy theories, kind of like a Voltron of bullshit. 

Okay back to symbols. In QAnon, as well as Pizzagate, they're into this triangular icon, which according to a leaked FBI document is a pedophile symbol.

The problem is, it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to create this thing without ever having seen it before. It’s just a spiral in a triangular shape.

And Anons are not fussy about how you execute this symbol or what color it is or how thick the line is or how many corners it has. If it's sorta like this, that's good enough. So they find these things all over the place because pedophiles clearly have a comprehensive branding strategy. 

This is the exact same thing as numerology. Once you start looking for whatever the thing is you're looking for, it’s everywhere. 

Symbols are a completely subjective and fluid way to create narratives. You can always find eyes or triangles.

Anybody who makes you uncomfortable, maybe scares you a little, you can easily convince yourself they're super evil. And the great thing then, is that you're all done! No more thinking required. They're demonic and that's that.

Like Barack Obama, there's something about his name, something about his… RGB values. He makes you feel icky. Here's a fly bothering him so bingo, he's the antichrist. 

And if symbols still aren't flexible enough for you, if they don't get you where you wanna go, you can look for codes.

So rather than having to find a particular symbol, you find a code, which, when decrypted, becomes a symbol.

How do you decrypt? Any way you like, that's the awesome part! 

Hey, maybe God’s a DOG man!

If you refuse to believe that Trump is dumb and careless enough to type “covfefe” instead of “coverage,” it can be a code. And it means whatever you like. It means he's a four dimensional chess galaxybrain.

The biggest example of code seeking is what happened with poor John Podesta’s emails. Podesta got phished and the emails were released on WikiLeaks. Then a bunch of mundane campaign conversations and chit chat were decrypted to be about pedo stuff.

What was the code? Some refrences to pizza, which is supposedly code for child pornography and other pedo stuff. This became the Pizzagate conspiracy, which had that recent resurgence on Tik Tok. Pizzagate went down in flames a few years ago when a guy went into a pizza restaurant with an AR15 looking for nonexistent caged children in an imaginary basement. Fantasy collided with reality and got crushed. 

How can you convince someone that you’re not using a code? Whose email could withstand this kind of analysis? If they didn't find pizza, it’d be some other choose-your-own-adventure crime. When people think you're using a code, they're going to indulge their darkest fears about you. 

By the way Anons, this guy -- he's not that interesting. 

2. DOT CONNECTING

Again, this is all about patterns but here we’re seeing patterns between different things. Often it's things that repeat, or it's things that happened recently, happened near each other, are superficially similar, or are just unusual. We're programmed to pay attention to things like this. Again, these are tricks that worked back in the incredibly old days. This is actual paleolithic footage that was recently unearthed.

Superstitions are dot connecting. We see connections between things that don't exist. A baseball player gets a hit while wearing a certain pair of boxers, then he gets another hit while wearing those boxers, and those then become his lucky boxers. He now has a superstition.

We're all a bit superstitious, we all do some dot connecting, but many of us can clearly see when it's gone too far.

The visual cliché of dot connecting is what’s called the “crazy wall,” which is a shorthand way of showing that a character has lost it. 

Everything is connected and it's all about one thing, much like in these QAnon diagrams. 

The fatal problem with dot connecting is that in a world where there are untold trillions of events each day and virtually infinite ways to connect them, you can always connect the dots in any way you want. 

As Carl Sagan once said, "You can always find the pattern you're looking for."

COVID conspiracy theories often have dot connecting. COVID and the roll out of 5G have been linked just because they're both happening now. This has resulted in some people burning down cell towers. 

This guy claims Wuhan was the first city to be blanketed with 5G which is why the virus originated there. 

In a popular and especially zany QAnon video series, the outer limits of dot connecting are explored. In just one example of many, Donald Trump's habit of drinking water like a child is decoded to be proof of his war against the cabal.

You see, the water was Fiji water. Fiji water is bottled on the isle of Wakanda. These are her words, not mine. In 1993 Seagram heiress Clare Bronfman bought 80% of the isle of Wakanda. Clare Bronfman financed the set up of… the sex trafficking cult nxium. So you see: by drinking Fiji water like a toddler, Trump was telling us about the nxium sex trafficking ring, which nobody knew about, except the New York Times, which had already reported on it.

Just recently, Trump drank water slowly and carefully with one hand and there was much rejoicing. 

3. EVERYTHING IS A PERSON

We have a habit of projecting human personality onto the world because we're tribal and we spend a lot of mental energy understanding our tribemates. A good chunk of our brain power is dedicated to understanding other people, then when we need to understand things that actually aren't people, we still use that part of our brain. 

This projection of human personality onto inanimate things is at the core of religions. We imagine the creator of everything to be like a person, so the universe itself is thought to be planned and controlled by someone. Magical thinkers see society as the outcome of someone's plan. This is a core element of conspiracy theories and maybe this is why so many very religious people also believe in conspiracy theories. 

A common question that's asked in conspiracy logic is "who benefits." Because everything is planned, to figure out who's responsible for something, just look for who benefited. 

As part of a larger body of evidence the question of "who benefits" might make sense, but on its own it tends to just be dot connecting and you can say almost anything you like. You could say Canada benefited from World War II because Europe lost its industrial capacity, which strengthened Canadian industry, therefore Canada started World War II. 

One of Q's most popular slogans is "Trust the Plan". Many Anons think Q has special access to the plan and thus can predict the future, but anytime he's made specific claims, they haven't come true. Q mostly follows the Nostradamus model where you say vague, cryptic things that could mean anything, then people match these to things that happened. So they connect the dots.

The chilling truth about reality, the red pill if you will, is that the world is riddled with chance, randomness, and mistakes. There is no plan and nobody knows what's coming.  

4. PURITY

Most of us would agree with a sentiment like this… if it were about reality. 

Magical thinkers have an extreme fixation on purity and innocence. This likely stems from our instincts about contamination and contagion, along with our instinct to protect children. This powerful instinct to protect children is of course a good and essential thing but it also has a history of scaring people into believing nonsense. 

The Satanic Panic of the 1980s was all the rage when I was kid. All the same tropes were there: Satanism, pedophilia, cannibalism, rituals, murder, rape.

Much of it centered on heavy metal music. People were terrified by heavy metal's dopey and superficial flirtation with Satanic imagery and themes. Grown adults were acting like stoned teenagers and listening for backwards messages in "Stairway to Heaven." The seeking of symbols and codes was in full effect. 

It all amounted to jack shit and it's been forgotten - - except by those whose lives it destroyed. For more on this, check out one of the documentaries about the West Memphis Three, including HBO's Paradise Lost series and West of Memphis. 

Many conspiracies lately are obsessed with child sex trafficking and while these types of crimes do exist, the particular crimes described do not.

In the QAnon narrative, it's believed that the Deep State and Hollywood and whoever are raping, torturing, murdering, and yes, eating children. 

Contagion is also a major theme. People are frequently referred to as sick. Trump has called people sick countless times.

Activities that are considered impure are labelled evil. If anyone has an interest in dark topics, they make the leap to Satanism, cannabalism and pedophilia. Marina Abramovic is an artist weirdo with an interest in the dark subjects and she plays with witchy imagery. She's had her life turned upside down because people can't distinguish between her creative work and her life. Y’know, Stephen King has never actually murdered a coworker. 

What magical thinkers don’t acknowledge is that people, all people, want to explore dark and frightening things with their imaginations.

It's natural and it doesn't mean you like these things. We think about awful and frightening things because life can be awful and frightening. And if you don't think about this, you will get emotionally demolished when tragedy strikes.

Everybody looks at the gnarled and smoldering car wreckage not because we like it but because we wanna know what it's like. 

Noone here gets out alive and stories help us accept some brutal truths about life. And magical thinkers don't acknowledge that they do this too.

The Bible is dark. David cut off Goliath’s head. God drowns everything and everyone in a giant flood, including all the innocent little children. The son of God, the purest being our earth has ever seen, gets whipped, a crown of thorns is pushed onto his head, he’s nailed to a cross and left in agony for six hours until a soldier spears him in the side and puts him out of his misery. Christians hear this story over and over and over and the icon of Christianity is a reminder of Christ's humiliation, torture and murder. I don’t think this is sick. People clearly draw strength and inspiration from this story. But if you look at it without context and with no curiosity, it could look like a peculiar interest in torture.

One of the subjects in a widely seen QAnon documentary is boggled by all the parents dying in Disney films and thinks this traumatizes children. First of all, who's ever heard of this? Like I saw Bambi and then I was never the same again after. 

Dead parents in children's films are tropes because your parents do die before you -- that’s the best case scenario. But even more importantly: it’s a metaphor. We one day must leave our parents, become adults, and venture into the world on our own. Bambi’s mother dies midway through the film and at the end of the film, Bambi himself becomes a parent, becomes an independent adult. This is the journey we all must take. We love our parents and they love us and then we leave them behind.

5. APOCALYPSE  

Lots of magical thinkers believe some sort of historic calamity is imminent.

My guess is this originates in our tribal desire to unite in anticipation of some large challenge or threat. And this coming event will justify your hard work and sacrifice. You'll be rewarded when good things like hunting season or harvest come or when bad things like disasters strike. 

In the New Testament’s Book of Revelation the apocalypse is the end times, in which God destroys the evil leaders and the entirety of Earth, and delivers the righteous to paradise.

Some Evangelical Christians believe in the Rapture, which is similar, but all the good Christians will be swept up to heaven leaving behind all the sinners to suffer.

The cult leader Jim Jones believed in something called "Translation" where his followers would all die and have a blissful afterlife on a new planet. This is where we got the phrase "drink the Kool aid" because his followers ultimately all knowingly drank poisoned Kool Aid and died.

Alex Jones has been warning of some coming New World Order globalist genocide for over twenty years. He frequently warns his audience that the time for bloody conflict is coming. You will need to lock and load. Often he then segues in plugs for prepper goods. 

And with Q, they believe in something called The Storm, which is inspired by this empty threat Trump made to North Korea. 

The Storm will be the time when all the pedos will be arrested, or worse. 

It seems like an unsustainable thing. There's this endless promising of a coming great event that is just around the corner, it's almost here, it's just about to happen. It never does happen and it just doesn't seem to matter. The Jehovahs Witnesses have been doing Armageddon predictions for a century. When you're invested this much, people just rationalize away the failures and cue up the next prophecy. That's a pun. 

6. GOOD AND EVIL

This last one isn't necessarily magical on its own, but it's so interwoven with magical thinking and it's potentially so toxic that it has to be included.

Good and evil thinking is just a tribal behavior where the in-group, your tribe, is good, and the out-group, that other bunch of assholes, is bad.

But with magical thinkers this good and evil categorizing is extreme. Everything is stark black and white. You can see this in the QAnon community which divides characters into the categories of white hats and black hats, which is a cliché from old westerns. If you're a white hat, like General Flynn, everything you do is right. If you're a black hat, like Killary, everything you do is wrong. 

Magical thinkers are attracted to stark simplicity. They're attracted to certainty because they're trying to ease their anxieties, they want clear resolution. Ambiguity, contradictions and nuance -- y’know, the stuff of life -- those all take a bunch of thinking. Magical thinking is about closing the loop. Further thought is just dedicated to rationalizing the beliefs you already have.

Sound familiar? I mean, we all do this. The difference here is the level of resistance to contrary evidence, which is profound. The imperviousness to reason is almost absolute. 

In QAnon, Trump is the whitest of all white hats because he's gonna bring The Storm one day. The hero worship of Donald Trump among Anons is completely over-the-top and absurd and the vilification of their enemies is its mirror image. The rhetoric about black hats is often violent and sadistic. Plenty of anons unequivocally state their yearning for public executions.

There's a clear sadistic craving for vengeance and the infliction of suffering. Anons sometimes warn of pain coming and use The Punisher logo as an icon. Why the Punisher rather than one of the many other heroes? The Punisher is ruthless. The Punisher kills.

Not everybody in QAnon thinks this way but there is clearly a lot of bloodlust in this community. The reason for this is obvious: if you think your opponents are raping, murdering, and eating defenseless children, you're probably not gonna be real concerned about restraint.

Without this extreme vilification, magical beliefs often just seem like kinda kooky and harmless hobbies. I'm not concerned about people who believe in UFOs or ghosts or astrology.

This extreme black and white rhetoric is the most alarming feature of extremist magical thinking because it dehumanizes enemies. And when people aren't seen as humans anymore, that's when atrocities can happen.

I'm not saying that will happen at scale with something like QAnon because as with a lot of online venting, I don't think most people really mean what they're saying. But there are people consuming these ideas and snapping.

Extreme dehumanization like this cannot lead anywhere good. 

So here's what's going on in America, folks. I figured it all out. America is now a dystopian sci fi franchise in which the characters have split into two tribes: the magical thinkers and the evidence seekers. These people are not making sense of the world in the same way and perceive different realities. 

Right now, the world is impossible to truly comprehend for anybody, but many of us can at least get some sort of functional grasp on what’s happening and even more importantly, avoid falling for preposterous claims that are obviously impossible.

We’re now seeing people who have less time, less cognitive tools, less education, coming with fantastical conclusions about what they think is happening. They are alarmed by the state of the world, they're anxious, they can't make sense of it, and they're being drawn to magical explanations, like QAnon and Pizzagate and COVID19 conspiracy theories. 

I'm not saying evidence seekers never think magically, everybody's a bit magical. And I'm not saying they're right all the time. They are wrong a lot because our world is incomprehensibly complex. Anyone making claims or predictions about modern society is going to be wrong a lot. But evidence seekers will also be right a lot.

Scientists have been wrong plenty about COVID, which is a new and extremely complicated virus. But they've been right even more. We have tests because of science. We comprehend the basic mechanics of this disease because of science. If COVID is one day extinguished, it will be science that does it. 

Magical thinking, or ideology for that matter, cannot cure disease. They are not systems of knowledge and they cannot build solutions. They can only criticize and second guess. Magical thinkers will rarely be right and it’ll mostly be luck when they are.

With technical or complex matters, evidence seekers are going to outperform magical thinkers… by a lot… because they have at least some comprehension of what is actually happening. And leaders who are magical thinkers are going to waste time and resources fighting imaginary enemies and hurting innocent people.

Now I know what a lot of you evidence seekers are wondering. You’re into fixing stuff. You're wondering: how do we fix this? 

This is a really difficult question. I don't claim to have the answers and my intent here is to present some crude initial thoughts and open this up to further discussion and thought. Here's what I think.  

You definitely don't reason your way out of it. Can you reach people who haven't completely drunk the Kool Aid? Yes.

But mostly, you're not going to convince your brother or your mom or whoever that Q or some COVID conspiracy doesn't exist.

That's the evidence seeking mindset. If I provide you with excellent reasoning and sources you will change your mind. This paradigm isn't convincing to magical thinkers, so don’t waste your breath.

Evidence seekers need to learn to communicate with magical thinkers. Leaders need to translate scientific and empirical concepts into magical terms. We need to learn to speak their language. We need to use symbols, connect the dots, we need to personalize, we need to highlight the sacred, we need to present inspiring or challenging future events, we need to portray good and, well, bad at least. Otherwise they're just getting spoken to by amoral conmen and people who are detached from reality.

There should be science and rationality and data behind these narratives, but they get translated into language that resonates with magical thinkers. Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind isn't about magical thinking but I think it overlaps with what would work. 

Education should be prioritized in society. In particular, I believe everybody should have solid scientific comprehension. Teachers should be held in high esteem, teachers should be paid well. Teacher should be a job lots of people want. The field of education should attract top minds.  

People aren’t just stuck with their pre-installed magic software. We can upgrade this software. When we learn about how the world works, through science, through history, through great art, we can override this programming.

I do believe tech companies need to intervene and police this stuff to some degree. Twitter recently announced its plans and we'll see how they fare. I realize this is controversial, but regular people are too busy or too lazy or don't have the tools to be responsible for filtering out vicious nonsense. I’m a middle-aged liberal, I believe in free speech. You can almost entirely say what you want, but I don’t think these platforms should amplify you. I think the libertarian vision of a free speech utopia is not reality - - unfortunately, I wish it was. I think platforms need to get their hands dirty. I’m sure how tech companies manage this has plenty of flaws and can be improved.

Lastly, and this one’s pretty easy, we need to address the causes of anxiety in our society. So just fix society. Pretty basic, it’s low-hanging fruit.

I realize this is hopelessly vague, but I believe I'm respecting the complexity of this challenge but not getting specific. 

Widespread fear, anxiety and uncertainty is the root of everything. If you can crack this, the ship rights itself.

This is where problem solvers should focus our energy. We need to improve social conditions so that people are less frightened and feel more sense of control, have purpose and meaning. Massive challenge, especially when society is so atomized. 

For energetic, optimistic folks looking to create social change, projects that make people feel more secure will have an enormous cascade of positive effects. 

I also think this applies at the level of family and friends. If your dad or sister or God forbid your kid gets into QAnon or whatever, try to help them feel more secure in life. Try to help them be happier, and understand that if they’re going to find their way out, they’ll do it themselves for their own reasons. If they want to talk about conspiracy stuff, you gotta clearly say you’re not interested in that. Be patient. Have good times with them. Be firm, but love them. 

Magical thinkers are just using the tools they have access to with the temperaments they have. And if any one of us were wired differently or were less fortunate with our opportunities or our education, this could be you. It could be me. And all this stuff would feel convincing, it would feel real. And we would protect these beliefs for a long while because it alleviates our fears and makes us feel like we have some control.

Remember that fear, anxiety and a lack of control are the oxygen that fuel this fire. When we reduce these emotions, we dampen this magical instinct, probably along with a lot of other destructive impulses. 

Those are my opinions. I’m happy to hear yours in the comments below. Thank you for watching. If you want to see more of this, come back me on Patreon. All hail Beyonce.