There are parts of the capitalism ideology that seem magical, mythological, mystical, paranormal, or superstitious.
Example: couponing or “extreme couponing”. People think that coupons possess some kind of magical power where if you use them in the right way you get free stuff or even money back.
The impact of modernism and colonialism on our ability to discuss and judge magic can get pretty complicated. A lot of branches of science will define magic as something like “belief or action which lacks evidence in its justification”. Which is basically just saying, “if we haven’t done enough science to it yet, anyone believing XYZ is engaging in magical thinking”. Meanwhile, that same scientific academy will turn around and enable the creation of the field of modern marketing, which is entirely based on a sympathetic magic.
Hell, money itself is one of the most powerful magical constructs in the history of humanity. It literally gains its power from belief. That’s chaos magick, straight up.
Thank you. I’ll message you if I ever finish it lol
Another thing in this vein I think about a lot is how a lot of science communication makes use of magical thinking. Some models for how the world works are just too complicated to explain to someone who doesn’t have the necessary background knowledge. So instead science communication uses analogies that are useful enough to the layperson to be useful on occasion but would have awful predictive power if taken literally in their respective field.
Example: we teach children a simplified version of germ theory. It gives them enough information to motivate the rituals that keep them healthy, or at least healthier than they would otherwise be. But if you had a child regurgitate those explanations back to you and tried to model the spread of germs using those guidelines, you would model an instant and constant worldwide pandemic. Because explaining epidemiology to a toddler isn’t going to work. Explaining how small actions in aggregate can have large effects in the population of highly social creatures is unnecessarily nuanced. They’re just not going to to retain it yet. Germs make you sick. The soap makes them go away. It’s the same basic idea as “perform this ritual to banish the bad spirits”, but with different terminology.
Something else I’ll throw into the mix is all the successful natural traditions that could be - and have been - dismissed as backwards or magical thinking.
It’s fucking amazing that the ancient Aztec and Mayan civilizations figured out nixtamalization which prevents deadly pellagra.
The Pygmy people (and lots of others) had and still have incredibly effective natural medicine cabinets at their fingertips.
I think the left needs to watch out for its scientism sometimes, even though it comes from a good place usually - and from being materialists.
