What is to be Done About Magical Thinking?
Why sorting out our own delusions is as important as judging others'
“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities”
- Voltaire, Questions sur les miracles
Magical thinking played a large role in the terrorism we saw yesterday on the U.S. Capitol (as well as in other state centers, like Georgia’s), in both more and less obvious ways. First, the more obvious…
The magical, heretical thinking of our nation’s Christian fundamentalists and their involvement in national politics behind such figures like George W. Bush, and Donald Trump, have played a major role is us waging self-described Crusades against Muslim-majority countries, killing millions of innocent people, as well as in justifying our torture programs and in denying women basic healthcare rights and cutting food aid for poor children right here at home.
The Christian Right’s endorsement of Trump coalesced these past five years with his support from other magical thinking-based groups like the White supremacist Proud Boys and QAnon devotees. The religious fundamentalism of our so-called Moral Majority is magical thinking.
The racism of the Proud Boys is magical thinking. Believing that someone has traveled from the future to alert us to Donald Trump secretly fighting a cabal of pedophiles led by Democrats as some QAnon believers do, is, of course, magical thinking.
To many of us, the last one seems immediately absurd. Many good-willed, liberal people will also reject the former two belief sets out of hand.
Yet even when we do rhetorically reject the unscientific, magical thinking reasoning of superior and inferior races and a God who only loves us and whose secrets we alone know of, we’re often tempted to do so without realizing just how embedded those philosophies are in the American project.
Religious fundamentalism and racism (both used together to justify the protection of capital) are bedrocks of America. They’re not new.
That is to say that dangerous magical thinking has not just been propped up by leaders these past four years or so. In fact, it has largely served as ideological foundation for our militant, White supremacist empire since its inception.
The armed terrorists who sent police and congress members fleeing to bunkers this week seemed fueled by the magical belief that Trump had, in fact, won the 2020 presidential election but was having it stolen from him. They descended upon Washington D.C. with the attendant magical belief that they could attempt an armed coup on the U.S. Congress to prevent certification of the 2020 Presidential election in favor of Joe Biden without facing lethal consequences for their treason.
As it turns out, they were mostly correct in believing that. They temporarily halted the congressional proceedings, took over federal buildings by violent force (when they weren’t being ushered in by Capitol police, that is) and then most of them went back to their hotels to re-charge their phones, and commiserate without mandated masks.
For literal treasonous insurrection and an armed coup attempt, these White supremacists were arrested in smaller numbers than peaceful Black Lives Matter demonstrators in Atlanta were that same day, and less than peaceful Capitol protestors of Justice Kavanaugh were earlier in Trump’s presidency.
Many of us go no further than laughing at and looking down at magical thinkers. It’s easy and cathartic.
It’s also useless. I suggest instead that we should consider the ways in which our society has given people like these ample reason to believe the outrageous things that they do.
A feature in The Nation magazine quotes one of the White supremacist terrorists as saying, “This is not America,” when confronted even with the relatively minor police resistance to their coup attempt. “They’re shooting at us. They’re supposed to shoot at BLM [Black Lives Matter], but they’re shooting at the patriots.”
This woman was shocked that the armed coup attempt that she took part in was met with any police resistance when she believed that the police should instead shoot civil rights demonstrators. It may be horrible, but why wouldn’t she feel this way?
Her reasoning only sounds insane when we judge it on moral grounds. When we look at the evidence of how police forces do and always have operated within our racist carceral system, and even during this past year with so many civil rights uprisings, her belief is completely rational, though repugnant.
Once we’re done condemning her as our moral inferior, we might take a look at just how evidence-based her conception of American law-enforcement is. We can say she’s morally wrong, but we can’t say her expectations were unrealistic as a White woman in America.
It would appear that magical thinking also played some role in Ashli Babbitt getting killed by police as she took part in the attempted coup. Babbitt, a social media influencer, QAnon disciple, and retired U.S. AirForce worker was shot dead when she ignored the orders of police officers who had guns drawn to stay behind a door after she and other mob members had stormed into the Capitol (graphic video of the killing, below).
Ashli can be seen on her twitter account over the years lending vocal support for the bi-partisan wall along our border with Mexico, near where she lived in Southern California. In several videos she screamed at elected officials she believed were betraying the nation and said that she was putting “politicians on notice.”
The day before she took part in the terrorism, Babbitt tweeted out that “nothing will stop us…dark to light!”
One of Ashli’s final retweets of the sixth of January, the day she was killed, read “The President reinstates Death by Firing Squad, Guess What the US penalty for Treason is ? DEATH BY FIRING SQUAD ! 2+2=4 last I checked.”
Ashli believed that others were the treasonous traitors who should be executed by firearms for their crimes. Where could Ashli have possibly gotten these ideas?
What made this AirForce veteran who had certainly grown accustomed during her military career to our armed forces intervening violently in the democratic processes of other nations, overturning their governments with impunity, believe that she could overturn a democratic process that she unilaterally deemed illegitimate by deposing elected officials?
Whatever it was seemed to have given Ashli the magical belief that she could run at bullets and win. Was she a lunatic, or someone who took to heart her training and what she’d been taught as a White American?
Ultimately, of course, neither Jesus – whose name was invoked with fervor in the speeches that preceded the Capitol storming – nor her military record and experience, nor her Whiteness could save Ashli from the bullet she chose to jump into. Now, she’s already become a martyr for her cohort of fellow magical thinkers.
We can laugh at these people, or we can cruelly relish their limited rude awakenings through death. I’d rather consider that maybe their magical thinking wasn’t the result of stupidity, or ignorance, or maladaptation to society.
In some ways, people like Ashli Babbitt understand America and our history better than most. While their QAnon theories are without compelling evidence, and some of them may or may not have accurate beliefs on the supernatural, White supremacists like these correctly and soberly understand that America was built for them, for their privilege, for their benefit.
They seem to understand that it is absolutely The American Way for us to use armed force to interrupt democratic processes. In some ways, people like Ashli learned the lessons and philosophies of the United States all too well.
Laughing these people off or, now that some of us have finally stopped thinking this is all a funny joke, stopping at moral condemnation and assuming that by sheer force of time, space, and the inferiority of their beliefs they and their ideas will eventually melt away and that things will get better, is folly. The arc of the moral universe does not, in fact, bend towards justice.
Time alone does not bring about improvement or equity. Actions, taken by people, do.
War correspondent and book author Chris Hedges summarizes this well in “Death of the Liberal Class.” Yes, some zealots are spurred into action, often violent and mad action, by their magical thinking.
However, Hedges astutely observes, the more calm and supposedly sophisticated among us are often lulled into violent inaction by our own, not well understood or examined, magical idea that progress is inevitable.
It is this type of less obvious magical thinking that is also responsible for our current coup d’etat. “This magical thinking, this idea that human and personal progress is somehow inevitable, leads to political passivity,” Hedges writes.
“It has turned whole nations, such as the United States, into self-consuming machines of death.”
White, theocratic, racist zealots hold ear dangerous magical thoughts, that is true. Strange ideas in the minds of angry people don’t do that much damage, on scale, however.
The reason why dangerous things like the current attempted coup d’etat we’re living through right now can even happen is because of the liberal magical thinking that ever conceived of the United States as something other than a White supremacist colonial settler state with strong theocratic forces.
The White zealots of this coup attempt understand correctly that the United States is supposed to work differently for them, that they are protected and enshrined by their Whiteness, and often their association with heretical versions of Christianity. That, in and of itself, is less madness and more cynical, selfish, though accurate observation.
That type of entitlement is the logical conclusion of a nation built on racial genocide, enslavement, and on class persecution, reproduced in modern times with different means but to similarly horrid effect. If we want to rid these magical thinking zealots of their power we need to, for the first time in our history, attempt to fundamentally identify, then root our and forever dismantle the structures of racial and economic oppression that we’ve left untouched, despite the liberal class adjusting its vocabulary and tone.
It is nowhere near enough to point out that these terrorists are using magical thinking when they say Donald Trump actually won the election of 2020. In order to defeat them, we as a society need to make them wrong in more significant ways.
Poking holes in the most obvious elements of their conspiracy theories will only help us feel superior, while doing nothing to make the nation a better place. We have to decide to truly make it the case that when a White supremacist riots because they believe they deserve more than their Brown or Black or Red or Yellow brothers and sisters, they are no longer backed up by the full faith and credit of all American history and its institutions.