To begin with, the failure of the
established order of industrial society, and of the political classes
who manage it, is becoming hard to ignore. Consider the way that the
world’s leaders have reacted to the ongoing implosion of the global
economy, or nearly any other recent crisis you care to name: in
each case, it’s a broken-record sequence of understating the
problem, trying to manage appearances, getting caught flatfooted by
events, and struggling to load the blame for yet another round of
failures onto anybody within reach. Rinse and repeat a few
times, and even the most diehard supporters of the status quo start
wishing that somebody, somewhere, would stand up and demonstrate some
actual leadership…

If you want to influence the thinking
of a nation, or even a community, you have to paint with a very broad
brush. That means, first, you have to aim at one of a few powerful
nonrational drives that affect most people in much the same way;
second, you have to pile as much pressure as possible onto whatever
drive you have in mind, so that you can overwhelm whatever the psyche
of the individual might throw at you; and third, you have to weaken
the reasoning mind, because that’s the part of the self that
most often trips up efforts to work magic off basic drives,
especially when those efforts aim at goals that most of the targets
think are against their best interests.

Two awkward consequences follow from
these considerations. The first is that there are things that
political thaumaturgy can’t do at all, because they contradict the
requirements of the method. Getting people to think clearly by
encouraging them not to think clearly is not a promising strategy,
and it’s not much better to try to use basic drives to convince
people not to give in to their basic drives. The old delusion that
techniques are value-free is as misleading here as elsewhere; any
technique is better for some ends than others, and thus privileges
the values that favor those ends above others…. The second
awkward consequence is that the political thaumaturge is always
affected by his or her own magic… Political thaumaturgy
can’t be precisely aimed, though, and can’t usually rely on
talking people into practicing complex rituals in their spare time;
instead, it relies on mass media, and on repetition and compelling
verbal or visual patterns that sidestep the critical faculties of the
reasoning mind…

For an example much closer to home,
consider the way that the privileged classes in the contemporary
industrial world by and large support policies that, in exchange for
absurdly huge short term gains, are sawing away at the foundations of
their own wealth and privilege, and may ultimately leave a good many
members of those classes dangling from lampposts. Awarding
multibillion-dollar bonuses to bank executives when their banks are
losing money and many people are going broke is, shall we say, not a
strategy with a long shelf life. It may be possible for a while to
insist that all that money is going to trickle down and create jobs,
but when the jobs don’t appear – and they won’t, because
diverting money from the productive economy of nonfiscal goods and
services to the unproductive economy of high finance is an effective
way to cause jobs to be lost rather than gained – that claim isn’t
going to hold up well.

John Kenneth Galbraith’s comparison
of the American political class to the French aristocracy on the eve
of the Revolution thus may yet turn out to be even more prescient
than Galbraith thought. That today’s privileged classes don’t
see this coming is another example of the way thaumaturgy recoils on
its practitioners: decades of public relations meant to
justify the parasitic habits of the finance sector have produced
generations of financiers who believe unthinkingly in their own
propaganda…

Another bit of practical psychology
that’s been used by operative mages for a very long time also comes
into play, especially when the politics of an age are more intently
focused on denouncing the existing order than in offering a coherent
alternative to it. You’ll find this principle expressed in
different ways in magical traditions, but the phrasing I first
learned is to my mind the one that expresses it best: what you
contemplate, you imitate…

Fortunately, there are ways to avoid
this trap. The most obvious, and most basic, is to go out of your
way to spend more time contemplating what you value than what you
oppose. It’s not necessary to have a comprehensive plan for a
better world already in mind, since the levels of your brain and
nervous system that respond to contemplation with imitation don’t
need abstract plans, and can’t really use them. What they need are
good clear images that express the values you want to cultivate.
That’s why advertising has so little conceptual content and so
many emotionally compelling images, for example; the thaumaturgists
of Madison Avenue know perfectly well what they’re doing –
which is one of the many good reasons why you should scrap your TV
sooner rather than later. The same method works as well when you
choose the images, instead of letting big corporations choose them
for you…

All this can be seen as simply one
material expression of the thaumaturgy discussed in earlier chapters,
the manipulation of basic drives through the endless repetition of
emotionally charged symbols that serves to swamp the thinking mind
and keep the individual penned in a narrow circle of self-defeating
behaviors. From another perspective, though, the torrent of
material goodies that comes surging through the channels of the
consumer economy is the payoff for cooperating with the existing
order of things: so long as you want the things you’re supposed to
want, you can have them in fantastic abundance. It’s no
exaggeration to point out that average middle class people in the
industrial world just now have access to material benefits that
emperors couldn’t expect to get five hundred years ago. That’s
their share of the payoff for acquiescing in the status quo.

That’s the great strength of the
magician states Ioan Culianu talked about in Eros
and Magic in the Renaissance, those nations – and if you’re
reading this, you’re almost certainly living in one…

The entire operation of the modern
magician state, after all, depends on uninterrupted access to
gargantuan supplies of cheap, highly concentrated energy. The
considerable amount of energy that goes to power the communication
technologies that get thaumaturgy to its target audiences is only a
drop in the oil barrel of the whole energy cost of the system. A
much larger amount goes to supply and maintaining the infrastructure
of thaumaturgy, and of course the largest fraction of all goes into
producing the torrent of goods and services mentioned above, the
collective payoff that keeps those target audiences docile. Now
factor in the depletion of concentrated energy sources – above all
petroleum, which provides 40% of the world energy supply and close to
100% of energy used in transportation – and the proud towers of the
magician state abruptly turn out to rest on foundations of sand.

To understand the consequences of that
awkward fact, it’s important to get past the rhetoric of
victimization that fills so much space in discussions of social
hierarchy these days. Of course the people at or near the upper end
of the pyramid get a much larger share of the proceeds of the system
than anybody else, and those at or near the bottom get crumbs; that’s
not in question. The point that needs making is that a great many
people in between those two extremes also benefit handsomely from the
system. When those people criticize the system, their criticisms by
and large focus on the barriers that keep them from having as large a
share as the rich – not the ones that keep them from having as
small a share as the poor, or to phrase things a little differently,
that keep their privileged share from being distributed more fairly
across the population as a whole.

read the whole thing, buy the book at Scarlet Imprint