https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Wlhzj8OUcPk
So one of the things that’s come up recently is the sort of inability for people to understand what is going on. What are people responding and reacting to? Why are they doing the things that they’re doing? Why are things so strange and weird? And one aspect that’s causing this is, roughly speaking, what is technically, or I think technically should be called magical thinking. And magical thinking is the concept that you can propose something, you can make a proposition, a truthful proposition, right, or truthful at least in your mind, and that that represents accurately reality. And this is the sort of thing that we’re seeing a lot of, where people are just kind of making statements and then proceeding as if those statements actually represent a way of functioning in the world. And what I want to try to do is tear that apart and show you why I think we’re living in the age of lots of magical thinking, sort of unjustified, if you will. And hopefully we can get to the bottom of this and I can bring it out in a way that will make sense to you and help you to understand why people are behaving the way they’re behaving and why they’re saying the things that they’re saying. Now, magic is typically portrayed as things like incantations, right? Some early forms of magic were portrayed as like alchemy is considered magic, right? And to some extent it is magic. They were very much trying to do something very specific that involved the spiritual, right, the ethereal, the ephemeral world, not the world that is material, that is sort of here and now and solid, but that world that is sort of harder to get a grasp on. Now, you could say, well, slow down, Mark. What are you talking about? Magic and magical thinking is when you’re speaking words and expecting that to manifest in some exact, precise, reliable, consistent pattern in the world. So I can say things like, well, ultimately, rocks are made of foam. All rocks are made of foam. This is wishful thinking. All rocks are not made of foam. And that’s axiomatic, right? It’s definitional. Foam is not rock and rock is not foam. That’s why they’re two different words. And that’s one thing to watch out for is, are there different words? Are there better words? Why are there different words? There are different words because they’re not representing the same concept. Now, that’s not universally true. Sometimes two different words represent the same context. Sorry, the same the same actual object, right, or the same concept per se. But often they don’t. Often we have separate words for things because we’re relating to them differently, even if they are the same object, which is also interesting to note. And so that is to say that words are not arbitrary. We need to have commonality in our usage and understanding of words. Otherwise, we cannot communicate correctly. And so a lot of what you’re seeing is just bad communication. It’s poor communication. So I can make the statement that sex and gender are the same thing. That’s not true. We have two different words for a reason. I can then act as if because gender is fluid that I can be whatever gender I want in the moment. It’s fluid. First of all, is gender fluid? I don’t know about that. I can state that something is socially constructed. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it is changeable. Certainly not by me. Certainly society has to change. I can state that something is socially constructed and then I can state therefore we must change society, which just because something socially constructed doesn’t mean we can change it. And just because we can change society doesn’t mean we should change society. So this is just magical thinking because I’m making statements like, oh, gender is fluid, gender and sex are the same. Therefore, if I want to be a woman, I can say I’m a woman and then I’m a woman. And then because gender is socially constructed, society has to agree. That’s me trying to impose upon society, which is beyond my capabilities. I’m pretending as though I have a degree of control over the world that is in excess of the degree of control that I have. The thing you have the most control over is yourself. That’s it. That’s the thing you have the most control over. And the control you have over yourself is terrible. It’s terrible. You can’t necessarily stop eating and drinking at will for long periods of time. Some people can. That’s called fasting. I do. I fast. I have a great deal of self-control, but I have a lot of self-control compared to most people. There are lots of things I can do that other people cannot do because they lack self-control. And self-control is something you can build up. And self-control is good. But self-control is not control over things outside of yourself. So I can’t make axiomatic statements and expect the world or society or other people or even people I live with to conform. Right. You can’t do that. You can try that. Right. You can pretend as though that’s an element of control. I might argue that almost everything outside yourself that is not inorganic, you do not have control over. You can influence it, but you don’t have control. There might be a few exceptions to that or a few exceptional conditions. But we tend to make when we’re doing magical thinking, we tend to make universalist statements. So we’ll say, well, I have control over what gerbils do because I can force them into gerbotubes. Yeah. OK. But you don’t really have control over them. You have some control over them under limited circumstances. It’s not the same as having control over something. And you equivocate. I have some control, therefore I have total control. People go to that a lot. This is part of that whole binary thinking. Right. My previous video. We like to simplify. It’s like, well, I have control. We also like to speak in the moment. And then that tends to cause us to universalize. Well, I have control now, therefore I’ll have control forever. I mean, you may control when the gerbil goes in the tube or something like that. And that may take quite a bit of effort on your part. You don’t control when the gerbil eats, right, when the gerbil is hungry, when the gerbil pees. You don’t control any of those things. You don’t control the gerbil bites you. You don’t control any of those things. I had gerbils, by the way, when I was young. There’s a lot of control you have over gerbils, but it’s way less than like total. It’s way less than you think. And that’s the problem. You can exert control and kill things. Also not good. You may have the ability to kill things, right, but you can couch that as influencing their life. And that’s an easier and better and more accurate, I would argue, way to understand your interaction with things outside of yourself, especially other people who have influence, not control. You probably don’t want control. Control implies responsibility, or at least it should. With great power comes great responsibility. Well, with great control, right? That also works. Probably works better because we have a video on power. And my definition is rather specific and I think way more clear than most definitions, right? It sort of disambiguates influence and control from power. And that’s why magical thinking is important, because it’s a function of binary thinking. It’s a function of this idea of power, right? So if we could just make the people around us society, right? They’re part of society, or they are society, technically speaking. Change the construction of gender. Make it fluid. Equivocate it with sex. Then everybody will treat me as if I’m the way I want to be. That’s magical thinking. That’s coming from you and trying to influence everything outside of you so that you can get what you want. I’m not accusing anybody. I’m not saying you’re doing this, but you may be seeing this. I’m certainly seeing a lot of it. I’d also accuse a bunch of people of doing it, but that’s a different thing. I’ll do that to their face, not in a video. I have no problem confronting people. Not with everything, but with most things. So that’s very magical thinking. And it’s this idea that we’ve simplified the world. We’ve got a simple way of intelligizing it. Social construction, fluidity, our own ability to influence and control other people. We all have to act as if. We tell them, oh, it’s an emergency. The four people in the world that have a disorder that causes them pain because society won’t recognize that. This is all a story, right? That society won’t recognize them for how they want to be recognized. I don’t even know how I want to be recognized. So I don’t know how they know. Maybe they do. Maybe they don’t. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe the reason why they’re having a problem is not because society doesn’t recognize them, but because their own internal self is rejecting their recognition. That happens to people all the time. Just watch what happens when somebody loses a job they’ve had for 10 years in a certain field. Their whole identity collapses in some cases and they don’t know what to do anymore. They don’t know who they are. That’s not a social construction. That’s an internal construction that you made for yourself. And when reality denies it or when society can’t support it anymore because society can’t support everything, then you have a problem. And so you don’t have control over society. You can try to get them upset about something enough to change as a group. You don’t actually have any control over a group. You can have some influence over a group, but it’s limited. And it doesn’t scale well. So the influence you have over a group of four people is different from the influence you have over a group of 10 people, etc. And this gets way worse as the numbers go up, right? Scaling is asymptotic. It’s not linear. It doesn’t go like this. Scaling tends to go like this logarithmically. Nassim Taleb talks a lot about this sort of thing. So read all his books, said it before, read them all, read, read, read. Good stuff. Very accessible books. Easy, quick reads. Very deep philosophical points in some cases that he’s making, I would argue. Great story based stuff. But some of these concepts are there, right? And there are things we interact with in the world. So one of the less popular aspects of St. Jordan Peterson’s message is this idea of the Pareto distribution. Taleb talks about the Pareto distribution. I knew about it long before Peterson did, apparently. The Pareto distribution just seems to be a distribution that we notice in the world. No amount of thinking is going to change that. No amount of pretending that it doesn’t exist is going to change that. No amount of complaining about the top 10% or the top 1%, which by the way, the top 10% is as far away from the bottom 1% as the top 1% is from the 10%, we’ll say, right? Like it moves on this funny curve. That’s what the Pareto distribution is. These power laws that are in place that Taleb talks about. Nothing that we do is going to change it. It’s everywhere in nature, right? At St. Peter’s point, it determines the distance between stars and stuff like that. It really does. It’s not something you have any control or influence over. It is just the way the world seems to be laid out. And I can understand why people find that problematic because they don’t want it to be true. So they engage in magical thinking and saying, well, we could all just be equal and get around this Pareto distribution if we did whatever it is they want us to do. It doesn’t matter. It’s kind of irrelevant. We just don’t have that level of control as a society. We have a great deal of control as a society. We can jam rivers. We can change entire ecosystems. We can probably destroy the planet. We can nuke the planet. That’s for sure. Destroy most life on Earth. We could do that. We could probably heat the planet up quite a bit more than it’ll heat up on its own. But maybe not. Maybe if you look in the records, far enough back, thousands of years, that maybe the human influence on climate is much less than we might think. It’s hard to know, though. And that’s the problem. We think we know a bunch of things that we don’t know. And that leads us again back to the magical thinking. We think we could control this. If we just all tried, we could control this. Sometimes that’s true. But most of the time, it’s not true. Most of the time, things in the world are laid out the way they’re laid out because we’re conforming to something we don’t understand. And so I talked in a previous video about information. Right. There’s a lot of information going on. We’re forming around things, conforming to things, being informed by things and informing those things. We’re not really always aware of that. And when we don’t understand that relationship, it possesses us. And then we want to get out of it. And we’re prone to this magical thinking, this thinking that we can use words to incant the world and change it through that incantation. Right. Hocus pocus bull. Right. And then I have knew whatever you want to mix into your little potion. Doesn’t matter. That stuff largely doesn’t work. And the parts of it that does work are sort of surprising and shocking to us. And I’ll probably go over all of that in a video eventually, too, although not today. So a lot of this is wrapped up in once we make a proposition, once we quote, think we know a thing. You know, we can we can believe that it ceases to become a problem for us. Right. Once we believe we have the thing named, that we have a handle on it, that it’s no longer an issue. So this happens a lot. One way it manifests is a lot of people talk about cognitive bias. And there’s a book of like a hundred of these silly cognitive biases that we have. I’m not sure there’s a hundred actual cognitive biases. There may be a hundred manifestations of five cognitive biases or ten or something. I’m not sure there’s a hundred. There might be. I don’t I don’t really engage too much with, you know, trying to label cognitive biases. Right. Some of that is to some extent a waste of time. But what I do engage in is trying to be careful with what I’m doing, what I’ve done and why and understanding that relationship. When people talk about a cognitive bias, they say, oh, you know, that’s that’s hindsight bias. You know, I don’t engage in that because I know about it. That’s not how it works. You can’t just say, you know about a thing and therefore it’s not a problem because knowledge is not linked to action necessarily. It could be, but it doesn’t have to be. There’s a deep asymmetry between knowledge and action. Knowing things doesn’t move the world. It doesn’t change anything. It may have the potential to change something, but it may also lead us astray. And that’s more often what knowledge does, leads us astray. So once you know about a cognitive bias, that doesn’t change your relationship to that bias. It doesn’t mean you’re less bias. It doesn’t mean you’re not prone to that bias. It doesn’t mean that when you exhibit that bias, you’ll notice. It doesn’t mean that you can notice biases without understanding them. You can engage with these things without being aware of them, say consciously. And you can subconsciously fix these bias. And that’s what happens when you meditate. So you meditate a long time, especially if you do mindful type practices. You know, you do sorts of meditation where you’re thinking about what you’re thinking, you’re contemplating as well as focusing. When you do stuff like that, one of the changes that happens is that you become a lot slower and more thoughtful. And this change isn’t reliable. I shouldn’t say can happen. It often happens to serious practitioners. You become more careful in your speech. You slow down. You become more thoughtful, more reflective. As a result of being reflective, you know, consciously and deliberately in meditation, you become more reflective throughout the day. And that’s something also that you can practice. John Vavica is a great meditation course. I’ll link that here. It’s wonderful. It’ll help you with some of this stuff. Certainly, if you take it seriously, I recommend you do it with a group. Group practice is better. You can do it individually as well. Both of them, though, not just one. But it can really help you to notice these things and avoid this magical thinking. Because it’s not just about knowing things. It’s also about taking action when you notice them. So there’s things, there’s labeling them, right? Giving them propositions, right? There’s noticing them when they occur in the world. Having a bunch of propositions. If you never interact with them, you never pay attention to them, you never see them, you never notice them. Pointless. You’ve got a bunch of useless information. Useless knowledge. Avoid useless knowledge. Then you have to take an action. And this is where Stoicism comes in so handy, right? You should engage with Stoicism. It’s interesting stuff. At least the aphorisms or the maxims. Taleb also has a book on aphorisms, by the way. It’s an excellent book. I have to get the third edition one of these days. These things are the way in which you understand and help yourself to recognize when you’re engaged in this magical thinking. And recognizing other people are engaged in magical thinking just allows you to make more sense of what they’re saying. Rather than just taking it for granted. Oh, gender is fluid and gender and sex are the same and all this is socially constructed. And we can just change society and that will work. That’s a lot of assumptions, man. That’s a lot of something. There may be more assumptions in there. That’s a lot of assumptions. Why are they doing this? That’s a better question. Now you don’t have to engage them in their magical thinking. You can engage them in the process of how they came to their conclusions. And there’s combative ways to do this, which I prefer because I’m a combative, discreet person. And there’s non combative ways to do this. So one is to say, help me understand what you mean when you say. Right. Help me understand how you came to the conclusion that you can do this. Are you sure that this is the way it is? Are you sure this is possible? Have you thought this through? Right. There’s all sorts of ways to ask questions of people to get them out of their magical thinking. Or at least to get them closer to being out of their magical thinking or at least recognizing their magical thinking. Because we all want the world to be different. I’ve got lists. I’ve got lots of lists on what things I would change tomorrow if I could. Unfortunately, I can’t. Or maybe fortunately for the rest of you, definitely fortunately for a bunch of you, I can’t change things. One of the things I do tomorrow is make sure needles were never seen on TV again. Nobody should get needles on TV. This is the most terrible thing I can think of. Stories where animals get hurt. Yeah, banned forever. I would make them unwriteable. Yes, untellable. In fact, old Yeller, not a fan of poor writing, wouldn’t be a thing. Couldn’t happen. All dogs would go to heaven. Actually, no, they would never die. I would definitely do that if I could. I would do it tomorrow. I would do it in perpetuity. But I can’t do that. There’s most things I can’t do. And I’m okay with that. And. You know, the important part about magical thinking is getting yourself to understand that. You have to connect your thoughts to actions, and those actions have to work in the world in a reliable, accurate, consistent fashion, right? That allows for change that is controllable or intelligible or manageable, right? Maybe all of those things. Keeping in mind that any change is probably going to change things that you don’t understand, right? We have influence beyond beyond our own sight, beyond our own intelligence, beyond our own understanding. And that influence in the world is important. But if the influence we have doesn’t connect to the outcomes that are useful, then those thoughts aren’t useful. So the thoughts have to connect to actions. Those actions have to connect to results. All of that has to be useful and intelligible. Otherwise, we’re just causing damage and we’re causing a lot more damage than we realize. Even when things go the way we expect, we’re probably causing a lot more damage than we realize. It’s all well and good, for example, to talk about climate change if you live in a city. But you’ve gone astray, right? It’s all well and good to talk about climate change if you have a computer, but you’ve already gone astray. There’s already a disconnect between your thoughts and your actions. Being done to the environment that in terms of climate change that is directly attributable to technology in particular is insane. Forget about your lawn, your car, all of that stuff. Industrialization is the thing that uses the most electricity and produces the most greenhouse gases. Period. End of statement. Barn on. It’s in the data. I would like to think it would be different that if we all just cut our electrical usages in our home that that would improve the situation. But actually, it won’t do anything that is non negligible. Like the amount of electricity individuals use that is produced by, we’ll say, bad power sources that cause climate change is so insanely low. And you can just look at you just to look at the data. Don’t listen to people. Google. Look at the data. It’s all there is insane. So when we engage in this idea that I’m doing my part for the planet and we still have a lawn, we live in a city, we have all these computers, I’m surrounded by computers. I’m just not a fan of climate change because I have computers and I’m not giving them up. You can you can come to my house and take them out of my cold dead hands. That’s about it. We’re engaging in magical thinking. We’re engaging in magical thinking to think that we are going to help change the situation with our individual interaction that isn’t aware of all of the other interactions that we have. Right. Everything that is mass produced is causing way more climate change than you are with your car. Everything, any individual thing. And that’s worth understanding. That’s worth appreciating. And it’s worth understanding that when we think we can make this change at a personal level, we’re engaged in magical thinking. Now, that’s not to say that we shouldn’t do something about manufacturing and make and improve it. I think we should. But there’s lots of reasons for that, like better manufacturing, cleaner manufacturing, cleans up the environment. Forget about the climate. Forget about the climate entirely. Just the environment. And we often do these things accidentally. So we removed sulfur from from gasoline ages ago and asthma got better. Why? We removed the sulfur to save the climate, actually, so it wouldn’t get too cool. Look it up. Very interesting history in the 70s about climate change. The reason why it did that is because when we remove the sulfur, we also remove not just the sulfur, but other particulates. And so incidents of asthma went down. That actually increases lifespan, by the way, because people with asthma, when they have more attacks, that shortens their lifespan. When you clean up the air, everything gets better. And so cleaning up the air, which also happens to help climate change, helps the environment and general that we live in, that we interact with on a daily basis. That’s why it’s not good to engage in magical thinking, because we really don’t know what changes affect what things until we do them and observe. Science comes after observation. So when people are engaging in this magical thinking, I’m going to fix the climate by recycling. OK, dude, it’s good to know. It’s good to note that it’s good to know when we do it. And it’s good to realize that just because we can label something, we don’t have control over it. We don’t understand it necessarily. We can’t necessarily manipulate everything we have a word for. And words are important, so we should use them carefully, because when we start talking about things that don’t connect to the real world, we’re going to take actions that are going to frustrate us. And one of the problems with that is that when you’re taking actions in the world and they’re not working out, like let’s say there was a vote and you voted a certain way and your candidate got into office, irrespective of how. And then that candidate didn’t do the things that you thought they were going to do. You’re just going to get frustrated. That’s going to cause you to be angry and resentful. And then you’re going to engage in more magical thinking. So the magical thinking happened that when you thought that by getting a certain politician elected that certain things would happen in the world and how the world works, I hate to break it to you. Politicians don’t have a lot of control over the government, much less the world, and they have even less control than they think because of the law of unintended consequences. And also, people are remarkably incompetent on average. This is where conspiracy theories come from. You have magical thinking. Things aren’t working out. You go, oh, the world doesn’t work the way I thought. It must be the lizard people. Fair enough. Certainly looks like the lizard people to me. And I’m not joking. I just know that it’s not the lizard people that most people are just dumb. And this magical thinking causes us to be conspiratorial because it doesn’t work, causes us to get angry because it doesn’t work, causes us anxiety because we know there’s a mismatch between the world in our head, the world that we’re speaking about and the world that we’re interfacing with. These are not matched up. The world that we’re talking to other people about, they’re talking about a different world. We’re not matched up. That’s not good. It’s hard to cooperate with people because you can’t trust them. If they see a different world than you see, once it’s too different, it’s a lot of trouble. That’s why it’s important that we’re aimed in the same direction, that we’re aimed at the same things, right? That we have things like conviction, right? We have to have intention in our actions. Our intention should match what we speak. Right? Don’t lie. Right? Always tell the truth or at least don’t lie, as Peterson says. These are important concepts because when we’re not doing them, when we’re engaging in magical thinking or when other people are, that mismatch causes anxiety, causes anger, it causes resentment. It causes us not to be able to commit to things, to act with conviction, with devotion, with loyalty. Right? What can you be loyal to in an uncertain world? How can you be loyal to a person that sees the world drastically different from the way you see it? And again, getting out of this is more about questioning, questioning ourselves, questioning our own assumptions, questioning other people. How did you come to this conclusion? Are you sure this is your own set of thinking? Right? Things like that. That will help them. That will help you. Right? Because if you can convince somebody that your understanding of the world is flawed and their understanding of the world is flawed and you have that in common, you can make a commonality. Even in difference, there is commonality. And when we can appeal to that commonality, then we can build trust. Then we can build better communication. Then we can build cooperation. Right? Then we can work together to manifest the things that we do have in common that are common to us. And that’s very important. That’s basically one of the problems we have in the world. And that’s why I think this magical thinking is an issue. And that’s why I think it’s important for us to get ourselves out of it through meditation, through contemplation, through the stoic ethic, things like that. And why it’s important to get other people out of it and to understand it when we see it. And maybe we don’t have magical thinking. Some people don’t. Most pragmatists don’t engage in magical thinking. They’re too pragmatic. Pragmatism won’t allow you to engage in magical thinking. But it’s important to know that other people are engaged in it. And that’s what their problem is. And I wish I could wave a magical wand and make it not happen. But I can’t. And neither can you. And that’s okay. You have a great deal of influence. Understanding things, understanding people’s points of view, such as they are presented, helps us to understand where they are in relation to us and get us closer together. Get us to find the commonalities that we need to engender trust, to engender engagement, conviction, devotion, loyalty, all of those things. Honesty. All of these things can be engendered when we understand magical thinking, when we engage with it, when we make sure that we are recognizing it. And remember, your thoughts are not actions. Actions in the world and thoughts have to match. And when they don’t, there’s an issue. And maybe you’re engaged in magical thinking. But hopefully this gives you some way to recognize it in yourself and in others and help them and help yourself to get out of this magical thinking. To understand that magical thinking is going to cause you problems, anxiety, resentment, anger. It’s going to cause you to do things in the world that aren’t going to work for you. It’s going to cause you conditions to deteriorate relative to other people. And it’s going to cause you to take weird actions like voting for wrong candidates and the mistaken belief that they can make things happen that they can’t make happen. This is how they over promise. Right. It’s also going to help you to find honest people. Right. Because honest people are probably going to be more nuanced and they’re probably not going to make statements like if we all just did this, then this would happen. Right. It’s a very poor formulation. And in not engaging in magical thinking, I will make the slightly paradoxical sounding claim that we can make magic happen together in participation with one another by cooperating with one another on the things we do have in common. We can always focus on differences, but that means we can also always focus on commonalities. And that’s where we need to be focusing on what we have in common. Delaying the inevitable conflict, you know, for as long as possible in some cases, because sometimes the result of cooperation is that people get closer together in their thinking and in their understanding and in their belief and in their interaction. And that gets rid of magical thinking when we cooperate together. And hopefully I have been able to cooperate with you and participate with you in helping you to understand and alleviate the effects of magical thinking to identify it and to engage with it in a positive fashion. Right. We can’t confront people about their bad magical thinking, but we can confront them with their rationalization, their reasoning, their their conceptions that don’t match ours by asking them questions about them by being curious, by asking for help from them to understand them to see how well they understand themselves. And for doing the same for us, because we don’t always understand ourselves as well as we think. And hopefully this you find this helpful. And I’m going to magically invoke my appreciation, which I really do feel for your engagement in my videos and for taking the time to try and understand what I’m talking about and hopefully using those tools. You know, in whatever way you can and helping to make the world a better, more intelligible place for all of us. And the best way to do that is by giving not just me, but everybody else, including yourself, time and attention.