Magic - Odds & Ends

Or why Bezos is magic

Before I move on, I just want to note a few final thoughts about our most recent topic. This will be a bit rambling, so I apologize.

I have referred to this article from Aeon before: The last sacred kings. From the article:

Like modern political leaders, sacred kings claimed to bring their people great benefits: peace, order, prosperity. But their right to rule devolved from the divine; it did not rest on the will of the people. In many cases, sacred kings claimed to bring benefits not only through wise policies, but more directly through their unique access to supernatural forces.

Quite independently of each other, different societies from Ancient Egypt to 18th-century Tonga arrived at the understanding that kings were essentially a means of regulating the powers of the cosmos for their benefit. This idea lay behind the urge to render them godlike by effacing their human and mortal nature and surrounding them with taboo and ceremony. Thus were they pushed up into the world of the gods in order to conduct business with them.

Sir James Frazer and A M Hocart, two of the founding fathers of anthropology, believed that kingship formed as a means of mediation with supernatural forces. It was, in this view, a ritual device that only later acquired political functions. This does not work as a general origin story of kingship, but it still conveys a significant insight. It turns upside down the Marxian notion that has become a kind of common sense, whereby the religious aura around kings was so much mystification designed to stop their subjects noticing their oppression...

Some anthropologists have found evidence from parts of Africa that ritual efficacy could come before political efficacy. In Southern Sudan, for example, rainmaker specialists could become chiefs and kings—but this came with a worrying rider: that they might be punished and killed if they did not come up with the goods. There are clues that they tried to acquire actual coercive power—via firearms, for example—in order to protect themselves from the anger of their disappointed subjects...

It is because of their cosmic responsibilities that kings presided over cults of human sacrifice in states as far apart as the Aztecs, the Dahomey in West Africa, or Hawaii. They were dispatching to the gods the most precious prize of all, in the hope that the gods would reciprocate by showering their blessings, allowing the crops to grow, the Sun to keep arriving each morning, and victory in the next battle.

What these passages underscore is that these potentates didn't come to power for practical reasons, like allocating resources or directing labor, which is what a lot of anthropological literature assumes. Rather, it was down to human irrationality. Humans abhor uncertainty, and these leaders played on people's superstitions in order to convince them that they could exert a degree of control over the random forces of nature. They were basically con artists, in other words.

Some of it may have been based on science. There’s a famous story about Columbus convincing the natives of Jamaica that he had godlike powers by successfully predicting a lunar eclipse. We know that ancient scribes developed sophisticated astronomy to predict the movements of stars and planets. Priests may also have acted as hydraulic engineers in alluvial civilizations—often only they could read and write. These priests and rulers may have been doing what we now call “science” to some degree and using it to convince everyone else that they were controlling events rather than predicting them.

Moreover, the striking thing is just how universal this sort of thing was, and how similarly it played out all over the world. Consider this passage about divine kingship in Thailand from the Aeon article above:

[T]he association between kings and the control of the elements is widespread. In 17th-century Siam (Thailand), for example, one of the very few occasions in which the king was presented to the people outside the palace was for the ‘speeding of the outflow’ ceremony at the end of the monsoon period, in which he rode out on a barge and tapped the floodwaters with a fan to make them recede. In this way, the rice harvest would be secured.

Otherwise, the king of Siam was installed deep in his palace. He ate alone, like so many kings worldwide. As French missionaries and ambassadors discovered when they reached the court of King Narai in the 1680s, touching the king was deeply taboo. He could not receive anything by hand: it had to be taken draped under a parasol by the king’s pages, who would then give them to a higher rank of pages, who would in turn present it to the king in a golden bowl only at the end of a long handle, which they somehow held up while lying on the ground. Even pointing at anything he used would result in the mutilation of the finger. Any audience with the king involved lying prostrate, still and silent on the floor while the king appeared from a high window…

Such restrictions detached the king from the world of humanity, and placed him as an intimate of the gods. Worldwide, kings could be thought of as the descendants of gods, as their vessels, their hosts, their sons, brothers, and lovers. When Narai was consecrated, one of his titles was ‘Manifestation of the Eleven Dreaded Ones’, which signifies the Brahmanic gods who had come together to be reborn in him.

Compare the above to these passages from a book called The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man about the pharaohs of ancient Egypt:

It was a function of government to make Upper and Lower Egypt an effective single nation. This was done by incorporating authority and responsibility for both regions in a single figure, the god-king.

By his formal titles he was Lord of the Two Lands, that is, owner and master; he was King of Upper Egypt and King of Lower Egypt, the wearer of the double crown which symbolized the union of the two regions; and he was the “Two Ladies,” that is, the incorporation of the two tutelary goddesses who represented the north and the south. A parallel title, the “Two Lords,” expressed the dogma that the two competing gods of Lower and Upper Egypt, Horus and Seth, were also physically resident and reconciled within the person of the king. An important ritual activity of the king's coronation was the “Uniting of the Two Lands,” a ceremony somehow in relation to the throne of a dual kingship...

The divine person of the pharaoh was too holy for direct approach. An ordinary mortal did not speak “to” the king; he spoke “in the presence of” the king. Various circumlocutions were employed to avoid direct reference to the king: “May thy majesty hear,” instead of “mayest thou hear,” and “one gave command,” instead of “he gave command.” One of these circumlocutions, per-aa, “the Great House,” gave rise to our work "pharaoh," in somewhat the same way as we modernly say: “The White House today announced…”

He was a lonely being, this god-king of Egypt. All by himself he stood between human and gods. Texts and scenes emphasize his solitary responsibility. The temple scenes show him as the only priest in ceremonies before the gods. A hymn to a god states: “There is no one else that knows thee except thy son, (the king), whom thou causest to understand thy plans and thy power.” It was the king who built temples and cities, who won battles, who made laws, who collected taxes, or who provided the bounty for the tombs of his nobles.

The fact that the pharaoh might not have heard about a battle until it was reported to the royal court was immaterial; the literary and pictorial myth of Egypt's might demanded that he be shown as defeating the enemy single-handed. An Egyptian in a provincial town might make the contractual provision for the delivery of goods to his tomb after death; the reigning pharaoh need have nothing to do with this transaction; in the age-long framework of mortuary activity the goods would come as an “offering which the king gives,” a mark of royal favor.

Only the national gods might intervene in the affairs of the state: the sun-god might ask the king to clear away the sand from the Sphinx, or Amon might commission the king to undertake a campaign against the Libyans. Otherwise pharaoh was the state, because he was himself a national god, specifically charged to carry out the functions of the state...

We cold modern analysts view the doctrines of the divinity, the blighting majesty, and the mystery of the Egyptian king as mere propaganda devised to bolster the person of a man who was solely responsible for the state. But they cannot be brushed aside for that reason. They had the reality of long-continuing success. They were as real in ancient Egypt as in Solomon's Temple at Jerusalem—or as in modern Japan. (pp. 75-78)

https://oi.uchicago.edu/sites/oi.uchicago.edu/files/uploads/shared/docs/intellectual_adventure.pdf (PDF)

Old Kingdom Egypt in 2500 BCE and Thailand in the 1600s CE are pretty widely separated in both space and time. The idea that there is some kind of direct transmission beggars belief. And yet the similarities between the rulers of these two countries are striking. The only explanation I can think of is that there is something deeply rooted in human social instincts that gives rise to this type of behavior—and that something is clearly related to humans' belief in magic and the supernatural.

If this is true, then magic was absolutely key to the formation of large-scale societies, at least as much as material things like cereals, metalworking, trade or warfare. Yet this topic remains woefully understudied. We tend to seek rational explanations for phenomena that have no basis in rationality. Humans are not rational creatures after all. As Peter Turchin pointed out, purely rational creatures would never be able to cooperate—collective action problems would undermine any attempts to do so. Cooperation requires us to be irrational to some degree.

Toward the end the article it asks where the sacred kings are today. My answer is a bit different from theirs. Sure, there are a few sacred kings left in places like Thailand. But we don’t have to go that far afield to find them.

Today's divine kings are sailing around on yachts. Or flying around on private jets. Or living on their own private islands. Or running for elected office. Or appearing on television. Or riding rocketships into space.

It's my contention that the kind of magical thinking responsible for the existence of sacred kings is basically the same as that which allows the existence of billionaires today. I'm sure if you asked people if they thought of today’s billionaires as supernatural or divine beings, they would probably say no. But nevertheless, we de facto treat them in the same exact fashion—and with the same degree of reverence—as we treated divine kings in those ancient civilizations.

Consider how many people think that the health of the modern economy is contingent upon the health—the financial health—of the billionaires. It is they who confer benefits on the rest of us like overnight product delivery, smart phones and electric cars. They are the "job creators," just as the pharaoh caused the Nile to flood its banks every spring and the sun to rise in the east. They are the "rainmakers" who are uniquely able to move money around to its proper place to make the economy flourish. Prosperity and wealth are concentrated in their person. Only by appeasing them can society remain stable and prosperous, we believe, and so their every whim is to be entertained and indulged.

Look at the cult of personality surrounding Elon Musk or the late Steve Jobs, for example. One tweet from Musk can send stock prices soaring or crashing, affecting the lives of millions. Elizabeth Holmes dressed up in black turtlenecks and spoke in a deep voice to evoke the power of Jobs even though she had no legitimate product to sell. I vividly recall a clickbait ad promising to reveal "what billionaires eat for breakfast"—clearly a form of sympathetic magic.

If you talk to people who are politically conservative and don't have a great deal of education—and I interact with a lot of people like this—you quickly begin to realize that they regard the super-rich with a kind of awe. They see the ability to amass such huge fortunes as essentially a kind of magical ability. They have what I call "folk beliefs" about wealth. They will tell you that Jeff Bezos simply "worked harder" than everyone else, and that he "took risks" and therefore is entitled to every penny of his staggering fortune. That's why they're so vehemently against taxing the billionaires—it would be the equivalent of causing harm to the pharaoh or insulting the king of Siam. The end result would only hurt ordinary people like them, they think. After all, Bill Gates is on track to cure malaria and feed the world!

Of course the notion that “hard work” could gain someone a million dollars, much less 100 billion dollars, is absurd. We have one brain, two hands, and 24 hours in a day—no one can work that hard or is that smart. And what the hell does "hard work" even mean anyway? In the United States, billionaires got 62 percent richer during the pandemic—they’re now up 1.8 trillion dollars. Did they somehow manage to work "extra hard" during the pandemic to “earn” all of that additional money in the midst of such suffering? We talk about the actions of billionaires as if they accomplish everything themselves rather than the thousands of highly educated and skilled professionals they have working for them. Its the same as we saw above where the Pharaoh was depicted as being singlehandedly responsible for everything from winning military victories, to constructing temples and pyramids, to writing laws and distributing food.

But I can tell you that the average American doesn't see it that way. They don’t know the first thing about stocks, bonds, credit, leverage, monopolies, or anything like that. In their view, billionaires are to be revered, not reviled. Criticizing billionaires is tantamount to criticizing their religion, and they just won't have it. Appealing to rationality will not change their minds, either. As the old saying goes, you can't reason someone out of a belief that they didn't reason themselves into in the first place. You can't reason such people out of billionaire worship any more than you could reason ancient Egyptians out of their reverence for the pharaoh or Thai people out of reverence for their king. None of these beliefs were acquired rationally in the first place.

That’s why so many people (including me) often get frustrated trying to convince working people that the existence of billionaires isn't strictly necessary and that it almost always comes at their expense. Most Americans come from the peasant stock of their respective societies and their attitude toward billionaires is basically the same as it was toward the kings and princes their ancestors lived under in ages past. Strip away the modern trappings and it’s the exact same cognitive machinery under the hood—the same mental heuristics—and those heuristics are ultimately based on magic. Sarah Silverman entitled her show Jesus is magic. She might well have said that Bezos is magic.

Of course you and I know that billionaires are just ordinary people like you and me who were lucky and gamed the system, and that their wealth is ultimately due to our hard work (as Bezos himself briefly acknowledged), but we are perennially in the minority. I believe this explains the tight correlation between religious belief and inequality all over the world (as well as within the United States itself). I'm sure some people in ancient Egypt might have thought that the pharaoh was just a regular person too, but it didn't change anything. They were either ignored or suppressed.

In a post about the role of marginal productivity theory in modern economics, Blair Fix makes a similar point:

Economists...will never admit that their theory is an ideology. Even many non-economists can’t see marginal productivity theory for what it is. Why? Because we are steeped in our own culture, blind to the ideologies that surround us. This is a problem universal to all societies.

Ancient Hawaiians, for instance, had an ideology very similar to marginal productivity theory. But to Hawaiians, their beliefs were not an ‘ideology’. Their beliefs were the sacred truth. Here’s how Peter Turchin describes Hawaiian beliefs:

“The Hawaiian chiefly elite were different from commoners … because they were the vessels of mana—spiritual energy flowing from the gods that was necessary for the wellbeing of the overall society. The higher the rank of a chief, the more mana was concentrated in him, with the king as the central node in the ‘mana distribution network.’”

(Peter Turchin in Ultrasociety)

To the modern observer, these ancient Hawaiian beliefs are easily recognizable for what they are—an ideology that justifies the social order. But before we (modern observers) become too smug, let’s turn the camera on ourselves. Our own ideology of marginal productivity is virtually the same as this Hawaiian superstition. Replace ‘mana’ with ‘productivity’, ‘chiefly elite’ with ‘business leaders’, and you get the following:

"Business leaders are different from workers because they own productive property, and this property is necessary for the wellbeing of the overall society. The more property a business leader owns, the more productivity is concentrated in him."

(paraphrasing Turchin’s description of Hawaiian mana)

Hopefully scientists of the future will look at marginal productivity theory the same way we look at the Hawaiian ‘mana’. Both are ideologies that justify the social order. And both hamper the scientific study of resource distribution.

An Evolutionary Theory of Resource Distribution (Part 1)

I know it's hard to see something as mundane as starting a corporation or having a big number in a bank account as equivalent to being able to manipulate the weather or control the heavens. But to the common person, it's all of a piece. How long before the billionaires literally declare themselves to be gods? It’s not inconceivable—some of them are already heading in that direction. The billionaires are already injecting themselves with elixirs of immortality and seeking to colonize other worlds (where they would surely set themselves up as emperors). Many of them subscribe to the doctrine of transhumanism, whereby they will be able to transform themselves and their progeny into superhuman beings through science.

Hawaiian chiefs had the right to rule because they possessed more mana than everyone else. Billionaires have a right to rule because they possess more money than everyone else. See the (lack of) difference? There is no rational reason for anyone to have such a staggeringly disproportionate share of society's wealth. But rationality doesn't matter! Justification for the existence of billionaires (and soon-to-be trillionaires) is ever shifting and ad hoc because it is not based on rational thinking at all—it’s based on magical thinking. The average person's beliefs about economics and society are not arrived at rationally for the vast majority, but is rather just another type of religion.

And every religion needs a priesthood to justify it to the masses.

When we discussed ancient Egyptian priests or Mesopotamian āšipu, we may have chuckled at their books of spells, their silly rituals, their charms and amulets, their belief in heka, and their supposed ability to drive out demons who were seen as the cause of every malady. But are today's economists really all that different? Is their discipline really any more “scientific” than the witchcraft practiced by these ancient magicians? Or is it simply simply a bunch of myths and stories designed to justify and preserve the existing social order? And are their methods expressly designed to mystify and obfuscate so that the average person cannot see through the ideology being presented as fact, just like the esoteric spells and rituals used by Near Eastern magicians?

I'm sorry for including yet another long passage, but I couldn't help but be reminded of Gosden's depiction of Mesopotamian āšipu when reading this description of economists from James K. Galbraith—himself an economist:

The neoclassical origin myth holds that the “marginalist revolution” of the 1870s brought three fundamental changes in economic perspective. The first was the …shift in focus from social classes to individuals, and correspondingly from production and profit to consumption, choice, and utility. The second was the elimination of considerations of power from economic analysis: the emphasis on struggle, exploitation, and conflict that defined what earlier practitioners called political economy gave way to a view of markets as mechanisms of benign cooperation that turned self-interested behavior into a common good. Following from those changes came the notion of general equilibrium, which imputes to the economy a kind of celestial harmony reminiscent of the serene social philosophy of imperial China (from which the idea was derived).

With these shifts, the new hegemony had been established. By the 1970s, if prior doctrines—such as the labor theory of value—were mentioned to graduate students at all, it was only to assert that economists in the previous century had been forced by some vague but insuperable logical difficulty to abandon the old track for the new one.

But, in fact, it wasn’t like that at all. Early marginalists...swept into economics from the worlds of engineering and early thermodynamics. Parading differential and integral equations that they themselves did not quite understand, they perplexed their contemporaries in math and physics but nonetheless gained a decisive advantage over the mostly innumerate types who did economics in those days...despite a vast increase in the expressive algebraic content of economic research, the logical gaps in the early marginalists’ models were never closed, nor were most of their errors corrected. The issue is not that modern mainstream economists are mathematically sloppy. It is that the smooth substitutions their equations portray correspond to nothing in the real world...

...And so, neoclassical economics perpetuates itself by replicating a single set of methods in a handful of leading journals to which no dissenters have access. There, the faithful continue to offer analyses that are of no interest to anyone who has grasped the evolutionary methodology common to all the important dissenting schools. Under neoclassical economics, the subject is defined by what it excludes: the simple fact that things change over time. Its practitioners harbor an affinity for Intelligent Design—the belief in a transcendent celestial harmony that is at odds with the development of actual scientific thought since Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species appeared in 1859.

Dismal Economics (Project Syndicate)

Finally, the link between the phenomenal world and our own consciousness is at the heart of magic. It’s something we clearly don’t understand and can’t explain adequately. The magical world that most ancient people inhabited was profoundly different—and yet no less valid—then the impersonal, disenchanted materialist world we live in today. It transcends science. Ran Prieur had some good thoughts about this while describing UFOs and other seemingly inexplicable supernatural phenomena (August 19):

The reason this stuff is not considered real, is that it can't be called forth at will. The phenomena appear on their own terms, never on our terms. Everyone who has looked deeply into this stuff has reached a conclusion that seems crazy to modern metaphysics: there is a category of experience that knows who's watching. This is why John Keel wrote, only half joking, that UFO researchers aren't telling the government what they know.

In The Trickster and the Paranormal, George Hansen points out that psychic research gets stronger results when the research environment is more in chaos (and thus can be more easily dismissed). The more respectable the study, the weaker the results. This even happens in science, where it's called the decline effect. As I wrote in this 2011 post: "Almost at will, you can get one-in-a-million results that later taper off into nothing. This should happen only one time in a million, and yet it happens reliably."

It's like that singing frog cartoon, where the frog won't sing for an audience larger than its owner. Or it's like the Matrix movies, where if you want to hack into the matrix, you have to do it in the shadows, or the machines will get you.

None of this is weird, if you understand that reality is not made of matter, but of perspectives. Quantum physics consistently tells us the same thing, and scientists have to come up with increasingly convoluted stories to resolve the "paradoxes" and hold onto their imaginary third person universe.

So I'm wondering if it will always be this way. Maybe in the far future, when humans are more benign, the world beyond will trust us with more reliable contact. Or maybe in the near future, when we can no longer tell what's real, the ambiguously real will come more out in the open.

I’ll close with an interesting tidbit related to magic: Kuai Kuai Culture. According to Wikipedia, it’s “a phenomenon in Taiwan wherein workers put snacks of the brand Kuai Kuai (乖乖) next to or on top of machines. Workers who do this believe that, because the name of the snack - "Kuai Kuai" - stands for "obedient" or "well-behaved," it will make a device function without errors.” And here’s an article about Iceland’s relationship with elves. Clearly magical thinking isn’t going anywhere.