[WS:] Do not underestimate the role of magic in modern everyday life. It is everywhere, albeit we do not admit it, because we are supposed be "rational." So we come with magic that is suitable for the era of reason. Financal market is perhaps the most prominent example of it. Noone really knows the outocomes of market activity (which is the pont emphatically made by Doug in his book _Wall Street_) but people have substantial stakes in these outcomes, so they cannot just sit on their asses and let the fate take its course. Instead they come with rationalist magic: questionable behavioral models heavily doused with mathematical jargon to give it an appearance of scientific rationality. But the fact of the mater is that financial market behaviot is fundamentally no different than playing poker or slot machnines - gambling on pure luck and occassionally pulling aces from sleeves. The only difference is the social class of players -
financial elites vs. blue collar grunts.
The market is supposed to work magic in almost every aspect of everyday life - lower the prices, improve quality, eliminate discrimination, crreate general happiness, you name it. BTw, th eleftists have their own eqiuvalent of such rational mythology - social change and social movements.
But modern day rationalist magic does not end there. The attittudes toward public safety and criminal behavior is basically magic. We really do not know what to do and how to control it, but this scares us, so we come up with magical solutions, depending on political ideology - arm ourselves with guns and security gizmos, lock them up and throw away the key (right) or inundate them with social programs (left.) They are magical, because they create an illusion of a remedy without doing much to actually make any significant difference.
Our percpetions of foreign policy issue is rationalist magic - based on questionable metaphors (game theory) and heavily doused in formalistic jargon to give it an illusion of rationality. So is our approach to our own health - the amount of snake oil we consume to stay healthy goes into billions of dollars, but there is no evidence that these remedies really do anything for us.
Examples of rational mythology in modern life are abound - we should not discount let alone denounce them, because this is how people really think. We are hard-wired for magical thinking, because magic substitues the inevitable shortcomings of our knowledge in creating peace of mind in everyday life.
Wojtek
--------------------------------------------------------------- "When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost. [...] All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men." - HL Mencken ----------------------------------------------------------------