Today I had an interesting thought. I was ruminating on various matters when it suddenly occurred to me that I’ve forgotten why I hate Aristotle. I know I had a reason for it, but I can’t recall what it is. But I strongly recall the man was an idiot, and later I’ll have to revise my retention as to why.
In my last article, I dare say I explored a few tones of reason just a few degrees below the unhealthier side of ambivalence, and obviously I stand by it. I have a lot of grievances with my species and it is good to air these things once in a while, but like all complex beings, I will stress that no single piece of writing can entirely capture my sole relationship to the universe.
As such, I figured I’d try to look on the positives instead and also challenge myself a little bit by proving that magic is real.
Now it goes without saying that I don’t believe in magic. The very notion of it is ridiculous. What’s next? Dragons? I mean sure, there’s dinosaurs, and dinosaurs are basically dragons so I guess dragons do exist. Then on top of that you got the Komodo Dragon and the Armadillo Gecko and not to mention literal flying lizards, all of which are reasonably describable as dragons, so I guess in the end that dragons exist and it took me less than a paragraph to prove it.
Moreover you could examine it from a causal point of view. After all, we prove something empirically by examining whether or not it has an effect on the measurable universe and in this sense dragons absolutely exist.
They have existed for centuries in the cultural consciousness of early civilisations to caution people from things such as greed, war, avarice and general ideas about evil. So while dragons are perhaps not flesh and blood entities, from a noospheric point of view they’ve had a far more impactful lifecycle than most people reading this article.
So what about magic then? Well. I guess the first step in proving magic is real is to define magic. Problem is that when we do that, it becomes far too easy to prove its real, since the commonality of magic in various folklore and fictions have essentially been the idea that we can translate our cerebral agency into some kind of elemental driving force that permits us to manipulate the fabric of the universe at a consequential scale.
IE: You recite something from a scroll or perform some kind of ritual, and then as a result of this we see some kind of extraordinary change to our physical environment.
So in other words, magic is basically just mathematics, and engineers are wizards. You got evil wizards who make nuclear bombs, and good wizards who make nuclear power plants. So given the existence of both dragons and magic, it’s safe to say that Lord of The Rings was kind of like a documentary except with orcs instead of defence contractors.
The only real trouble with magic is that we’re a lot more responsible with it than we are mathematics. Stories about magic talk about how you need virtue, and goodness, and to wield it responsibly. There is no illuminated manuscript about how Merlin became rich by inventing a social networking app that tries to pit strangers against eachother in a hostile environment so that they’re more vulnerable to advertising.
I don’t recall the chapter of Return Of The King where Gandalf falsely accused the elves of shooting down a commercial jet plane so that he could get a defence grant from Boromir and start manufacturing missiles.
Nor do I remember anything in Harry Potter about how Harry used the prestige gained from defeating Voldemort in order to get some lucrative job in the security sector…
…actually nevermind, that did happen. But JK Rowling did kind of lose her mind at the end of the series so that’s a bad example.
Rather, I don’t recall reading the Westcar Papyrus and seeing that one bit about how King Cheops paid the magicians of his court to suppress research done on leaded petrol at the behest of the ancient Egyptian private sector.
And I think that’s probably because those things used to be bad prior to what appears to be an ongoing epidemic of cowardice. Everyone’s afraid of losing their jobs, or ending up in prison, or dealing with even the mildest retaliative measures from authority that they themselves decided to serve.
Take Elbit Systems for instance. It’s a weapons manufacturer that makes drones in the United Kingdom. They rely on human experimentation in the third world to test their weapons, they perform live target practice on random innocent people in the Gaza strip and the Israelis are happy to let them do it.
But here’s the thing: If someone handed me a big stack of research data full of human experimentation, then that person would not leave the building alive. I would cave them in with a fire extinguisher and leave the body on display as a warning to other evil people.
And yet, when I read the newspapers, it seems that no one is doing this. They’re all just collecting their pay and murdering kids in the west bank, giving the same tired excuses like “Oh I don’t want to go to prison” or “I might lose my job.”
So what? Have some perspective. When it comes down to you doing a stint for murder, or someone’s family being turned into marmalade by a death robot that you helped build, then obviously it’s high time to take one for the team.
It’s really irksome just how many people out there think that murder is okay so long as it’s legal. Who just treat it like a nine to five job. Who sit at these assembly lines, soldering up circuitry for machines that are designed to kill the poor and consolidate power for the rich, and do it with the kind of emotionally dead look on their face that most people need an Ambien prescription to pull off.
As we abandoned good and evil, thinking these were arcane notions of fanciful metaphysics, then clearly we also abandoned a piece of ourselves. Because the strongest magic out there comes from the magic within the human soul, and the human soul is only as vibrant as one’s faith will permit.
So I ask you to look within, to find the resonance of the human conscience, to see the invisible force that binds us all together as one, that permits us to feel the suffering of another, even from the other side of the world, and then let that force shape you into being that is true to itself. That acts not according to fear and meekness, but rather one that will deliberately, and without hesitation, raise a hand against evil no matter the cost.
Today evil men walk among us with a flaunting and obscene gait, and we’re not going to see tomorrow until we give them all a reason to start running.
