“Magic Thinking” is the idea that belief can change the physical world. Now, I’d be the first to admit that someone’s beliefs can motivate them to accomplish great things, but in the end it is the accomplishments that can change the world, not the beliefs. Belief is the first step, and at least in my experience, often the easiest.
Yet today, all over the United States, we’ve had a resurgence of “magic thinking” totally divorced from reality.
How can a culture that promotes Viagra, movies and television with intense sexual content, that supplies its young people with private transportation and funds, and that now has the largest gap between the age of physical maturity and financial and social maturity honestly believe that abstinence is going to be practiced for ten years or more by a significant fraction of the young population? It isn’t; and the facts show it, but legislators across the country continue to push abstinence as the solution and to reject any form of realistic sex education.
Here in Utah, as well as in other states, legislators are busy passing laws that are clearly unconstitutional, laws that their own legal counsels have advised them against. The latest here is a proposal to “reclaim” all federal lands and declare them state lands. And at a time when state finances are is short supply, they’ve even declared themselves willing to spend $3 million on a futile lawsuit – while “boasting” the worst-funded primary and secondary education system in the state. They’re going to send a message to Washington – and to anyone who doesn’t believe as they do – and they believe such messages will change things, even as they reject the messages of others who don’t share their beliefs.
We even see magic thinking in sports, with the recent episodes of Tim Tebow and the Denver Broncos [although Tebow is now a New York Jet], the feeling that belief will overcome a less than stellar passing capability – and for a time, given the impact of belief on performance, it did, but belief has a tendency to fall short over time when confronted with superior abilities and equal determination.
When manifested in international relations, magic thinking can be deadly. Too many American politicians have shown this over the past fifty years by actions supporting their belief that all that’s needed in the Middle East and elsewhere is “democratic government.” But they tend to ignore the practical fact that democracy doesn’t work well in cultures that have enshrined bribery and corruption as social necessities, or that continue to regard women as property, or the possibility that people in other cultures, even with more representative and honest governments, may still oppose U.S. policies and aims both politically and militarily.
In the end, there’s a simple fact that all too many “magic thinkers” don’t understand: The strength of one’s beliefs does not make something so. All the denying in the world isn’t going to stop global warming. All the religion in the world isn’t going to overturn the fact of evolution, and all the belief in abstinence isn’t going to stop hot-blooded young people from having sex. Nor is all the belief in the supremacy of American “ideals” unsupported by a massive commitment of physical power going to ensure that American policies and beliefs spread and triumph, although it’s likely to get thousands more American soldiers killed.