In this episode, we explore how reclaiming a much-maligned term could be a useful small change
“Magical-thinking? Isn’t that just delusion and stupidity?”
Actually, no. Very much not.
Okay, yes, the ‘magic’ we might see in the theatre is mostly skilful illusion - which is not the same as delusion, however, unless we forget that the illusion isn’t actually real. And yes, there’s a lot of delusion and stupidity that gets labelled ‘magical-thinking’ - but mostly by people who have no clue as to what magic actually is.
In essence, what’s happening here is that bundling cluelessness together with disciplined magical-thinking, and then saying that the cluelessness proves that all magical-thinking is meaningless, is almost exactly the same as bundling the stupidity of pseudoscience together with disciplined scientific-thinking, and saying the the pseudoscience proves that all science is meaningless. In both cases, it spectacularly misses the point: the problem is neither the cluelessness nor the mode of thinking, but the need for discipline and rigour, whatever the mode of thinking and action we may need to employ.
One clue comes from Arthur C Clarke’s famous dictum, that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. If that’s so, then it seems reasonable to argue that the corollary is true: that “any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology”. Among other things, the aim of both is to do something - to create real change in the real world: the main difference is in how they do it, and what form that change is likely to take.
For the latter, we could turn to the Introduction to WIB Beveridge’s 1950s classic ‘The Art of Scientific Investigation’:
Elaborate apparatus plays an important part in the science of to-day, but I sometimes wonder if we are not inclined to forget that the most important instrument in research must always be the mind of [the researcher]. It is true that much time and effort is devoted to training and equipping the scientist's mind, but little attention is paid to the technicalities of making the best use of it.
So what are those “technicalities of making the best use of [the mind]”? The first one that most people associate with science is reason - and yet as Beveridge points out in his chapter on ‘Reason’, it actually has a very limited role in science:
The origin of discoveries is beyond the reach of reason. The role of reason in research is not hitting on discoveries — either factual or theoretical — but verifying, interpreting and developing them and building a general theoretical scheme. Most biological "facts" and theories are only true under certain conditions and our knowledge is so incomplete that at best we can only reason on probabilities and possibilities.
The key here is that reason looks backwards, to test and fill in the gaps within an overall schema, and derive useful logical-implications from that schema. What it can’t do is look forwards into the unknown; it can’t create anything, especially anything beyond what is already known.
To make something new - to make something from nothing, like tomorrow’s breakfast, finding a new home, creating a new idea or new product - we’ll always need a bit of imagination, a bit of magic. Magic is a key part of the means by which we create something from nothing. (Not only magic, of course: often a lot of hard work too. The ones who give ‘magical-thinking’ a bad name are those who pretend that things should and do happen ‘just like magic’, without any hard work somewhere in the story…)
Along with its more tangible form as technology, magic is one of the four modes via which we create change. To make change work well, we need to select and switch between those four modes - the Artist, the Believer, the Scientist and the Magician or Technologist - in a systematic, disciplined way.
Beveridge talks a lot about this kind of discipline in The Art of Scientific Investigation. He has whole chapters on strategy in science, on imagination and intuition, on serendipity and chance - for example, the famous quote from Louis Pasteur that “In the field of observation, chance favours only the prepared mind”. Again, there’s a whole discipline around how to prepare for chance, and how to avoid traps such as ‘policy-based evidence’, seeing only what we expect to see or, worse, only what we want to see. Likewise, we’ll likely need a lot of care and caution around Gooch’s Paradox, that “Things not only have to be seen to be believed, but first have to believed to be seen”.
A key contrast to Believer-mode or Scientist-mode thinking is that in magical-thinking we use beliefs as tools, not purported ‘truths’. In essence, we treat each idea or belief ‘as if true’, whilst being careful not to entrap ourself into thinking that it ‘is true’ - a crucially important distinction. Following Gooch’s Paradox, we dive in to the belief ‘as if true’, to enable us to see what the belief will allow, whilst at the same time keeping a tiny portion of the mind as a cautious, somewhat-sceptical observer on the scene, aware of a wider world in which the belief may not be true, and able to call a halt at any time.
This is also where the classic idea of the ‘magic circle’ comes into the picture - a way of isolating off, from the everyday world, the space where we’re working with this potentially-dangerous idea or belief. In business we might do this with a breakout-room in a strategy-workshop: we try out new ideas, but take care not to allow those untested ideas to blur into the space where mainstream production is taking place. In engineering or in software-development we’d use a pilot or a prototype, isolated from mainstream production or process. Only when the idea or belief is proven to work do we bring it back into the everyday world.
Perhaps a closer analogy here is the concept of the Hero’s Journey, much used in screenwriting and storytelling (of which the first Star Wars film - now known as ‘Episode Four’ - is perhaps the classic example). First there is the ordinary, everyday world; then something comes along to throw the lead-character into ‘the special world’. In our case, that move would usually be more intentional, but in essence ‘the special world’ is one in which different rules apply - in a sense, literally a ‘magical world’. There are various activities within ‘the special world’, at the end of which we return to the everyday-world with whatever gifts we’ve found in there - again, much as described in Beveridge’s The Art of Scientific Investigation. But we do need to keep those two worlds separate and distinct - things can get real complicated if we mix them up…
Fun is important, too, and sometimes deliberate absurdity as well: fun definitely helps to make it happen! We might note that that kind of fun also has its own rules, its own discipline, such as in the ‘rules for improv theatre’.
And at times, yes, we do have to let ourselves go into a little craziness to make it all work. Or, to quote Friedrich Nietzsche: “One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star”:
But what happens if we get careless about that discipline? Well, that’s when we fall into any or all of the Seven Sins of Dubious Discipline: the Hype Hubris, the Golden-Age Game, the Newage Nuisance, the Meaning Mistake, the Possession Problem, the Reality Risk, and Lost in the Learning Labyrinth. Each of them a destructive, dangerous and sometimes potentially-deadly variant on what we might otherwise describe as Not A Good Idea…
We need magical-thinking to support our work, our creativity, our everyday lives. But we also need the right kind of discipline behind it - because without that discipline, there’s no way that it can work well in the ways that we need.
In short, don’t treat the term ‘magical-thinking’ as a synonym for cluelessness and stupidity: much as with pseudoscience, the latter only apply when magical-thinking is not done right, when the discipline and rigour required for that type of thinking is allowed to fail.
We need disciplined magical-thinking: without it, we have no means to create anything new. A point worth remembering, perhaps?
A truly magical post Tom, pity that your last statement is disrupted by the Cabal who have no interest in new things, they would rather spend millions convincing the globe that they and only they have the rights to "magical thinking" and if you dare encroach on their territory you are bought out or undercut to ensure failure. A really sad world we are living in, where the few are allowed to dominate the masses, and non-cabal innovation is met with distain.