Derivative Images

Black Magic is based on a manichean view of the world, where the black magicians assume the role of Good, White, etc., whereas anything that stands up against their aims is considered as Evil, Black, etc. In this manichean cosmic struggle, everyone is forced to take one of two sides. This is the quintessence of political polarization. Of course, among black magicians themselves, factions that compete for power will each claim to be White, whereas the opposite faction is Black, or at least manipulated by evil forces, or allied to them, or at best "objectively allied" to them. In democracies, this competition for the claim of being good against evil takes paradoxal form, as the political life is polarized into two poles (left and right), each identified by its radicals, but at the same time, each competing for the marginal voters around the median opinion, far from the professed radical ideals used for intellectual justification of the parties. People in democracies are thus led to constantly choose between the "Lesser of two evils," away from either of the two main branches of Black Magic ideals. Democrats are both aware of this limitation of democracy as the means to advance their Black Magic ideals, and at the same time, fanatically attached to democracy as part of the consensual doctrine accepted by the two main branches of democratic Black Magic.  
 
 Another paradox of black magicians is their relationship with money. They will institute a precise accounting of private and public activities in terms of money, so as to be able to tax and fund them; they will thus express everything in terms of money; they will see money everywhere. Money is a magic thing to them; when any emergency happens, all the government has to do is to "unblock money" so as to fund a budget for whatever emergency measures have to be taken. black magicians worship, admire, envy, desire the power conferred by money. They love to generously spend other people's money, with laws, subsidies, feasts, institutions, constructions, etc. However, doing so, they spend not just people's money, but also their lives: for the utility of money comes from its use as an intermediate for the adaptive cooperation of individuals who are free to choose how to cooperate or not. The power of money is ultimately tied to the freedom and creation of White Magic; people only accept government-controlled money as a compulsory legal tender because they expect that despite the inconvenience, they will be able to use it as a practical universal intermediate in free trade. So black magicians are ambivalent about this. They hate the free market and all it represents, because it is a negation of their basic premises. At the same time, they recognize that a free-market economy is inevitable, and indispensable, if they have to have anything to prey upon. Black magicians will thus learn to have a double hypocritical attitude regarding money: they will openly claim it as good when it is confiscated and spent by the Godvernment, and as an instrument of vice to be despised when it is in private hands. Yet they will do whatever they can so that the money flows, sacrificing their ideals to the private lobbyists who promise prosperity. Finally, they will personally indulge to the power of this great "corrupter" that is money, although by identifying themselves with the Great Cause, they will easily pardon this vice in regard to the services that they render to the Nation (or whichever the Great Cause is).  
 
Black Magic leads to many such paradoxes, and black magicians must thus train themselves and their followers into techniques of double-think, whereby they will be able to manipulate concepts from two or more logically contradictory points of view, depending on the context, while actively avoiding any situation where the contradictions become too obvious. The ultimate spell of Black Magic is thus to confer its followers some kind of schizophrenia allowing them to survive despite the contradictions upon which their beliefs are founded.

Staging the Worship 
  
 Black Magic is a cult that must be kept alive by constantly occupying the minds of people. And the best way to occupy their minds is to also occupy their bodies. The Godvernment will seek to intervene in any and every aspect of social life. It will even intervene in so very personal things as intimate relations between people in love, by regulating marriage, giving it an important place in fiscal and civil regulations, etc. Any domain that is not subject to heavy regulations is disconsidered as lawless savagery, a wild anarchy, to be promptly remedied by new legislation. At the same time, all this intervention must be accompanied by constant rhetorics, by appeal to the citizens' spirits, and ultimately by the actual concern of anxious citizens, so that the Godvernment will appear positively rather than negatively. This is why black magicians will resort to a series of tricks so as to stage the public worship of Black Magic.  
 
War is the grandest way in which the Godvernment is presented as the savior of the People. War may be an actual war against a foreign country, if possible led by an obvious tyrant. It may also be war against unofficial governments reigning over areas abandonned by official legal governments: the mafia, drug trafficking organizations, terrorists, guerillas, etc. In a more rhetorical way, it may be war against some official vice: drug consumption, smoking, prostitution, drinking, unofficial religions, etc. Politicians will resort to the vocabulary of war even as they claim to fight poverty, fight unemployment, fight any "social disease" or misery. All these wars serve as a justification to the State impersonating the role of Good in a cosmic struggle between Good and Evil. Their ultimate goal is not external, it is internal: the important effect and strong incentive for black magicians to wage war is not to fight the claimed enemy, but to tighten the subjection of the allegedly protected citizens(74). The "exceptional" situation of war will serve as an excuse for whatever crimes and attempts to subvert the rule of law that godvernmental forces may commit, as well as a diversion from whatever misachievements they may make on "secondary" fronts. This situation of exception is so beneficial to black magicians that they will make it become permanent: indeed, once they have spread the idea that they are the solution rather than the problem, they will use the very failures of their policies as a pretense for ever increasing their interventions. An initially small temporary intervention will thus eventually turn into a permanent war to struggle against the permanent fiasco caused by the very intervention of the State.  
 
Throughout all their staging of life as a cosmic struggle, black magicians will cultivate among their followers a feeling of righteousness. According to black magicians, the world is "us" against "them," it is friends versus foes – and you better be among friends. Friends are to be identified by their intents, their community of interests, their belonging to a nation or a race or a social class or any other category proposed by the black magicians' ideology. Black magicians thus propose an easy, undemanding, relaxing, and false grid to understand the universe. This simple grid offers followers the immediate benefit of saving the need for sustained enquiry, indulging their intellectual sloth. Thus, bad guys can be equated with people with bad intents, and the other way round, while similarly good guys can be equated both ways with people with good intents. Enemies who claim to have good intents will be classified as hypocrits, or as deeply misguided pawns manipulated by a greater Evil. Friends who have bad intents are to be justified, pardonned, or excommunicated. This polarization of life in its extreme forms can lead to Conspiracy Theory, where some people want to see a common intent, a common will, concerted interests, a central organization behind any Great Evil in the world. Anything wrong must have been meant as wrongdoing. The dual form of Conspiracy Theory is much scarier: Totalitarianism. It is the belief that, at some scale, there can be any Good in the world only if behind it there is a common intent, a common will, concerted interests, a central organization. All in all, this Black Magic polarization of people's vision of the world is akin to Animism: the want to see willful intent everywhere.  

François-René Rideau

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Passages published for educational/informational purposes only.