Is Magic Our Last Best Hope?

Mitch Horowitz on a special Team Human Live, recorded at Caveat Lounge in NYC

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Below, an excerpt from a great discussion I had with occult scholar and author Mitch Horowitz at the Caveat Lounge in NYC on October 30, 2023. To listen to the whole interview, click on the link below, or see the Team Human feed information at the bottom of this post.

https://www.teamhuman.fm/episodes/268-mitch-horowitz-team-human-live

Douglas Rushkoff
Sometimes it feels as if our civilization is past the point of no return, and I should just do palliative care on humanity. Which isn’t a terrible thing in itself: play in the band on the deck of the Titanic as it’s going down? That’s sacred, right? But what I’ve started to wonder is, if there’s no technosolution out of this mess coming from Monsanto or nanotech, then maybe magic is our last best hope. Is it?

Mitch Horowitz
Is magic our last best hope? Well…I’ll give you my viewpoint on magic and you and the attendees can determine whether it meets that criteria of being our last best hope. One of the things that I’ve been really interested in over the past several years — and I think we’ve talked about this on the pod before — is this question of whether the individual can have a warranted, finely grounded, defensible belief in the extraphysical capacities of the psyche. And I believe that that is true. I think we as a human community have enough evidence — not only from centuries or millennia of testimony and human experience, which I value enormously as a record, but also through the hard sciences, the psychical sciences, including sciences that are not controversial at all, like neuroplasticity to demonstrate that what we call a thought (which is something that our civilization has never even defined, even as we barrel towards something called artificial intelligence) what we call a thought is capable of shaping and affecting the matter that gives rise to it. And that is an absolutely defensible statement, which I won’t belabor here, but I’ve written whole books on that topic.

And once that individual has the warranted belief — the finely grounded belief that the mind has extraphysical capacities — my question about magic, which is a way in which you harness this extra physical belief, my question is whether we are capable — we as a generation and as individuals — are capable of doing away with spells, ritual, liturgy, symbol, and just understanding that thought itself may be a selective or causative agency among many other laws and forces. Not this notion that we exist under one mental superlaw. I think life is infinitely messier than that.

We exist under a complexity of laws and forces. Mind actually has thought, intellect, psyche, and has the capacity to change things concretely in the individual’s experience. And I’m wondering if the sometimes very thick, dense ceremonial qualities that accompany magic — like things that you’ll find in Aleister Crowley, who I honor — Is that necessary? Is it necessary? And if we can experiment with that, we may come to something extraordinary.

Douglas Rushkoff
Right. So, let’s break it down into two ways of thinking about magic for now. The easiest, simple, least supernaturally challenging way to think about it is more like 1980s mindshift stuff. Like EST, right? “I’m going to change my experience of life so that the things I’ve been putting up with or am trying to change, fall away in the process of life itself.” EST, Landmark Forum, and so on. And because so many people experienced the power of mind shit they thought to apply it to global problems like war, poverty and hunger. Lynne Twist started something called the Hunger Project, an offshoot of EST applied not to personal transformation but collective mindshift which would lead to global change.

So if we all think differently about capitalism — like I’ve been trying to tell people: Borrow a drill! Start sharing! Put the social back in socialism! That capitalism would just fall away because we no longer accept it as a given circumstance. We change how we see the world, which changes how we all act, and how the world works?

Isn’t that a simple way? Can’t we just help people somehow — not get people to believe something — but couldn’t a global mindshift happen like that [snaps fingers] and just change? Couldn’t people just turn nice? Couldn’t we have a global, or universal shift or at least a tipping point realization? We’re going about this wrong. And then that would solve 90 percent of our crises. No? Can that happen? Isn’t that a kind of magic?

Mitch Horowitz
It is a kind of magic. And I’m interested in that question. I feel all the same social urgencies that you feel. I do realize that in the life of an individual that “flip” experience is absolutely possible. I’ve experienced it myself. I’m sure some of you in this room have. William James referred to it as a conversion experience — coming into a belief or an insight. You might call it an epiphany. If you come from the Christian tradition you might call it a Born Again experience. Nevermind. And you come into this sudden, shocking realization that just stops all the associative thinking that’s going on inside you.

Now, I know that can happen in the life of an individual, having experienced it personally. Realizing, for example, that it’s completely superfluous to put up with relationships in your life that completely drain you and detract from your experience. There will be consequences that will come from jettisoning those relationships. But what a terrible human tragedy it is not to realize the absolute truth of that statement. Can we, as a human civilization, do that? I don’t know. I must say this bluntly: I have very, very little faith in human nature en masse. It’s part of the reason, frankly, why I mintain very few relationships. Very few friendships…. I have professional relationships, but I find most people horrible. And family members, workmates, so-called friends who humiliate and insult you. They’re horrible. So my faith in human nature is very low, even though my faith in the individual is high.

In this conversation, Mitch and I look at the scientific basis for retro-causality, argue about whether magic is a personal or collective activity, and marvel at how a Muslim prayer changed my life. You can stream this episode of Team Human wherever you get your podcasts. To get an ad-free version of the show you can become a contributing member of Team Human on Patreon for just $5 per month.

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