Fantasy, the Occult, Genies, and Winning the Lottery
Why you shouldn't mess with magic, as well as why you should avoid Harry Potter. The second has to do with the horrible writing, not the occult.
Essays reference herein:
https://bondwine.com/2008/04/29/the-taste-for-magic/
www.decentfilms.com/articles/magic
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This video is going to be an exploration of the philosophical and moral implications of magic in fantasy literature, of real-world occultism, of the myth of the genie in the bottle, and of real-world lotteries.
I'm sure all of you have heard about the controversies that frequently crop up around works like Harry Potter, for instance.
A lot of people view this as ridiculous.
They presume they have a naturalist worldview, they presume that magic doesn't work, and they think it's rather silly that Christians get so bent out of shape about the whole thing.
Except there's very good theological reasons to worry about this, whether or not you believe in the occult.
See, as far as Christians are concerned, either magic works, and it works by circumventing the will of God, by allying oneself with demonic forces, or it doesn't work, and distracts oneself from their day-to-day duties and pursuing the will of God, by being going out and being a good person and working hard to earn what they want.
Because quite frankly, if you're going to go to all the work of casting a magic ritual to get what you want, why don't you just pray for it?
This is the point that the Christians get at.
And you see, not all fantasy works are built equally.
And in fact, let me I'm gonna acknowledge the the two writers that really got me thinking about all of this, uh Tom Simon and Stephen Day Gradinus.
They have a couple of excellent in-depth pieces analyzing what makes a fantasy work valid and healthy like the Chronicles of Narnia or Tolkien versus something that is very, very questionable, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Links to both their works down below.
And the main point that they drive home is that they they analyze certain hedges, certain rules that are built into the fiction itself, never explicitly stated, that prevent magic from being a valid pursuit of the protagonist character, the character that we, the reader, put ourselves into.
The rules are as follows.
Number one, the pursuit of magic as a safe and lawful occupation is restricted to wholly imaginary realms, unconnected with our own world.
two.
The existence of magic is an openly known reality of which the inhabitants of those worlds are as aware as we are of rocket science.
three.
The pursuit of magic is confined to supporting characters, not the protagonists with whom the reader is primarily to identify.
4.
The author includes cautionary threads in which exposure to magical forces proves to be a corrupting influence on the protagonists.
5.
Magical powers occur naturally only to characters who are not, in fact, human beings.
6.
Magic is the safe and lawful occupation of characters who embody a certain wizard archetype, white-haired old men with beards and robes and staffs, etc.
seven.
The author gives no narrative space to the process by which magicians acquire their powers.
Although study may be assumed as part of the backstory, the wizard appears as a finished product with powers in place, and the reader is not encouraged to dwell on the process of acquiring prowess in magic.
So those are the seven points.
And they certainly do offer an excellent divide between what is generally good literature, good moral literature, and that which encourages recklessness, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where they use Christian items to combat the demons and the devils and the vampires, and yet never give any question to the natural order of things.
They never question what does God want us to do with our lives.
So lesbian relationships, casual sex, that's all perfectly acceptable in the Buffy universe.
They don't so much deny God as simply ignore the idea that a God might exist.
However, these points, and I think they're going to come back in this.
When you start asking what sort of person would break these rules, what sort of character in a fantasy novel would seek after magic for its own sake, you start to see where that goes.
But my own issue with books such as Harry Potter has never been primarily that the magic is going to encourage people to explore the occult.
My biggest problem with Harry Potter and with DD, my problems with it are structural, both in the sense of logical structure and narrative structure.
Now in Harry Potter, the magic used in that series is very incoherent.
It doesn't make any sense.
As I understand, I haven't read any of the books.
I've only seen the first movie and I wasn't impressed.
At one point, Harry is given a time turner because he's sleeping in to class.
He's given a time machine to go back in time because he keeps sleeping in.
And this isn't really ever used again.
Most of the magic, it's there for special effects purposes, but then it's forgotten.
They don't apply any reason, any scientific method to this.
It's as if you have to throw out your logical brain before you even come in through the door.
And the thing is, if that magic works on Tuesday, it ought to be working on Thursday as well.
If the magic is going to be at all used by protagonists.
Now, if you're going to argue that magic is insanity, that magic drives people insane, and thus it's inconsistent day to day what it does, because these people have lost all reason through their belief in magic, then that's a good way to go.
That could be a really interesting story, but it doesn't serve a book where the protagonist is a magician.
If you're going to have magic used by good characters, they need to be able to consistently use that magic in all situations.
The second issue I have with magic, so often in fantasy literature, and perfectly embodied in the games like Dungeon and Dragons or World of Warcraft or what have you, in that these fantasy forms of magic are ultimately indistinguishable from science.
The magic is something the magician studies.
They just learn to harness the natural forces of the world around them, but instead of using math equations, they use archaic symbols, arcane symbols.
But at the same time, you know exactly what the magic does.
It gives you a plus one to your attack bonus.
It gives you plus three to armor.
It causes three D6 of fire damage, etc.
This magic, although it has the trappings of what we call magic, the Dungeons and Dragons magician, he has the robe and he carries books around and spells and potions.
It has all of these trappings of magic.
But it has no spark.
The magic, ironically enough, has no magic to it.
It's not mysterious.
It's utterly predictable.
And so they call it magic, but you might as well have a hacker in a cyberpunk story doing the exact same things.
So what does real magic look like in a narrative?
I would argue that real magic, the sort of magic that you read a fantasy novel to find, it's about personality.
It's about imposing will and order upon the universe.
And thus you see how we start to get back to the reason that occultism is forbidden in the church.
Because in a good fantasy novel, it's generally somebody like Aslan or Gandalf the Grey, who is effectively an earthbound angel in that narrative.
They know what the purpose of God is.
They know what the destiny of the world is, and they employ their magic for these purposes, not for their own self-aggrandizement.
Or you get their dark shadow.
And this is the person that uses magic as a will to power.
This is the dark sorcerer.
This is the necromancer.
This is the Nietzschean ubermensch who crushes, who just tramples on all of those who are beneath him because he has this hidden power.
And so something like Harry Potter, it completely ignores the logical side effects of this magic.
You know, Eliezer Yukowski wrote a whole book about that, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, where he just explored how crazy this magic was and how they never did anything logical.
You know, just with all the fact that they used gold coins in the wizard realm, you know, you could make so much money back on the muggle realm.
Why doesn't anybody do that?
And then you have D and D, where there is no narrative, there is no spark to it.
And so really it might as well be science since the magic, you know, what's the difference between a fighter and a mage?
You know, they both have bonuses in battle, depending on how experienced they are.
It's a very good game of chess.
Okay, like World of Warcraft, it's a very good rule system for planning out strategies, but it doesn't have that narrative spark, that meaning, that intention, that will that magic really ought to have.
And so with this, understanding that it needs to one, if you're going to have magic at all, it needs to be coherent and rule bound, but at the same time based upon imposing your will upon the world.
And if you're going to impose your will, is that God's will?
Is it a righteous will?
And what does that question even mean?
See this?
This is the part of the video where we're going to move on to genies.
And we all know the myth of the genie.
You rub the lamp and you get three wishes.
So what's wrong with this?
Well, first of all, if you found a genie lamp, what would you wish for?
What could you wish for safely that would be good?
You know, we could sit around and talk about this.
Like maybe you would wish that everybody that has cancer on the planet Earth is cured.
That's probably a fairly safe and good wish.
And there might be a few others like that, but we have all heard that we are all familiar with the way that wishes trap you.
You know, you wish for world peace, and Hillary Clinton suddenly gets better and takes over the world.
Great, we have world peace under a tyrant.
The wish tends to backfire.
So let's forget about these global spanning wishes.
What would people wish for in their own life?
You might wish for wealth, for longevity, for love.
But are these really wise wishes to make?
Let's take the first one, wealth.
Do you want to be wealthy?
Do you really want to be wealthy?
Because let's be perfectly frank.
What's stopping you right now from becoming wealthy?
It's not that hard to make a million dollars.
It'll take several years of focus and effort to do it.
You'll have to earn it.
But you can do that.
You can become wealthy.
What about longevity?
Once again, this is something that's within your control.
If you want to be healthy, you need to take care of your body.
You need to be cautious that you don't injure yourself.
You need to work out every day.
You need to discipline yourself, but you can have longevity.
And what about love?
Wishing for love.
Is that how you get love?
The hoori that the Musloids expect to receive in the afterlife after they murder a bunch of innocent people.
These huri, these soulless sexual slaves.
Is that love?
Because once again, if you want a sexual slave, there are dozens upon dozens of men and women out there who want to enslave themselves sexually to somebody.
If you actually want love, though, that can't be taken.
That can't be forced.
It can only be given voluntarily.
And that's the trap of the genie.
Most of the things that people would wish for, most of the selfish things, they could actually go and get these things on their own.
And then they would actually have earned them.
They would have a right to them.
But see, wealth, wishing for wealth is no different than stealing.
Wishing for longevity?
Well, people do this every day.
Instead of taking accountability for themselves, instead of monitoring their health and eating well, they expect to go to the doctor and get a magic pill that just fixes everything.
And again, love.
If you want somebody to love you, you need to be a person worth loving.
And the modern form of the genie, the real world form of the genie is the lottery.
The vast majority of people that win the lotto are dead broke after a couple of years.
And in fact, not just dead broke, but miserable.
They didn't appreciate what they had before they won the lottery.
And post-lottery, they've lost most of it.
They no longer have their job, they no longer have their family and their friends.
They no longer had what they used to have because this wealth flooded into their life unearned.
And something that is unearned can never be truly appreciated.
And everybody pretends that they want to be, that they would be the one person wise enough to handle a lottery.
But you know, a lottery is not an inheritance.
An inheritance coming from your ancestor, your ancestors, that comes with obligations and duties to maintain it.
If you inherit a business, a business that generates money for you, you understand that you need to take care of it.
Whereas people that get trust funds, they tend to self-destruct very quickly, becoming SJWs and political activists and trying to destroy the very society that gave them that wealth in the first place.
And this is no different than the lottery winner.
And how this lottery, this windfall of cash that they did not earn, destroys their ability to enjoy life.
A lottery will give you the exact same ability to find love as a genie.
You'll find a slave who is using you for their own purposes.
And so the lesson to take away from all of this, I think it's threefold.
When we talk about the magic and fantasy literature, real-world occultism, the imaginary genie and the very real world genie of the state lottery, the first is to really appreciate what you have already.
Not just what you have, but the opportunities that present themselves to you.
So many people limit themselves.
They say, well, if only I were born in a different place, I could do this.
If only I were a millionaire, I could do that.
Well, then why don't you become a millionaire?
It's not that hard.
I mean, you have to really want it.
Okay, it's but it's a lot easier to become a millionaire than a famous football player.
But you know, anybody, if they want it, just about anybody can become a college football player.
If they want it, you have to work for it.
You have to earn it.
So it's appreciate what you have already and the opportunities.
Appreciate not as in feel thankful, but appreciate as in notice the fact that you have so much opportunity in this life.
This leads into the second.
The second point.
Once you appreciate all the opportunities, all the different things that you could do, all the power and control you truly do have in this world, you realize that the only way to have something is to earn it.
You folks know that I love making automotive metaphors.
Take car ownership as an example of this.
My 1994 sports car.
I absolutely love that girl.
She's taken me all over the country wherever I needed to be.
I've done some good work with her.
I've taken care of her.
I'm the one who maintains her.
I know her inside and out.
And I absolutely love that car.
And then I've seen men that own car dealerships, and they're constantly driving a brand new whatever.
It's not quite brand new, it might be two years old, but they're driving whatever luxury vehicle they feel like because they have it on their lot.
Yeah, or think of the oil sheiks, you know, who regularly crash their Lamborghinis for fun because they have so much money they don't know what to do with it.
I get more pleasure out of my car because I've earned it than somebody who has not earned their car.
To truly own something, you need to earn it.
Sweat, blood, and tears.
And finally, the third point.
That either magic is a very foolish waste of your time.
You know, even if it works, it's still foolish.
Because you're trying to cheat.
You're going to, even if it works, even if you get what you wish for, it'll be ashes in your mouth.
You'll take no pleasure from it because you didn't earn it.
The only type of magic that would work, that would actually give you what you needed.
Not what you think you want, but what will actually make you feel fulfilled would be the magic that does not subvert God's will.
There's no easy way to get ahead.
You can shoot up fast like a weed, but you'll be gone at the end of summer.
Far better to be the slow growing oak which weathers many storms and rises above the canopy.
Thanks for listening, folks.
And you know what?
Maybe some of you will come up with a really good magic system for a novel, a fantasy novel, and this might just influence you a bit.
