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Marc Coleman is a business consultant, former broadcaster and journalist. He is currently working on a book on the persistence of western democracy.
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‘Magical thinking’ is a great phrase that I learnt years ago, it’s a concept that’s useful to understand someone’s thought processes, maybe even your own. If you know what it is, skip forward about two minutes; if you don’t, it’s important to understand that it’s not a positive thing, in fact it’s very negative.
The concept of magical thinking is often used by therapists, psychologists and so on, to classify a particular thought process, and to help their patients to get over it. You see it at a comical level sometimes in kids, don’t step on the cracks in the pavements or the monster will get you. That’s basically the core of it, believing that one thing can affect another thing where two seconds of rational thought by an adult will tell you that it can’t.
People with mental health problems frequently exhibit magical thinking. A very famous example would be John Hinckley, Jr, the guy who shot Ronald Reagan in 1981, did it because he thought it would impress the actress Jodie Foster and make her fall in love with him.
Everyone can see that isn’t rational thinking, but a lot of those people might well have a lucky pen they do the lotto with, salute a magpie, not want to stay on the thirteenth floor of a hotel or whatever. But those things are basically harmless, if they give people comfort, there isn’t really any point in doing anything about them.
What therapists focus on magical thinking that harms people, interferes with their life to the point that they can’t live normally. There are people who have such compulsive obsessions that they can’t leave their house until they have spent hours switching on and off lights or locking and unlocking doors, and they are certain that their house will burn down if they don’t perform a ritual like this.
Other forms of magical thinking include doing things are disconnected from the desired effect, but the disconnection isn’t so instantly apparent. This often crops up in people that have suffered abuse; they’re often quite tragic, such as an abused child doing anything that they can think of that will cause the abuse to stop.
These cases are too sad to even give examples here, but you get the idea, a child or even an adult telling themselves that they caused this incident of abuse themselves, because they didn’t do this or that right, and clinging to that thought because the reality that they would be abused anyway is too horrific to confront. Even more tragically, these thought patterns can be exploited by an abuser, and used to put the blame for the abuse on the victim.
It’s a therapist’s job to help the victim see that the magical thinking is just wrong. So that’s magical thinking. It’s something that’s not nearly as nice as the name sounds.
I thought of that about two issues that have been in the news in the past few weeks. I think that magical thinking has a particular role when it comes to Irish whattaboutery – when people clearly on the wrong side of a political debate try to divert attention to a different topic and away from their own losing argument.
The first was the emissions reductions that are going to be imposed on farming. Agriculture is really getting a big pass here. Agriculture is by far the biggest emitter of greenhouse gasses, it emits more than what the entire transport sector, and the entire electricity generation sector emit combined – the government has assigned them a transport a 50 per cent reduction over the next eight years, compared to 2018 outputs, and electricity a 75 per cent reduction.
By contrast, agriculture is only having to meet a 25 per cent reduction. I say only, I know that is seriously challenging, but given that it’s the biggest emitter, 25 per cent is a way smaller reduction than the 75 per cent reduction for electricity.
As with any suggestion for change there’s lot of opposition, and as with anything to do with farming, that opposition is very well-organised has a lot of access to the media and no shortage of sympathetic commentators. Every possible point in opposition gets more than its fair share of media coverage.
One of those points is that, in the Amazon, deforestation is going at a pace to provide land for farming which is often beef ranching, under the Covid-denying climate change-denying populist Trump of the Tropics president Bolsonaro. This is true.
The line was best exemplified by a whole slew of people who said some variation of the theme that it was better not to do anything to reduce Irish beef production, because the expanding beef production in Brazil is more carbon-intensive, meaning that it emits more CO2 equivalent per kilo of meat than production in Ireland. I’m in no way sure of that claim by the way, but I’ll let that pass for the moment.
It’s the magical thinking that I’m concerned with here, maybe you’ve spotted it, it is to imagine that there is a cause and effect between reducing Irish beef production and increasing Brazilian beef production. They are essentially saying that the reason they want to keep up beef production is because that will reduce Brazilian beef production. There is, of course, not a shred of evidence of that.
The other major case of magical thinking was in the reaction to Sabina Higgins’ letter to the Irish Times. There were a whole load of problems with the letter, not least that she signalled that the invading and defending countries were on an equal moral footing by saying that the world should persuade quote “President Vladimir Putin of Russia and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine to agree to a ceasefire and negotiations”.
But I don’t want to get into that, or the issue of the presidency being above politics; I’m interested that in the opinion piece that prompted her letter, by Geoffrey Roberts, a former professor of history at UCC. His piece, also in the Irish Times was titled “Ukraine must grasp peace from jaws of unwinnable war”, which summed up its content well, and also summed up a large body of opinion that was claiming to support the president’s wife in her well-meaning intervention.
Basically, the recommendation was that Ukraine should trade land for peace and security going forward. It might be a bitter pill, they would have to accept Russia ruling over some areas of Ukraine, but it would save Ukrainian lives, and the independence of the rest of Ukraine, that was the argument. The magical thinking element of this is that there isn’t the slightest evidence that such a deal is on offer from Putin, and even if it was, there isn’t the slightest reason to believe that he could be trusted to fulfil such a deal.
Allowing Russia to establish itself unhindered in the currently occupied territory of Ukraine, to dig in, regroup, resupply and rearm would do nothing more than give Putin a whole new base to attack the rest of the country as soon as he saw that it was to his advantage. Even if he was offering peace for land, he simply couldn’t be trusted.
But the main problem is that Putin isn’t offering peace for land. That deal simply isn’t on offer. The only offer Putin has made is that Ukrainians should lay down their weapons and let his army take over. Not alone that, but he, his foreign minister and prime minister Lavrov and Medvedev and his propaganda outlets like RIA Novosti and Первый канал, his largest TV station, have explicitly said that the intend to destroy the whole of Ukraine, literally wipe it off the map, murder the whole of its intelligentsia and army, destroy all of its cultural artifacts and institutions, wipe out its language, and subjugate its population with decades of re-education in revenge for the supposed crime of electing a nazi government.
Putin is not asking for land in return for peace, he is asking to be allowed to commit genocide in peace. That’s the awfulness of it, and I suspect that that awfulness is why the old lefties who are in the habit of trotting out the line that everything bad in the world flows from the western Anglo-American alliance, they just can’t cope with all the evidence that in this case, that isn’t true.
And equally farming is such a traditional and conservative way of life, that many of its people just can’t fathom that things are going to have to change a lot, quickly, and they revert to magical thinking to avoid an unpleasant prospect.
But I’m sure that’s not the only magical thinking out there, maybe you can come up with some of your own examples, tweet them to us at @HeresHowPodcast.
