![]() ![]() In fact, that’s the literal origin of the word “inexorable”, from the Latin in (not), ex (away), orare (to pray)-something that cannot be prayed away. Societies without a causal explanation for, say, the weather will always construct some sort of combination of words and thoughts and actions to be performed by privileged caste members like priests or kings, through which the entire society convinces itself that humans exercise some sort of control over these incredibly powerful real-world forces and that they aren’t just buffeted this way and that by the inexorable might of a big bad world that really couldn’t care less about them. It’s the same thing with what cultural anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss called “ The Savage Mind” in his groundbreaking 1962 book. ![]() Every four-year-old child is an egomaniac, in the clinical, non-judgmental sense of the word. It’s a profoundly egocentric conception of the world, and if you’re a parent you know exactly what Piaget is talking about. Tell your four-year-old son that the family dog has died, and he is likely to a) blame himself for something he did or didn’t do for “causing” the death, and b) believe that there is some combination of proper words and proper thoughts and proper actions that can make the dog come back to life. ![]() Magical thinking is a term of art in both clinical psychology and cultural anthropology, and it refers to the common belief among both children and “primitive” societies (yes, intentional quotation marks there to show my arched eyebrow at the word) that thinking the right thoughts or saying the right words can control the invisible forces that shape our world.įor example, as Jean Piaget (the father of developmental psychology) noted, children from the ages of 2 to 7 tend to have very little conception of real-world causality. ![]()
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