Episode 340: The Sublime Folly of Hope

[00:00:00] Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and psychologist Dave Pizarro, having an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics. Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say, and knowing my dad, some very inappropriate jokes. That's like the dream of everyone. They want to be cool because of this, cool because of that, blah, blah, blah. And more people need to know that they're not fucking cool.

[00:01:14] Welcome to Very Bad Wizards. I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston. Dave, since we're doing some Gen Z shit in the opening segment, here's a question that I have, and I don't even know if this might be millennial more than Gen Z, I don't know, but like what does the exclamation point on a text signify? Oh my God! Dude, I have no idea. I think it might be millennial because like some of my even Gen X friends have like picked up on it.

[00:01:41] And I am so confused. I need help. Like I need help to understand this. Like it is meaningless to me. It's like, it just happened to me. Like I texted a friend happy birthday and he's like, oh, I'm here with my parents. And I was like, oh, give him a hug from me. And he just put an exclamation. Right. It's completely opaque to me. Like a lot of the time. Sometimes it's like, like when I use it, it's like, like, holy shit. Yeah. Or like what? You know?

[00:02:09] Whoa. Yeah. But then it just seems like it's being used in ways that I can't understand. This is a good call for listeners. Please explain this. It reminds me of that boondocks episode where the teacher uses the N word and it's like based on a real, like a real thing.

[00:02:29] And he's like, yeah. And he goes, I need your help. Like I don't. He's like, I thought it was fine. I thought with the, ah, it was friendly. I'm telling you, I don't understand. And I need your help. But it's like the possibilities are even greater in this case. It's like there's some other dimension or something that I don't have access to.

[00:02:56] Does it just mean I saw your text? Like, it's like context clues lead me to believe it means everything. Well, yeah. Or it could mean so many things, but like, uh, it's not the thumbs up, you know, which is more like I saw your text. Like we're like anthropologists. We're trying to immerse ourselves.

[00:03:19] Funny that you should say that actually, because in the second segment, we are going to be talking about an article by, I'm just seeing that his name is on the title. Yeah. Wait, Malinovsky? Yeah. Uh, Branislav, he should consider putting his name on his most famous papers. Bronislav, uh, Malinovsky. Magic, Science and Religion. Uh, classic 1925 paper, I think.

[00:03:49] Yeah. It was like weirdly published in a collection of things that were posthumously published. So I don't know what it was in originally, but he wrote it around the twenties. And that's in some ways the secondary text, or at least it started out that way. It started off that way. Yeah. Cause you put a nice, uh, much shorter piece called Baseball Magic by George Gmelch.

[00:04:12] I know. I was, I was hoisted by my own petard here where I picked like a nice short one and we were like, oh, we need a companion piece, uh, that maybe gives us more meat to the theory. And, but like, I'm glad we read this one actually. Me too. It's really good. I really enjoyed it. Anthropologists, sociologists can do really good things. Everything that we're not. Exactly. They're everything that we're not. Um, but what they don't do is conceptual analysis.

[00:04:40] That is the purview of analytic philosophers like myself and like you in spirit. In spirit, you know, this is, this is philosophy in the wild. This is applying the tools and methods for the improvement of critical thinking, life understanding. A hundred percent. And it is public philosophy in the best sense of the term, I think. And unlike certain people, we make this free for everybody.

[00:05:10] That's right. That's right. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't pay us. No, not at all. In fact, quite the opposite. So yeah. So today we're going to, we've been doing conceptual analysis of Gen Z words for the most part, like contributions of the concepts of this new generation. I guess they're not even new anymore. I know. They're like 25. They're adults. Yeah. But, uh, yeah. And we, for some reason have been kind of stuck on the Cs.

[00:05:41] Yeah. I think we've only, we've only done one that wasn't C, but I don't remember what it was. I don't either. Yeah. We've done cringe. We did corny. Did we do cool? I think we did cool. This is all a way to avoid doing the conceptual analysis of the actual C word, which I don't want to do. Um, this is where circling, circling the actual. No, that's what we're building towards. That's going to be the last episode. Circling the drain. I think that would be a good one. You know, like just all the different ways that's used.

[00:06:09] I don't even think it's a poison word anymore. I think you can just say it. You and Trump, you know, you're, uh. No, he said pussy. That's true. What a cunt. Oh my God. I can't believe you said that. Auto moderate that. Uh, so today we are still stuck on the Cs, but not quite that far into the Cs. We are going to talk about crash out. Yeah. Crashing out.

[00:06:37] Crash out. A term that again, you know, for me has become popular in the last, whatever, three, four years, but I'm sure it's probably 10 years. Well, I did a little research. I mean, when I say a little, maybe like two minutes and I think it's first emerged in like a 2013, 14, like raps on like most of these. I was going to say, it's all black slang. When you were saying Gen Z slang, I'm like, let's give credit where credit's due, you know?

[00:07:03] Yeah. No, I think Gen Z puts their spin on it is the best you can say because I do think it was a little different. For sure. And it took me a while to get that difference. So it's one of these things where it's a term that I thought I immediately understood because it, it seems like face validly like a term that you would use when you just get really angry. Yeah. Where you just get so frustrated and so angry and you're just start doing stuff that you know is it's not going to end well for you and those around you.

[00:07:31] There was once a professor at Yale who was a World War II veteran who was like very PTSD'd and he would just unload on Yale students sometimes. And there's this story about like the worst case in which this happened. He walked in late to his own undergrad class, silently stared at the class and just said something like, you fucking Yale fucking cunt students. You're all stupid.

[00:08:00] And he just like turned around and walked out. Another time he actually threw a garbage can from his office. He threw it at a graduate student. That's a crash app. That's a crash app. So he skipped right to the last C. Yeah. So let's just get it out on the table. Like what you think crashing out is. We'll just do like a, you know, a pilot definition and then we'll try to think of some counter examples, think of some ways

[00:08:29] that it doesn't cover, you know, conceptual analysis. Like we'll give the necessary insufficient. As always, we will arrive at the necessary insufficient conditions for crashing out. Yeah. My tentative definition is when there's like a, an emotional event that causes a lack of restraint. So like you end up doing things that you would normally restrain yourself from doing. So that's different from what I originally thought of crash out as like getting really angry and like yelling

[00:08:58] at somebody like losing control in that way, because this can include like for me, the prototypical example of, uh, in the movie swingers when he leaves like 20, you know, voice messages. Oh yeah. Yes. He's just lost it. Yeah. And he can't stop himself and he knows it's bad and he still can't stop himself. Cannot stop himself. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What about you? That, that is a really good example. And I think a good definition is when you start to spin out,

[00:09:28] like, I think actually like an accident is a good metaphor because like sometimes you're, you know, you're just driving and then something happens and all of a sudden you've lost a little control of the car. You could get it back, but then you start doing things that are like, you turn the steering wheel the wrong way because if it's on ice, you know, you're supposed to turn it in the door, you know, and then all of a sudden it's getting worse and it's getting worse and you just can't stop it. And eventually your car just slams into something and it's totaled.

[00:09:56] I feel like that's what, I think it's interesting that it's, I think most commonly like a short term thing, you know, someone could crash out on Twitter. Yeah. Like Jason Stanley crashed out famously. That was, I thought, like a paradigmatic example. Like when you start like posting your SAT scores. Your IQ. Yeah. You have your IQ. Uh, you're crashing out. Uh, but like, I also think, and I, like,

[00:10:26] I credit my daughter with a little bit of this, like it can be also more of a long-term thing where you, you know, like in a, if there's a relationship that's gone bad or if there's a relationship that isn't happening, like you can be crashing out for a month just because you're like, you can't stop yourself from reacting badly to this thing. That's right. I had a friend in college who, uh, was in love with, he was in love with this girl so bad. He had it bad.

[00:10:56] Yeah. But it was unrequited. And she finally got through to him that she didn't want, like it finally hit him that like, it was a no. It was like a firm no. And this poor guy sat in his room. Tony, sorry if you're listening. He sat in his room with like the curtains drawn listening to LL Cool J's I Need Love on repeat. Right. You just walk in and it lasted weeks. Like literally. And that's a great example of crashing out when it's not like you're getting angry and you're yelling

[00:11:25] or you're like responding to every reply on Twitter with, or you're not just yelling at some like lady on a bus or something. I think like what you, what you're saying is you've lost control and you're doing things that you would never do. And you might even recognize that. Yeah. Like while it's happening. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. That seems like a kind of crashing out that isn't captured by like

[00:11:50] going berserk where you're actually completely unreflective. You know, you lose control. You're seeing red. Like that's why it can be different from seeing red because you're just like, like in the swingers scene, he knows like it's getting worse and worse because he knows. And he's like, right. And he knows every, like, there's no way the next message is going to make it better. It's, but he still can't stop himself from doing it. Yeah.

[00:12:15] Now, can you have a crash out that's like super short? So somebody posted a funny, I don't know, it was like a ticked a reel or some shit. Um, it was like Gen Z leaves a voicemail and it was like, Hey, this is a, Oh shoot. How do I undo this? Oh fuck. I don't think I can. And then she's like, I'm really sorry. You're probably never going to want to call me back after this. So have a nice life or something like that. She like realized like in the moment

[00:12:43] that she was fucking up the message, like started trying to fix it, realized she couldn't. And then like, just was like, I'm out. Sorry. You don't ever have to call me back. Like in that moment, she kind of lost control, but that's like a really short, she like figured out how to turn in the direction of the, of the spin pretty quickly. So then I don't think that's crashing out. I think that's something else. Like you fucked up, but then you, um, yeah, you got the car back on the road.

[00:13:11] Yeah. You're going to hear it on the border. Like it could have, like, you know, like, I think like a lot of crash outs as I think of them happen in social media, you know, and academics can be very susceptible to it. And I think one of the things is that you've lost control of the situation. So maybe you post something say, and you get piled on for a bit

[00:13:35] and you didn't mean for like your remark to generate that response, obviously, but you also think that maybe it's a little unfair the way people are reacting. And so now you've lost control of how people are responding to you or understanding you. And in addition, as you go into the crash out, you lose control of yourself. So you just make things worse. You keep trying to rescue the situation

[00:14:01] and keep trying to regain control. And in doing so, you keep losing it more than you did initially. Right. It's a form of digging yourself out of a hole, but it's like specific. It's worth, I don't know. You keep digging a bigger hole, but you can't stop yourself from digging because there's a tunnel here or something like that. Yeah. You kind of believe it. Um, you know, you sometimes see standup comedians,

[00:14:27] like the more inexperienced ones, like have a crash out with a heckler and they're completely losing control of the crowd. And they try like that happened kind of to Michael Richards, to Kramer when he kind of lost control. It was like, man, like a more, somebody who was more seasoned in the art of crowd control wouldn't have let themselves just lose it like that. Yeah. And, and it's interesting because like Bill Burr famously also had this in Philly. The Philly crash out. It's hard to tell when it's Bill Burr. Yeah.

[00:14:55] But it wasn't a crash out. That wasn't a crash out. Like because he had control, he had confidence in what he was doing. Like, so maybe part of crashing out is also just external. So maybe I have an externalist, uh, crash out, which is like, if it actually is good for you, then it's not crashing out. Is that right? Yeah. It's funny because if in that setting, they're not perceiving you to lose control,

[00:15:20] even if you are losing control, you certainly don't get like the hit of having had a crash out. People love that Philly rant, but they didn't love it at the time. Right? No, well, it's certainly not the crowd. No, not the crowd. Yeah. But he's like, it's like a famous, you know, it's, he's applauded for it. Whereas Michael Richards obviously is not, but like I've heard Bill Burr, I could be wrong, but I seem to remember him in an interview saying like, I don't know why people like that so much. And I wonder if he in

[00:15:47] the moment was like, no, I'm going to let loose. I really am going to like crash out on these people and not give a fuck. Like, okay. So let me ask you this since it's time to make distinctions. What is the difference between crashing out and having a meltdown? Having a meltdown feels like it can be much more internalized. So like maybe this fits in with your potential externalism, which is a meltdown. You could certainly take it out on people,

[00:16:13] but you could also burn out and like, yeah, I don't know. Is it melt? Maybe I'm just confusing meltdown with like nervous breakdowns. Yeah. Yeah. Like I feel like a meltdown is public. It is public. Yeah. It's, you have to have an audience for a meltdown. I think so. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you could maybe have a meltdown in your own house with like some appliance or something.

[00:16:42] With your dog. Like your dog would need to be there at least. Yeah. Someone needs to witness it. Yeah. So are you melting down when, cause like one of the things we've been saying is a kind of like a quintessential crash out is the guy who's like the girl broke up with him and he's doing whatever he can to get her back. Is that also a meltdown? No, I think meltdown is short term. Yeah. Like, you know, that's why like a classic meltdown or people will use meltdown with little kids.

[00:17:08] Yeah. Tantrum. They'll have like a tantrum and it's just like, oh, he's melting down. I got to take him home and put him to sleep. Yeah. Yeah. Not put him to sleep like euthanizing. So, uh, yeah, like that's, I think a key difference. I also think crashing out is there's something deeper about a crash. Well, yeah, I kind of think that a crash out can be any like of a number

[00:17:35] of sources of restraint that disappear. And it could be like an emotion like anger or desperation in the case of like unrequited love, whereas a meltdown feels hotter. Yes, that's right. It's like public, but it's also like your emotions are at 11, whereas a crash out could be like, you're actually acting a little too calm or something under the circumstances or you're being,

[00:18:01] yeah, you're holding yourself a little too stiffly. Yeah. I think the loss of control thing is so key. And I think you could even have a meltdown. I mean, it's also typically a loss of control, but maybe sometimes you're like, fuck it with the meltdown. Exactly. And a child doesn't care. Yeah. Child is not like, I know better than to keep stomping my foot. Right. Right. You wouldn't say

[00:18:27] that a three-year-old is crashing out. Like it almost doesn't make sense. No, you could just like jokingly. Yeah. Yeah. Right. But it would be a joke, whereas a meltdown is kind of a standard word for a three-year-old. So that's an interesting, again, this is philosophy. This is cutting nature at the joints. It's true. No dictionary is going to give you this wisdom. Do you think you are someone who crashes out often? I would say of all my flaws, like I think that I'm, I'm like, I like to think that I'm characterized

[00:18:57] by patients in situations like that. But then it's like, I have very clearly crashed out. Like I've never done it over unrequited love. I've never, you know, gone more than two comments deep on social media. I don't think, you know, like I usually stop. Yeah. You always have one though. One long one maybe, but it's not a crash. It could be long. Yeah. But like my four-year-old right now has been testing me in ways that like,

[00:19:25] I've probably had what I would consider two crash outs in the last like three weeks alone. Where I'm just like, I was seeing myself say things that I would never want myself to say as a parent and that I would judge other people for and like raising my voice in a way that I never did. And, and, and I was just like, you know what? I can't help it right now. Like I see it happening. It's how it's just, this is happening right now. Right. I see it happening and I can't stop it.

[00:19:54] Yeah. I agree. Actually. I don't think I've ever witnessed you crashing out. Like I don't think like on, even on the podcast, you know, I would get heated. It gets heated. But not uncontrolled. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think I'm prone to short-term crashing out, you know, like if the, my refrigerator, we have a comically small refrigerator and I hate this refrigerator with like the fire of a thousand

[00:20:21] suns and like, and like, so it's like the raspberries will fall on the floor and then I'll try to get something else to like stop something else from falling. Then like five other things will fall because of what I did. And then I'll just get so, I get so frustrated, but like. You, you don't, uh, in my experience, you have those mini crash outs about like things. The demonstration. Yeah. Like you're, the computer's not working right. Or like, remember when it always makes

[00:20:47] me laugh when you were yelling, you weren't yelling at me, but you were like kind of jokingly telling me to move. Cause like my window was in the way. Right. You have to like remind me like for real that like you aren't in charge of where the window is. On my computer, like 2000 miles away. Yeah. And yeah, they're short bursts. Like my sister is kind of like this where you're just like a, all of a sudden, like I'm talking to my sister, she crashes out when she's driving.

[00:21:16] Yeah. Oh, my Eliza does that too. She's such a crash out when she's driving. It's annoying. I'll just be talking to her and she'll be like, Oh yeah. I went to mom and dad's like, fucking ass. And I was just like, what the hell? Is that crashing out though? Is that just a little like momentary rage? It's momentary rage. I think it's all about whether you, like how, this is my internalist retort. How are you feeling in the moment? Did you have to stop yourself or was it just like a cathartic yell?

[00:21:46] Yeah. Yeah. Right. Like, yeah. I think, like, I think something you said at the very beginning, like you would never be doing this if you were thinking clearly or if you had control of yourself and sometimes with traffic, like you just, yeah, fine. Fuck this person. And I may, I'm going to yell in my car. Yeah. And you know, one more thing that I had thinking about, I was thinking about like the, you know, the Bob Frank emotion thing and where anger can be like functional in the sense that

[00:22:13] people won't fuck with you if they know that you're somebody who might like snap at them. Crashing out actually seems like a bad signal of you. Like, whereas if I know that if I cross you, you're going to like fuck me up. And when you do it, you're really angry. Maybe I might describe it as like losing control and like fucking, you know, kicking my ass. But that's like, seems like a reliable cue not to fuck with you in a way that crashing out makes me think a little less of the person. Like I don't, I'm not like that worried about, like I, I kind of am like, oh, you're a

[00:22:43] person who can be fucked with. Yeah. You know? Right. And sometimes you want to like press those buttons if you're. Yeah. Cause they're hurting themselves. Yeah. Like even maybe if they're crashing out and you throw a punch, but like clearly you're hurting yourself more. You're not in a position of power when you're crashing out. No, you're the opposite of that. Yeah. No, actually I think that's super important for this. So one of the questions you might ask is why now is this term gained such popularity? You know,

[00:23:11] like I think even people our age are using the term now. They might not be using it precisely if they haven't listened to this, but like they're using it. So why now is this like gaining such traction? And I think part of it is we feel powerless. Like we feel like we don't have power. When we're in crashing out situations, power over the situation, power over ourselves. So I think it's connected to this feeling of impotence, but for that exact reason, like you said, you're going

[00:23:41] to lose respect for them because it shows that they don't have power. You know, they don't have power in the situation and over the situation or over themselves. Yeah, totally. And it is unlike anger, like stereotypical anger that usually is associated with internally feeling like you have control. You are taking control of the situation when you're angry. You're telling someone off, like you're finally feeling empowered. I remember like the first time I got like angry at somebody who is like, had been consistently mistreating me,

[00:24:11] I thought. And when I finally got angry and they stopped, I felt good. Like I stood up for myself, you know? Right. Um, and that was Tamler. That was you. The first time you finally stood up. Yeah. I've never fucked with you again. Uh, no, I think that's exactly right. Yeah. I like, I like your analysis though. It's like a materialist, uh, analysis, you know, where like the, the current circumstances of society are like influencing our. Just the fact that it seems like things are beyond our control at every level of government,

[00:24:40] like the bureaucracy, AI, like all this shit is like making us feel like you don't control your own fate. And so then I think you're more likely to crash out. And I think like the difference in anger and crashing out is you're empowered and anger, like you said, and you are like disempowered in crashing out. That's right. By the way, I think LLMs can crash out too in this weird way.

[00:25:07] Like these videos, there was a guy who said he, he does these funny AI videos where he's asking like very obvious questions and the AI can't answer. But one of them was, Hey, remember when you told me that thing and you were totally wrong, you should apologize and tell me that you were wrong. And the AI, this was a chat GPT voice thing. The AI was like, well, I don't think I was wrong, but you know, I see what you're saying. Like maybe we could have agreed on something. And he's like, no, no, you were wrong. Remember, admit it. And just tell me that I'm smarter than you.

[00:25:33] And the AI just was like refusing. Like it was actually having an episode. It was having an episode. It was hilarious. So yeah. All right, we solved it. Well, speaking of how to deal with a world that is unpredictable and that you don't have control over, let's turn to our main segment in the next, uh, well, let's turn to our main topic in the next segment. I, that's what I said. I mean,

[00:26:03] magic science and religion by a very distinguished author. Whose name we shall pronounce in the next segment after a brief break. We'll be right back.

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[00:29:56] support. Really. We are honored by all the support that you've given us over the years. Okay. Let's get back to the episode. Now let's turn to our main topic. Two articles, one by the anthropologist Branislav Malinovsky called Magic, Science, and Religion. You were right. Published in 1925 originally. Just like a little bit of background on Malinovsky and this article. Malinovsky was a

[00:30:22] Polish anthropologist who is like, I guess, widely understood to be a, uh, the person who changed the way anthropology was done from like armchair sort of theorizing about, you know, the primitives and occasional visits to other cultures. Whereas Malinovsky believed and did this, that you need to live with the people, get to know them, immerse yourself in the culture for more than just a few

[00:30:48] days and talking for longer than just a couple of interviews. So like ethnography is like real ethnography. Yeah. Yeah. And he did his work primarily in Melanesia and the Trobriand islands where he studied a bunch of cultures from that general geographical area in Melanesia. And in this article, Magic, Science, and Religion, he proposes a distinction between these three

[00:31:16] that was different from the way that anthropologists and sociologists thought of them before. And like, broadly speaking, people treated magic as like, um, earlier form of like superstitious view that then kind of evolved into religion. And then we finally got to science. Whereas Malinovsky saying like, no, when you look at these peoples from these cultures, what he called primitive peoples, what you see is

[00:31:41] that our view that they are unscientific is totally wrong. They're actually very adept at learning about the natural world and using their knowledge of the natural world to manipulate things, to grow crops, to build boats. They understand that that is a category of thing and that it is a different category than these other ones. So they are able to control the natural world to a certain extent through their understanding of the natural world that is reasonable and seemingly rational and not

[00:32:11] unlike our modern science. Whereas magic is what they rely on in situations that they have no control over. And so magic is a set of practices that are aimed at directly controlling outcomes that matter, that you know, that the people know they have very little control over. So they can build a boat using the best practices that they've learned through generations, a boat that will get them safely out to the

[00:32:40] ocean to fish and bring them safely back and float right and all that stuff. You can't control the freak storms that might destroy your boat. So you can't control the weather. You can't control the amount of fish that are out there on the day that you go out. And it's under those conditions that you start relying on essentially this kind of attempt at control through rites and spells and incantations. Yeah. There's a lot more. There's a discussion about religion as well, but we can get to that.

[00:33:08] Yeah. Cause I do think that's also important. Like magic, he says, has this kind of very specific instrumental purpose. We don't control the weather, so we need it to rain or we need the seas to be calm, or I need this girl to love me who doesn't love me right now. And religion is done more for its own sake. Like the ceremony we have, cause we're having a baby isn't so that the baby is healthy. It's more

[00:33:35] just a celebration of what's happening. So it's like more intrinsic than magic. That's right. And it's tied to major milestones in life, like birth and rites of passage and, and death very clearly. Like he has a whole section. You could see like Ernest Becker was a fan of this guy. Like you could tell at some point I was reading it and I was starting to like, have like, I was like, Oh man, am I like, is my heart rate going up? And then I was like,

[00:34:02] Oh no, I'm just reading about death. Well, there's a great line in it. Uh, actually I think he might've been referring to you when he says the savage is intensely afraid of death, probably as the result of some deep seated instincts common to man and animals. He does not want to realize it as an end. He cannot face the idea of complete cessation of annihilation. That's exactly what I started to have cold sweats. Yeah. The savage, you are the savage.

[00:34:31] You're just a savage. You know, his point eventually is that we're all in the same predicament. No, of course. Like that is totally his point. Like he's at, it's the most respectful treatment of, I think, primitive cultures. Like even compared to like now, I feel like. Yeah. I'm glad you say that. I thought so too. You know, this view that like he's not that he cares that it's a disservice. I guess maybe he does. He just thinks it's wrong. It's like the wrong view

[00:34:56] to think that, Oh, the primitives have magic. And then like they're whatever fucking witch doctors become priests when society gets complex enough. And then eventually we have scientists. And they become physicists and like the final boss. But he says these are like very, like you say, very domain specific and they are serving their own function. In fact, the thing that he is like known for in anthropology, aside from the methodology,

[00:35:23] is his view of functionalism where he actually thinks that there is a rational account for why people are engaging in these practices. And he had some beef with Durkheim, which you kind of get from this article where Durkheim believed that like religion was just a sort of manifestation of society at large, that what we were doing is like worshiping the collective. Like we were, we're weak.

[00:35:48] The collective is strong. And we kind of build these beliefs and institutions that are just somehow projecting our awe of like the collective onto something else. And Malinowski thought that this was just a mistaken view. He said, religion is performed collectively. Like that part is true, but he thought it was serving a psychological function for the individuals in a way that he

[00:36:13] thought Durkheim was missing. Yeah. Cause it can happen with individuals and it can be just as powerful. Yeah. And on the flip side, you can have this kind of collective effervescence, as he says that in a totally secular situation. And like, it's funny that I read that term in the paper because like people were talking about that with the world cup, like collective effervescence,

[00:36:38] like it's not religious there. It's not. And people will use that. Like they will say, like, I think metaphorically, like rock concerts are like religion or like sports is like religion, but it's only like religion in like that one kind of way. Nobody confuses it for actual religion. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And then in terms of how we're all the savage and that this is, that this does have a functional pragmatic value almost to the point where he's willing to call it a kind

[00:37:08] of truth. Right. Yeah. That relates a lot to your other piece that you put in the slack, the VBW slack baseball magic, which is I think building on his ideas and explicitly refers to these ideas of all the crazy baseball superstitions and rituals and the various things that people do. And I think this guy might've been a Red Sox fan cause he talks a lot about Nomar Garcia Parra

[00:37:33] and Wade Boggs. He was an actual player. Yeah. He was a Detroit tiger, I think in the sixties, but like when he's writing this, you know, it's later than that. And he's speaking about a lot of the people from my childhood and early adulthood, but yeah, Nomar Garcia Parra. I don't know if you like watched baseball or you know who that is, but he had this incredible, like if you YouTube Nomar when he's like going to bat, it's just a crazy group of rituals. I mean, he did it really fast.

[00:38:02] It's almost like a magician, like doing all these things and Wade Boggs would have chicken before every game. And you know, like baseball is like almost every day for like nine months. And the point that he makes at the end, which I thought was so fascinating, why do they do this in baseball more than other sports? It's because baseball is a more unpredictable. Like you have less control. You can have a great swing of the bat and you can make great contact and it just goes right to

[00:38:27] a fielder and you can do everything right. Like if as a pitcher and have a perfect slider that tails away and they get their bat on it and it scoots down the line for like a double and all of a sudden like three run scores and like, it's just, there's so many things. And so there's a comfort in routine ritual and all these rites that you do. There's a comfort when there's so much of what you do and

[00:38:56] so much of your fate depends on things that are entirely beyond your control, even if you're doing everything right. Yeah. I love that insight. And he uses, so Melch, the former baseball player who became an anthropologist. Yeah. That's pretty good. It's crazy, right? Yeah. He directly references the Malinowski view and it's like that article is

[00:39:20] built on this example that Malinowski gives, which is in these troberanders when they do lagoon fishing, which is like easy, they don't have magic. Like there's no magic associated with that. It's like in the open ocean that they have magic because that's so hard to control. And Melch makes that distinction within baseball where he says, who has the least amount of control? Like, you know, famously they say that the batting, like hitting a baseball is one of the hardest things in all of sports to do

[00:39:48] and pitching. Whereas the fielders like really are just sort of relying on their skill. Like, you know, if the ball is within their reach and they're good, they're going to get it unless something weird happens. And so the amount of superstition, at least the claim is from Melch is that you see way more superstitious behavior from pitchers and batters than you do from fielders. Yeah. Or, and obviously batters are also fielders. So the same person will have rights for hitting,

[00:40:16] but they won't have rights for fielding. That's right. That's right. They won't do like a Nomar Garcia para touching his forehead and his chin and his nose and rubbing his crotch every time they're in the field. They won't do that. But that same person, you know, he was a shortstop. He didn't do any of that shit when he was playing shortstop. He just did it at bat. Hitting streaks are talked about and they matter. And when you're on a streak, like you won't shave, you develop a super, like catching streaks for the outfielders. Like they don't care. They're not

[00:40:44] like, I've caught 10 fly balls in a row. I'm not going to shave my, my beard. Yeah. And like, there's two different things also, right? There's the taboo, which the classic example is you can't say that it's a no hitter. If there's a no hitter, that's like a kind of jinx. Um, so there's also like a lot of taboos about what you can't do. Uh, yeah. And they're again, focused on things beyond your control. No hitter is a classic example. Like you could just

[00:41:12] get a slow grounder to third base and blow your no hitter, even though it was a great pitch and a weak swing. And you know, it made me think, I don't know if you're a baseball person at all, but I guess baseball is one of the sports that has the most like kind of fluky lucky things more than any other sport, more than basketball, more than football. Like what you were saying about fielding in baseball, which is just one part of the game and one of the least important

[00:41:40] parts of the game in some sense, like that is seems to be true of all the other sports for the most part. Like there's obviously going to be some luck in basketball. You know, someone hits a bank shot when they weren't trying to hit a bank shot or, but those are pretty minor things compared to like the main things that can happen in baseball. And I guess I just never thought about that, but I think it's right. You know, tennis, there's not a ton of luck in tennis. There's not a ton of

[00:42:09] luck in hockey. No, I know. I totally agree. It's a weird thing where baseball has, it's a team sport, but it is a team sport that relies so much on individual performances, like the batter and the pitcher and all of the luck things that you're talking about, like are involved. So there's two separate things that I think are happening in the, in these sports. So there's like

[00:42:35] the situation where like who wins and loses is more luck based, like of the teams, maybe in baseball day to day than in other sports. And then there is your performance is dependent on other people on your team's performance. And so in that way, your performance is not in your control. I mean,

[00:43:01] obviously it's like tennis, there is no other teammates. So, but like in football, like I guess as a quarterback, you can have great receivers who make catches they have no business making, or they can drop the ball or something. Like, I feel like that is more common to other sports. I guess my question is, is baseball just more luck based in general? I think it might be. I mean, it is like,

[00:43:25] you know, as people often point out, it's like a weird sport where having 30% success at bat is like amazing. And like, you can be the best player. So like the amount of randomness for any given at bat seems, seems high. It's so high. Again, I don't think you see that in other sports. You might see that in soccer because goals are so scarce. Yes. That's the other thing I was going to say is scoring is scarcer in the way that in basketball, like you kind of know that the better team won, like when they win, like in soccer,

[00:43:55] you have flukes where any team could win. Yeah. But there's also just like lots of motion. There's like constant, constant causality in a way that's not, you know, it's more like winning or losing in the penalty kick shootout where that is luck. And they do, I believe get pretty superstitious about that kind of stuff. Do they? That, that would be interesting. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. And this was all just by like my way of agreeing with you that I do think baseball is weirdly luck. It's more

[00:44:21] luck based. I just was trying to figure out what specifically makes it feel that way. And I, yeah, the analytics have always also been, you know, now we have player stats in other sports that can tell us. Yeah. Baseball was the original analytics sport. And I think maybe for the same reason that is by far the sport with the most superstitions, like it's in another stratosphere than other sports. You don't really hear about that stuff. And if it is, it's some quirky story. It's not like all of

[00:44:50] them, like it is in baseball. And it's just accepted. It's a matter of life. As he says in the article, it's often very like, it's not public. It's rare that it's public. Everyone has their own thing and they go about their own business with their own weird rituals that are often just so weird. And there's like tons of funny movies and books. This article is worth a read if you just want like

[00:45:15] a descriptive sense of the weirdness of some of these rituals. You know, he, he like Malinovsky, I think has respect for it. He says towards the end of the paper that like, obviously the superstitions and the rituals don't make a pitch go faster or a batted ball, find the gaps between the fielders, nor do the Trobriand rituals calm the seas or bring fish. What both do, however, is give their

[00:45:43] practitioners a sense of control with that added confidence at no cost. And we all know how important that is. If you really believe eating chicken or hopping over the foul lines will make you a better hitter. It probably will. And that's that like practical, like kind of functional, like it's true because you believe it's true, which then makes it come true. Yeah. Yeah. At the very least, if you believe it and you don't do it, you're worse. Like, I don't know like what the difference

[00:46:13] is there, like, but it certainly is seeming to have a causal effect. But if it gives you more confidence, which allows you to, you know, play better in that situation, then it really would be right. But it also is true that like, if you run afoul of a jinx or a curse or a superstition or whatever, that will almost certainly have an effect more than if you just do the right thing.

[00:46:37] Yeah. By the way, so I was doing some external research as a good scholar and I found an article that was a review article in 2016 called Superstitious Behavior in Sport, a literature review, where they were trying to look at all the work that had been published by that time. And there is a section on type of sport. And so I'm just going to read you a bit here. So superstition and sport

[00:47:04] may vary with the role of the player as well as with the type of sport. The greater is the element of chance and uncertainty in a sport or a player's task, the more prevalent is the practice of superstition. The player's role in baseball supports this surmise because superstitious behaviors are more often linked to batting or pitching than to fielding. However, Berger and Lynn 2005 could not demonstrate this contrast in their investigation of American and Japanese players. Studies with goaltenders in ice hockey have also shown that these players practice a high number of superstitions, which

[00:47:32] makes sense. Like they're like a kind of locus of control over the game. It's also a low scoring game. They get blamed. In football, clothing and appearance were linked to superstitious behaviors, but no differences were disclosed between goalkeepers and attackers. Oh, that kind of football. So there seems to be like at least evidence since this 1975 article. Is that when it is? Yeah. No, it can't be because he talks about Wade Boggs who's after that. Gemelch.

[00:48:00] I think it's in the early 90s. I think it's like 92. Yeah. 92. 92. Yeah. So like I like this a lot. Like that, the baseball magic talks about like how pigeons Skinner famously sort of found that even pigeons develop superstitious behavior because if you just gave them rewards randomly, whatever they were doing at the time, they'll just keep doing it. And it's hard to extinguish animals because you get such immediate feedback. Also, that's the other

[00:48:27] thing is like you go to bat. It's the same thing. You know, basketball can be different besides free throws where they do like, and they do have rituals and free throws and they do have rituals and free throws. Although, you know, in that case, it's not that luck based. Um, so maybe there's two elements to it. There's just, it's the same thing. You go up to bat and you know, like you have counts, it's two and one. It's all, you know, if it's two and one, it's two and one. Like if it's

[00:48:54] O2 pitch, it's an O2 pitch. Like you've had that like a thousand times over the last two years, probably. So like those kinds of things, I think invite rituals, which is why like, you know, think about getting a peer reviewed paper published is something that is very luck based, like what referees you get. And yet we don't really have rituals around that because it's just not that,

[00:49:18] uh, it's like too spread out in time. You know, if we pressed a button and we found out right away, like maybe the shirt we were wearing would matter. Totally. That's why, Oh yeah. What I was going to say is like in other sports, I think fans are crazier about their rituals. Yes. You know, cause we have real, just no control. Argentina, it's as close to a national religion. The things that people will do, like everybody has in every household, they have something that they do that

[00:49:46] they swear they have to do. Yeah. And this is another thing I found in the lit search. People will say like, no, I know this has like push comes to shove. I know that this not doing anything, but it's still compelled. Yeah. No, I had that same thought is that even in sports where the players themselves are not that superstitious, the fans are. And I think it's exactly for the reason you say that we have zero control. So this is our way of asserting some control, which is our way of

[00:50:15] connecting with the team. Yeah. You know, it's like showing that we care. These things have such an expressive component and it's also like other people near you. Like, you know, you get mad at your friend if they jinx the game. Like if they like, think of how we talked about this recently, I think, but think of how mad you got at Yoel for texting you congratulations for the last Argentina. Like maybe he did that this time. He did not. He learned, he heard, he heard.

[00:50:43] So maybe it's the reverse. It's actually, I did develop, I developed a superstition this year. You know, I bought my messy shirt. Oh yeah. I saw that. I was witness to that. Yeah. And I, I developed, it's embarrassing. Mock me fine. I don't care. Mock me. Um, I would never, like, I just like, as the world cup progressed, I realized like I had to put the shirt on 10 minutes before kickoff. Like I couldn't put it on before. I couldn't put it on

[00:51:09] after. I remember when I was picking you up at the airport, I pulled over, like, even though I was like late, like I quickly pulled over so I could get my shirt on. The listeners should know that on, uh, I think at the quarterfinal match, uh, you picked me up from the airport, even though, uh, they were playing in Syracuse. They should also know that I did not take you to the airport. Well, that was, that was totally fair. And they should also know that I had to hold up the,

[00:51:38] your iPad on the way home. Of all people I knew you would understand. The other thing I wanted to say about this, you know, it's a little different. There's a thing that Malinovsky says about magic where he points out that the practice of magic, tends to be passed down to individuals as X who have expertise in it. So like there is the,

[00:52:04] whatever witch doctor or the wizard or the witch who knows this shit more than other people. And so people go to them and that seems slightly different. I don't know what the difference is. Cause he also talks about people, you know, having superstitions, but there is this sort of like cultural aspect to the magic in these cultures that he studied where like, it's a formalized set of rights and spells

[00:52:29] that are kind of secret. Right. Yeah. And one of the other things that I guess we should acknowledge is that baseball, there might be features of baseball that make it really likely to develop superstitions, but there's also a culture in baseball that has developed about this. Yeah, that's right. And I think like the difference maybe is that in a lot of these societies, it is very group specific. It's not individual specific what you do. And in baseball, it's more

[00:52:55] into, and maybe this is because the sport is more individual. Like when you're fishing, you're fishing for your family, you're fishing for like maybe like the larger group where in baseball, like you said, there's a lot of individual stats, but it's very personal. Whereas there's a social element to, the rituals, the rites. You know, one of the things that I wanted to say about like Malinovsky, one of the things I like about this article is he's kind of doing psychology and I think it goes

[00:53:21] in hand with his functionalist account, but he tries to kind of come up with an origin of why we do magic. And he has this like kind of cool way of describing when you really want something to happen and you have a strong emotion that is centered around like that specific outcome, you just like have to do something. Like it has to come out somehow. It might come out in like saying something. It might come out and like you're trying to do anything you can because you have no control over it. I kind

[00:53:51] of liked that emotional piece to it. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that emotional expressive aspect is something that we all have, you know, like, uh, when you are sitting in the same spot or when you're putting on that shirt, in that case, it's not social in a way. Maybe it's vicariously social because you know, other Argentinians are also doing their own rituals, but it's expressed

[00:54:17] because you love Argentina, even though they're a bunch of thugs that... They were mourning Messi's dads. Is that why? They started like attacking Spain after they watched that. They crashed out a little that was a crash out for sure. Uh, but like, that's your way of expressing your love for the team, you know, in addition to you actually also like, I have to do this so that we'll win. It's like

[00:54:42] this emotional connection. It's a symbol of your emotional attachment to the team. Yes, absolutely. That's right. So when Malinowski is talking about the, this sort of like origins of magic, uh, he says so far, we've been dealing mainly with native ideas and with native views of magic. This has led us to a point where the savage simply affirms that magic gives man the power over certain things. Now we must analyze this belief from the point of view of the sociological

[00:55:07] observer. Let us realize once more, the type of situation in which we find magic man engaged in a series of practical activities comes to a gap. The hunter is disappointed by his quarry. The sailor misses propitious winds. The canoe builder has to deal with some material of which he is never certain that it will stand the strain or the healthy person suddenly feels his strength failing. What does man do naturally under such conditions, setting aside all magic belief and ritual forsaken by his knowledge, baffled by his past experience and by his technical skill.

[00:55:36] He realizes his impotence yet. His desire grips him only the more strongly his anxiety, his fears and hopes induce attention in his organism, which drives him to some sort of activity, whether he be savage or civilized, whether in possession of magic or entirely ignorant of its existence. Passive inaction, the only thing dictated by reason is the last thing in which he can acquiesce. His nervous system and his whole organism drive him to some substitute activity.

[00:56:03] Obsessed by the idea of the desired end, he sees it and feels it. His organism reproduces the acts suggested by the anticipation of hope, dictated by the emotion of passion, so strongly felt. The man under the sway of impotent fury or dominated by thwarted hate spontaneously clenches his fists and carries out imaginary thrusts at his enemy, muttering imprecations, casting words of hatred and anger against him. The lover aching for his unattainable or irresponsive beauty sees her in his

[00:56:30] visions, addresses her and entreats and commands her favors, feeling himself accepted, pressing her to his bosom in his dreams and so on. Yeah, that's great. Yeah. Isn't it cool? It's great. And I think it really speaks to what I take to be at the heart of both these papers and this view that it's our fear of like loss of control, loss of agency, impotence that- You couldn't have planned a better first segment tie-in.

[00:56:58] Exactly. Because like, you know, like the other option, rather than going through these rituals and these routines and like just kind of getting back to work, even though it's like something that is a superstition, the other alternative is crashing out. Like those are two reactions to a situation where your destiny is not in your control. And I love that this paper like respects

[00:57:25] just the, like the fact that they're taking action in some way, even if we might think from on high, as he says, that it's silly. Of course, like this can't have any causal impact. At least you're doing something and you're not just passively acquiescing. You're not just throwing a fit and, you know, posting your IQ scores. Dude, it's almost exactly what you're saying. He, a few sentences later says,

[00:57:51] when passion reaches the breaking point at which man loses control over himself, the words which he utters, his blind behavior, allow the pent up physiological tension to flow over. But overall, this outburst presides the image of the end. It supplies the motive force of the reaction. It apparently organizes and directs words and acts towards a definite purpose. And I think that the practice of magic as it like might get formalized either by you and your

[00:58:17] development of rituals so that you have like a regularity of it. Like to know each time you're going to do in these uncontrollable situations, you're going to do this. You're going to, you know, cross yourself or you're going to like utter certain words or whatever. Like that is a way of not crashing out. That is a way of in the same way that the baseball player might actually perform better because he's doing these rituals. That loss of control, that high uncertainty, if it weren't for channeling

[00:58:46] it through something, it might just lead to a greater loss of control that would actually be bad in the way that this functional, it seems to be a functional argument for. Yeah. Right. So it ends up being in the best case scenario, like it actually is a way of taking action to assert some control or assert some agency over the situation. Like in the best case, because that confidence, you know, like we always talk about fake it till you make it,

[00:59:14] but like that confidence allows you to perform better. But even if it doesn't do that, even if like the thing is going to happen the way the thing is going to happen, whether you do the ritual or not, at least you feel like you're taking steps. And sometimes that can be a kind of false consciousness, but like sometimes it actually is really important. And sometimes it's the whole thing. Like sometimes you don't even really need the end. You need to just feel like you're working for the end, you know?

[00:59:42] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, I like, obviously there are downsides to superstitious behavior and like these kinds of weird causal beliefs. Like you, I'm sure it can fuck up things. Maybe you're not doing a thing that you should be doing. Maybe you had more control over it than you, whatever. Like this is all just to say, that's not the fun part of this conversation, but I hope that's obvious. Yeah. Well, obviously if you're like burning like babies or something as a way of like,

[01:00:07] or, you know, Agamemnon sacrificing his daughter so that they can sail to Troy. I mean, that's actually, that reminds me like those kinds of magic rituals, like just were things. And it's like in the Bible, like there are these stories, the army of Israel is defeating this other army and the king of the other army realizes that the only, like his only recourse is to sacrifice

[01:00:36] to his God. And so he brings his firstborn son and like on the city wall or something like literally kills his own son as a sacrifice to the God. And what's kind of funny in the story is that this seems to work because they end up defeating Israel. Yeah. I mean, it works in the Trojan war eventually, I guess, and not for long for Agamemnon,

[01:01:01] but yeah, no, I know. Like I've been thinking of Abraham and Isaac, you know, like part of sacrificing is that it's dear to you what you sacrifice. That's right. And in fact, the Cain and Abel story exactly is like that where Cain gets in trouble, not because he sacrificed fruit instead of animals, because he didn't give his first fruit, like the first crop, like it's your firstborn son. It's your best lamb. Yeah, exactly. And that's not really talked about much in this. Like it's pretty harmless,

[01:01:29] the kinds of rituals I believe throughout, right? Does he even talk about sacrifice? No. Like I think that he's kind of focused on inconsequential things, but that does get lead to a question of mine, which is like the division between magic and religion seems right when I was reading this. But some of the stuff that we're talking about now, like these rituals directly to

[01:01:52] appease a God, like an intermediary. And I guess he does say this. He says magic is when the individual is trying to directly control the outcome themselves. Yeah. They have a specific end that they're trying to achieve. And there's no intermediary because there are cases where you're praying to the storm God or whatever. And that's religion. Is it religion in that case?

[01:02:16] I think so, because once you're creating supernatural entities that you need to please, in order to like, you're no longer directly controlling. You know, he's not tying these three things causally. Like I think he's against that, but it does seem as if the story of how magic and superstition could arise would be the kind of thing that might lead as you formalize and formalize and you develop myths. He talks about mythology and stuff, but like that might give

[01:02:45] rise to religion, you know? You mean, so it starts out with, oh, I have this magic spell that I can say, and that will cause this woman to like me or this person to have a baby. Yeah. Or my crops not to fail. And then it's like, okay, no, now I have to sacrifice an ox to this specific God. Yeah. Because that God actually has control over this domain of nature.

[01:03:10] Yeah. But it's maybe it's not as specific. Yeah. Yeah. No, you're right. They certainly blend together and it is weird. I didn't think about it at the time I was reading it, but it's weird that he really only focuses on the ones that are harmless and positive. And often if they're not collective, you know, like in the case of religion, he often talks about collective experience, although he doesn't think like Durkheim that it has to be that way or it's like intrinsically like that.

[01:03:39] But yeah, he doesn't really get into the ways that this can be destructive, I guess, to people. You know, I've been reading a little bit about voodoo and there is a distinction and like, forgive my ignorance for people who know more about this than me, but there is a religion voodoo, like which people now spell V-U-D-U. That's like the Haitian, like has its origins in Africa and it's a world of spirits. Like it is a world of like spirits that are in different clans,

[01:04:09] like different families. It's like a very fleshed out set of religious beliefs. But then there's like voodoo, like say we think about like Louisiana voodoo or like hoodoo where you're just like, you know, like the trope of a voodoo doll. Yeah. So there is like that pre-religious kind of spell and incantation and rite that is not necessarily tied to a religion. Yeah. And tying this back to

[01:04:36] baseball, do you see Major League? I think so, but it would have been years ago. So Major League has a player played by Dennis Haysbert and probably not the most politically correct presentation of a, I don't know where he's from, but maybe from Haiti. He's a voodoo practitioner and he like, he has in his locker, like this voodoo God that he prays to and that he gives rum to and... are a siempre poderoso.

[01:05:09] Hey, Paz, are there Pedro? Yeah, sí. I cannot hit curveball. Straight ball, I hit it very much. Curveball, bats are afraid. I asked Jobu to come. Take fear from bats. I offer him cigar and rum. He will come.

[01:05:36] You know, you might think about taking Jesus Christ as your savior instead of fooling around with all this stuff. Shit, Harris. Jesus. I like him very much. He no help with curveball. Wouldn't leave a rum sitting around out here with this group. He's very bad.

[01:06:02] Steal Jobu's rum. He's very bad. And, you know, like the movie actually is fairly respectful of it. You know, now they would have to make it about the Cleveland Guardians. That just doesn't... Yeah, that's true. One, like, by coincidence, I've been reading this book on Shaiva Tantra,

[01:06:29] this kind of Hindu tantric religion or tradition, and like all Hindu-Buddhist traditions of this type, and especially non-dual traditions, that the self is empty, the self isn't real, it's a construction. And in a lot of these, the way the self gets built up is as a response to the unpredictability of the environment, a way of asserting control.

[01:06:58] You sort of build in these self-referential patterns of behavior as a way for, like, the organism to assert control in an environment which they consider to be free and spontaneous and conform in all sorts of different ways. And this is like being, but that's not like a self in the way that we think of ourselves as a self with a personality and with tendencies and all that,

[01:07:27] like, that these things kind of self-reinforce themselves as a response to the anxiety that the organism feels or whatever you want to call this quasi-being feels to, like, not having control over their environment, their circumstances, and so they actually create a self. I mean, it's hard for me to wrap my head around, and I think at some level you can't wrap your head around it. But I think that's interesting that at some level

[01:07:54] that might be the thing that is, like, the greatest human anxiety, like, the greatest, like, existential threat to us is that lack of control. Yeah, that is super interesting. And it kind of makes sense. As I was, like, reading about this stuff, like, the connection across so many strains of thought that uncertainty plays this big role. Like, I don't know if I'm stating the obvious, but it is at the heart of everything we do. Like, whatever you're talking about,

[01:08:22] like, the predictive processing approaches, behaviorism, and learning, like, it is all connected in this way that is a response to what is ultimately the human condition. Like, the absolute fucking tossed into a world where there is a degree of uncertainty that you have to deal with. Yeah, and, like, if you have a job where you have autonomy, like, that's a really good job. People talk about fuck you money. What does that mean?

[01:08:51] That means, like, you're not at the whims of some boss that can tell you what to do to such an extent because you're dependent on that job to live. If you have fuck you money, you can't, like, like, so many things are at the heart of us wanting to have control over our fate to some degree, even though we know we can't. Yeah, even though we're faced with, like, the very truth that we can't. And his discussion of death is like this. It's like, like, there are certainties about life

[01:09:19] that are also, like, surrounded with anxiety. I don't know how to describe it, but, like, everybody's born. Everybody goes through puberty. Everybody dies. Everybody, not everybody, but lots of people get married. And, like, we center collective activities around those events. Like, I guess those are still uncontrollable. They just happen to us, but, like, they happen reliably. Yeah, that's more, like, things that happen that we don't want or sometimes that we don't want. Well, certainly with death.

[01:09:47] But, yeah, it seems like there's two ways of responding to it. There's the way, like, you can't get a girl to like you. Like, many of the rituals that he's talking about is making a woman fall in love with you or making a woman bury you children or something like that. And, you know, all the different contingencies of life, one way of trying to do it is to be like, you know, like, gain control. Do the looks maxing, you know, like, read all the books about how to assert yourself. Start negging. Negging. Read the game. Negging, exactly.

[01:10:17] But then the other, like, sort of wisdom tradition way of handling with this is to surrender yourself to the uncertainty. And in some ways, that's not what he's saying here. He's saying that religion is kind of a noble way of asserting some agency. But then there are some religions that encourage exactly the opposite of that as well. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think, like, the deep truth of Buddhism, as I understand it, is realizing

[01:10:46] that you're like a fucking leaf in the wind. Like, maybe you should first realize that. Realizing it and, like, finally, like, embracing it. Because ultimately these things don't work in the way that we wish they would. Yeah. Yeah. That gets to this one, like, the last thing, at least from my end, that I wanted to talk about, which is he has a discussion of why magical practices persist when, like, it's pretty obvious that they often don't work.

[01:11:16] And there is a discussion in the baseball, in the magic baseball, about that too. Like, you know, you're on a hitting streak and you don't shave, but, like, it ends. So, like, was the beard doing anything? And he has, like, a kind of a cool discussion about the built-in protections that magic has to deal with its failures. And so he says, first of all, magic is surrounded by strict conditions, exact remembrance of a spell, unimpeachable performance of the right, unswerving adhesion to the taboos and observances which shackle the magician.

[01:11:46] If any one of these is neglected, failure of magic follows. And then even if magic be done in the most perfect manner, its effects can be equally well undone, for against every magic, there can also be countermagic. So, like, it's pretty, like, it's a nice buffer for the local witch doctor. It has a good unfalsifiability element built into it. Yeah. But I was fascinated by the magic baseball discussion of how some players are quicker to abandon

[01:12:14] their practices when they don't work and some just seem to, you know, like Wade Boggs. It's like 27 years of chicken. Yeah. Or whatever. And, you know, like, you could be of two minds about that. Like, because if you're really going to switch every time something doesn't work, then you're going to be switching, you know, assuming these things don't have a huge causal impact, you're going to be switching constantly and then you'll lose the comfort of the routine. But at the same time, if you stick to something

[01:12:43] that, like, in your heart, like, it's almost got to be tied to, like, do you believe this still works or not? Yeah. My favorite, like, I love these examples of, like, Jordan wearing the 45 and Kobe wearing, like, the, what's the 24? And they were just like, oh, fuck. Like, they were, it was like a new, it was a new phase in life and they were going to, like, change it. And they quickly went back. They went right back to it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I guess if we're going to wrap this up,

[01:13:11] I want to read then the last paragraph because it's so beautiful, I think. He says, Looking from far and above, from our high places of safety and developed civilization, it is easy to see all the crudity and irrelevance of magic. But without its power and guidance, early man could not have mastered his practical difficulties as he has done, nor could he have advanced to the highest stages of culture. Hence, do we find magic an invariable adjunct of all important activities.

[01:13:41] I think we must see it as the embodiment of the sublime folly of hope, which has yet been the best school of man's character. So I love that line, the sublime folly of hope. So good. It keeps you optimistic when everything seems like, you know, like the forces of the universe are lined up against you. Yeah. He says, The function of magic is to ritualize man's optimism, to enhance his faith in the victory of hope over fear.

[01:14:11] Yeah. Yeah. And it's, in some cases, our best attempt at dealing with this shit that is an uncertain life. And I wonder the whole time, is like, is like card magic? Does that count? It might. Right. And your deepest anxiety is taken care of. I shall defeat death by making the card you selected float to the top of the deck. All right. All right. This is a great art. I'm like, I'm so glad. I feel like I should have known

[01:14:40] about this work before. Yeah, me too. I really, I really enjoyed thinking about it. And yeah, I bet we'll come back to this topic. I mean, I guess we have been circling around this quite a bit in recent years, but all right. Thanks everybody. Join us next time on Very Bad Wizards.

[01:15:04] I'm a very good man.

[01:15:42] Just a very bad wizard.