I have this friend, N, that has recently started believing things very out of the ordinary. He said that he’s been getting into paganism and studying runes and candles. I told him that was very interesting, it sounded like a fun time and a good hobby to have. N let me know that it wasn’t just a hobby, but that it had a function and purpose, a sort of witchcraft.
I come from an academic background; it doesn’t seem healthy to me to actually believe and try to practice witchcraft, not because it might be real, but because of the mental health associations with it. So I told my concerns to N but he brushed them off, saying that people have the right to believe in what they want. I respect that, but I do not want N to fall into delusion. I let him know, as respectful as I could, that believing in witchcraft does not make it real and that it wasn’t healthy to believe otherwise. He got really bothered when I told him he should talk to his therapist about this stuff. N has a history of mental health issues and was in a deeply abusive relationship for a few years which cause him a lot of grief. I was accused of being rude and trying to impose my beliefs. His last message to me was him asking me to stop and that anyone has a right to believe what they want.
I cherish N a lot as a friend, I do not wish them any harm. I respect that anyone has a right to believe what they want, but I really don’t think this is healthy for my friend. Is there any way I can help him? Is the best way forward to just stop and let him be?
We like to think that we are perfect beings that don’t believe any BS because we’re skeptical about “the supernatural world” or what have you. But ultimately, we are not too different from your friend. Lacan has the idea of the “Real”. It’s the abyss of reality which we construct our whole psyche to escape from. Reality is so soul crushing and destructive that we need to creat symbols and images in order to protect ourselves from it and create a personal narrative that lets us navigate the world.
Your friend is going with witchcraft - but secular evidence based scientists aren’t fundamentally different. Our beliefs in money, democracy, borders are more or less all collective delusions that we agree to maintain. We have a fixed idea of who we are - our sense of self - which in reality is a fragmented mess. Our scientific models of reality are simplified frameworks for which to view reality - if we look at the Newtonian model of physics it works perfectly fine for us to do a lot of useful things. But ultimately it’s a flawed framework. It doesn’t accurately represent reality.
It’s impossible to accurately represent reality. We can only try to get closer, and many times that doesn’t get us any closer at all. Just a different type of wrong.
So we go back to your friend, toying around with beliefs that are obviously false to me or you. Is it harmful? It is adaptive? It really depends. Unless he’s doing things that are going to harm him or others (starts sacrificing sheep or something) then I say let him do it. He’s really just building a framework in an attempt to understand / bare reality.
While cars are real, the price of the dollar is what we believe it should be. Willpower alone can change what the dollar is worth. I cannot eat the dollar, the dollar has no function other than a representation of worth. And worth is also something that is subjective.
Secular evidence based science is closest to reality only if you accept secular as not attached to religion and not the Soviet “religion is active brain rot”.
A square will exist without us, your gods will not.
If you assume religion is true and work backwards you will get non replicatable answers.
@tikitaki
@Valhaitham
Let’s not compare an invention (ie money/borders) to something completely made up that has no basis in reality.
Just because money isn’t in nature and we invented it doesn’t mean it’s a societal delusion that we simply accept. You could say the same for cars and bikes and planes and video games. Literally everything fabricated is “a fake delusion”.
Democracy is closer to what you’re saying but still not right.
You have to compare a belief to a belief. You can compare religions and other philosophies using your logic but shouldn’t bring in real things cause it falls apart.
the only reason a piece of paper or a pixel on a screen has any value to trade for goods and services is because we collectively agree that it has value
the belief creates the system. it’s an ideology, a religion. is it a useful construct? absolutely.
the point is that our existence is full of these beliefs. it’s a prerequisite for being a human that can interact with the world. we need these constructs otherwise the Real would not make sense and we would essentially be monkeys
I can repeatedly use money to buy things with a 100% success rate, which is a bit higher than praying.
Yes, faith in the current value of money is what gives it the current value, but money as a thing does not require faith to see it working as a way to make trade easier than barter.
Faith can be a positive thing, but it is the opposite of something that literally exists and people interact with every day.
Yes, you can use money to buy things, and it works consistently. But let us not forget that beneath this seeming functionality, money is nothing more than a piece of paper or a digital representation. Its value is not inherent but a construct, a Symbolic order as Lacan would say, imbued by our collective belief and trust in the system.
Just like how the Lacanian ‘big Other’ is a social construct that regulates our social reality, money too is a sort of ‘big Other’ - a shared illusion that maintains its power as long as we continue to believe in it. It’s not about the physical money itself, but the social contract it represents.
In the same way, religious and philosophical beliefs, such as our friend’s belief in witchcraft, are also part of the Symbolic order. They are systems of understanding and interacting with the world, constructed from collective agreement, belief, and faith. These belief systems may not align with empirical reality as we understand it, but that does not diminish their power to shape individual behavior and interaction.
So, if we are to follow Zizek’s line of thought, all ideologies - money, science, witchcraft - are like the glasses we wear to view the world. They are the fantasies we construct to veil the unbearable Real. As Zizek famously said, “We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.”
The lenses may vary from person to person, but all serve to mediate our experience of the world and give it meaning. Our friend’s belief in witchcraft is just another lens, another narrative to make sense of the chaos of existence. We may not agree with it, but it’s crucial to remember that the ‘Real’ itself is inaccessible - all we have are interpretations and narratives. In that sense, his belief system is not fundamentally different from our trust in the value of money or the validity of scientific models.