Week 2 of the Blog (by Gord)
Hi everyone. As I announced in class, this week’s blog topic is “Something you don’t believe” or “Something you don’t believe in”.
I don’t believe in magic. I wish that magic were real, but it isn’t. If it were real, then I would be able to solve all my problems very easily. I could be healthier, wealthier, and I could change the world without any real effort. So maybe it seems like a bad thing that magic isn’t real. But, in fact, I think it’s a very good thing that magic doesn’t exist.
After all, if I could use magic, so could everyone else. If everyone was a millionaire, then cabbage would cost a million dollars a head. If everyone had magic, everyone would use it all the time for everything. And that’s just the innocuous result of magic. There are also a small number of people who would do very bad things with magic. I wish it weren’t true, but history has taught us again that too much power sometimes tempts people to do horrible things.
I think most people don’t really believe in magic, but I also think that “magical thinking” is widespread. For example, a lot of people think that if they don’t talk about a problem, it will go away. This idea is basically a magical one, if you think about it, because talking doesn’t really change anything. However, in many old stories, myths, and fairy tales, talking about something is what makes things happen, for good or bad. Similarly, people who wish that global warming wasn’t happening seem to believe that they can prevent it just by saying that it isn’t happening.
Probably it’s a very old way of thinking, that goes far back to before people studied science or nature in a modern way. Words do have power — political, social, and expressive power — and we really should be careful about how we talk about things. But I do not believe that words are magical, because I do not believe that magic exists!