How Not To Do Magic: The Saga Continues

[ecosophia]

It's been a while since we've checked in on the efforts of the soi-disant "Magical Resistance" -- that is to say, the people who still haven't gotten over the fact that Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election, and are expressing their rage and hatred by way of magical rituals rather than public tantrums of some other kind.  Partly, I'm glad to say, that's because they seem to have learned one of the basic lessons of magical practice, which is that being public about your workings is a great way to let other operative mages know how to mess with you. Since the spectacularly unsuccessful attempt to use magic to keep Brett Kavanaugh from being confirmed as a Supreme Court justice, the Magical Resistance has been much quieter about its intentions and ritual texts. I'm pleased to see this; any indication that the very low standard of magical competence in modern American society has risen a bit is worth celebrating. 

That said, the efforts of the Magical Resistance to hinder the Trump administration don't seem to have been favored with any greater level of success than before. The latest and most obvious example of this, of course, is the end of the Mueller investigation. For more than two years now, a great many of the people who hate Donald Trump have been insisting at the top of their lungs that Mueller would inevitably find some suitably gaudy collection of impeachable offenses in Trump's conduct in office. At least some of the people who were busy casting spells to bring Trump down, to judge from their comments on various online forums, loaded a great many of their hopes on Mueller -- and, to judge by the rituals they were using back when they were being public about it, an equally large share of their magical efforts. Those clearly didn't do much, and there's a useful lesson in operative magic to be drawn from their failure. 

The core of that failure comes from their choice of intention. Those of the Mueller-centric spells I encountered, back when such things were being made public, focused nearly all their rhetoric on the ideal of justice. That's a perfectly valid magical intention, but like most other perfectly valid magical intentions, it has a catch:  you really do need to be sure that justice is on your side. 

In a criminal investigation, justice includes such basic elements as fairness, impartiality, and a willingness to suspend judgment until all the facts have come to light. The goal of a just investigation is to punish those who are actually guilty of the charges made against them and to vindicate those who are innocent. If you say instead, "I hate the defendant, therefore he must be guilty of the accusations," that's unjust; if, more cynically, you say, "I hate the defendant, therefore I don't care what the facts say, I'm going to insist that he's guilty of the accusations," that's also unjust. The attitude of the Trump-haters toward the Mueller investigation was one of these two -- I'll let my readers make their own speculations as to which one -- and I can promise you that if you perform a magical working for justice motivated by one or the other of these deeply unjust attitudes, you are not going to like the results. 

And of course that's what happened. As far as I can tell, the outcome of the Mueller investigation was, technically speaking, a success for the Magical Resistance, in that justice did in fact happen. That is to say, an innocent man was cleared of false accusations made against him by his political enemies, and some of the people who helped to spread those accusations have suffered a great deal of public embarrassment. That's entirely just. If that wasn't what the Magical Resistance had in mind, why, that's what happens when you're insufficiently careful about the intentions you choose for your working. 

The moral to this story? Justice isn't whatever you want it to be, neither is magic -- and if you're not sufficiently careful with either one, you can very efficiently kick yourself in the backside. 

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Previous inadvertently anonymous comment about waiting until we can read the actual report was written by me, Deborah Bender. I don't feel like figuring out how to post it under my own name.