by Crimethinc. Workers' Collective
Available in 284 free installments
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a personal mythology
A PROCESS THAT NURTURES THE DEVELOPMENTS THEREOF
Ingredients
When it comes to really making things happen, you'll probably find it's more effective Instructions
to come up with crazy schemes with a couple of friends and believe in them so intensely that everyone else begins to as well ("Hey, did you hear what's going to happen . . . ?") than it is to meet in big groups and struggle to hit on some plan that somehow satisfies everybody. The scale of the latter kind of plan is usually limited to the lowest common denominator of what everyone considers possible, and such approaches rarely lead beyond the narrow confines of the status quo.
To pull off a revolution on any scale, you have to be able to believe outside the box. Reality, both present and future, is created by mass consensus: consensus about what is worthwhile (a house, a husband and kids, a retirement plan), about the meaning of the surrounding world ("Downtown is for shopping, highways are for driving, Friday night is for drinking ..."), about what can and will take place ("If we all simultaneously stopped paying rent and clocking in, it could work, but that will never happen ..."). Even a small group of people who believe against the grain can call an entire world-system into question, not to mention liberate themselves from its supposed inevitabilities. If the alternate world they consider themselves to inhabit is convincing, and more appeal- 501
*An excellent example of spell casting
recorded by recent historians is the
life of Joan of Arc. When Joan was
fourteen, a year before she left the
obscurity of her family's rural farm
to Join the French armies and lead
them to w'rtory in the name of God
ouerthe invading English, her village
celebrated a local holiday with one
of those cookouts at ivhich old folks
sit around drinking and reminiscing
while youngsters run and wrestle and
tell tales in the yard. Near the end of
the evening, sitting in a bush with her
cousin, youngjoan confided her secret
to him in the breathless seriousness
with which children express themselves
in such moments: in one year, she
explained, she would leave the farm
and lead the French armies to victory
over the invading English, for she had
been chosen by Cod. Many of us make
and fulfill similar predictions about
ourselves: we will one day have our
own apartments and children, we wilt
grow up to be writers or sing in bands,
we will purchase new pairs of shoes.
Would that we could visualize our
greatness on the scale Saint Joan did!
Spell Casting
§02
ing than the one everyone else accepts, the future itself can be hijacked by the desires this minority trusts and thus unleashes.
To speak on a smaller scale, perception and reality influence one another, and believing that something is possible is generally a prerequisite for being capable of bringing it about. In this sense, whether a desire for revolution or anything else is "realistic" is a moot point: for the individual v^^ho does not wish to cripple herself, the question is not what to beHeve in as "the" truth but what beliefs render which truths possible. Being pragmatic is often the least pragmatic way to approach Hfe.
But how does one go about beHeving in one's crazy schemes in a psychotically sane society? That's where the science of spell casting comes in.
The simplest way to cast a spell is to begin to act "as if": as if there are others who feel as you do, as if you are possessed of great powers, as if you are the protagonist of a story with a happy ending. Do what it takes to position yourself far enough from the madding crowd that you can establish contact with other realities?stop watching television and reading newspapers, travel far from home and outside the circuits set out for your social class, do the unthinkable in your own life so you can think the undoable in social life. Practice believing, as the queen in Alice in Wonderland recommended, at least six impossible things every day before breakfast. When you truly believe something and act accordingly, your conviction takes the form of a self-fulfilling prophecy.''
