Immature minds are so threatened by the knowledge that random horrible suffering is an integral part of human experience that they use magical thinking to protect themselves from having to accept this difficult reality.
Let’s see how magical thinking works using the example of reactions to the Parris terror acts. Everybody is scared of terrorists, and the idea that one can get blown up by men in masks while one is dining at a restaurant is intolerable to many, forcing them to use early childhood coping strategies.
1. To make terrorists seem less scary, one can indulge in an imaginary redistribution of power where the self becomes big and strong and the terrorist is imagined as small and pitiful. “Terrorists killed because they were driven to desperation by poverty and marginalization, as well as the hopelessness of Palestinians. I’m powerful because I can see what is happening to them and take steps to protect them from further hurt. And when I do that, they will not hurt me.”
This narrative is very similar to “Daddy hit me because I upset him. If I stop causing him hurt and forcing him to hit me, he will stop.”
[To be continued. . .]
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The Ugly Diplomat version:
“I’m going to punch your Daddy covertly, and then I’m going to punch you, basing this action on the pretext that I’m defending your Daddy from your covert insubordination, which should make you behave better.”
Seriously, there’s more than a little bit of this in what we’d tend to call “first-order analyses” …
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