Summary: <br> <a href="https://twitter.com/MarcPColeman" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener external" data-wpel-link="external">Marc Coleman</a> is a business consultant, former broadcaster and journalist. He is currently working on a book on the persistence of western democracy.<br> <br> <br> <br> <a href="https://blog.hereshow.ie/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Marc-Coleman-scaled.jpg" data-wpel-link="internal"></a><br> <br> <br> *****<br> <br> <br> <br> ‘Magical thinking’ is a great phrase that I learnt years ago, it’s a concept that’s useful to understand someone’s thought processes, maybe even your own. If you know what it is, skip forward about two minutes; if you don’t, it’s important to understand that it’s not a positive thing, in fact it’s very negative.<br> <br> <br> <br> The concept of magical thinking is often used by therapists, psychologists and so on, to classify a particular thought process, and to help their patients to get over it. You see it at a comical level sometimes in kids, don’t step on the cracks in the pavements or the monster will get you. That’s basically the core of it, believing that one thing can affect another thing where two seconds of rational thought by an adult will tell you that it can’t.<br> <br> <br> <br> People with mental health problems frequently exhibit magical thinking. A very famous example would be John Hinckley, Jr, the guy who shot Ronald Reagan in 1981, did it because he thought it would impress the actress Jodie Foster and make her fall in love with him.<br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> Everyone can see that isn’t rational thinking, but a lot of those people might well have a lucky pen they do the lotto with, salute a magpie, not want to stay on the thirteenth floor of a hotel or whatever. But those things are basically harmless, if they give people comfort, there isn’t really any point in doing anything about them.<br> <br> <br> <br> What therapists focus on magical thinking that harms people, interferes with their life to the point that they can’t live normally. There are people who have such compulsive obsessions that they can’t leave their house until they have spent hours switching on and off lights or locking and unlocking doors, and they are certain that their house will burn down if they don’t perform a ritual like this.<br> <br> <br> <br> Other forms of magical thinking include doing things are disconnected from the desired effect, but the disconnection isn’t so instantly apparent. This often crops up in people that have suffered abuse; they’re often quite tragic, such as an abused child doing anything that they can think of that will cause the abuse to stop.<br> <br> <br> <br> These cases are too sad to even give examples here, but you get the idea, a child or even an adult telling themselves that they caused this incident of abuse themselves, because they didn’t do this or that right, and clinging to that thought because the reality that they would be abused anyway is too horrific to confront. Even more tragically, these thought patterns can be exploited by an abuser, and used to put the blame for the abuse on the victim.<br> <br> <br> <br> It’s a therapist’s job to help the victim see that the magical thinking is just wrong. So that’s magical thinking. It’s something that’s not nearly as nice as the name sounds.<br> <br> <br> <br> I thought of that about two issues that have been in the news in the past few weeks. I think that magical thinking has a particular role when it comes to Irish whattaboutery – when people clearly on the wrong side of a political debate try to divert attention to a different topic and away from their own losing argument.<br> <br> <br> <br> The first was the emissions reductions that are going to be imposed on farming. Agriculture is really getting a big pass here. Agriculture is <a href="https://www.gov.ie/en/press-release/dab6d-government-announces-sectoral-emissions-ce...%5D%5D" data-wpel-link="external" target="_blank" rel="external noopener noreferrer"> <title>Defender of the faiths</title> </a>
