"Hey, If We Think Real Hard, Maybe We Can Stop This Rain!"
Magical thinking occurs when a drop of truth is magnified by desire into a lake of delusion where reason can only flounder and drown.
When the announcer at Woodstock said "If we think real hard, maybe we can stop this rain," his words contained both a particular and a general truth. The particular truth was that nobody knows for certain what telekinetic effects 300,000 people in one place might be able to achieve by concentrating on a single object. The general truth was that nobody knows for certain what the limits of human potential are. But properly viewed, these are modest truths. Both speak only of possibility. And while acknowledging possibility is not an irrational thing in itself, it can be a dangerously seductive one when it concerns something we really want -- like mind-over-matter. The children of Woodstock were all about tearing down conventional limits and opening vistas of possibility. And while that is not a bad thing in itself, it can deprive the poorer navigators among us of landmarks they may need to maintain a course. That indeed is the central tragedy of our generation, a tragedy that can be attributed to our peculiar mode of magical thinking: how many of us got lost, foundered, and sank because they fell prey to the siren call of unconstraint. A further tragedy, one step removed from this, is how many of us -- or our immediate successors -- rushed to embrace constraint wherever it was offered, producing an absolutist, proto-totalitarian backlash that continues, four decades later, to reverberate loudly down the corridors of history.
