This concept is fundamental to the ideas developed in Magical Thinking in America.

The lack of integration between major types of thought process used by the brain results in an incoherent body of human ideas. Archaic (supernatural) and modern (scientific) explanations for the environment describe mutually exclusive universes. Attempts to reconcile these distinct universes create disaster: ever-more powerful technologies are developed, directed and used against human beings and nature by the Top Male hierarchy. The secrets of nature are routinely turned over to thugs.

The explanation for obvious and longstanding contradictions in human behavior is revealed in the additive nature of the human brain, which is a poorly integrated compilation of evolved functions. The evolution of the brain from a simple bioelectrical circuit into the complex of functions that must operate the animal body has not been without problems, especially in human species. The primate lifestyle requires a large brain, long gestation, and delayed infant development and care, activities that are fueled by a diet high in fat and protein. This trend in quality vs. quantity led to a large brain size-to-body ratio in hominids. Bipedal stance, increased tool use, response to rapid environmental change, a diet high in fat and protein, the development of spoken language, competition among hominid species, and genetic mutations, are all contributors to the present state of Homo sapiens.

The archaic brain is instinctual; it operates on automatic responses to the environment that we identify as emotion and intuition (gut feelings) , but instinct also appears in humans as images and symbols that manifest in dreams and art, and as the magical explanations found in myth and religion for both internal and external phenomena. These explanations do not correspond to physical reality: the laws of nature are routinely overturned in religions; religion is the ritual presentation of a culture’s central myth. (Joseph Campbell)

The result is belief in a supernatural dimension that exists outside physical reality; this non-existent dimension is a projection of the magical human brain onto the external environment. It can be all but impossible for human beings to “get” this relationship, because the human desire to dominate the environment is extreme and adaptive. Gods (which began simply, as ancestors0 are the projection of this dominance need onto imaginary and all-powerful beings that can be manipulated into overthrowing nature in favor of man.

Human reaction to the environment, and our interactions with nature, continue to be dominated by supernatural delusion; it is the default mode of thinking of the social brain. This odd condition –which produces a human view of the universe that is extremely inaccurate, can be resolved if we understand that man evolved in a natural environment that was very different from artificial modern environments. Our early ancestors may have wondered at the origin of their surroundings, but the content of their experience was physical and natural: earth, sky, water; the sun, the moon, and certain stars, and the plants and animals they depended on for survival. These feelings of wonder would have been oriented to survival, and not to philosophical questions about existence. How do I gain control over an environment that includes other humans? That was the central question for modern man. Force and cunning, deception and intimidation were the available tools, and still are the preferred means of male domination.

Not much could go wrong when the human population was small and weapons and tools were good enough for food acquisition and for defense. Incorrect assumptions as to the underlying principles of how the world works (revealed by science) did not preclude the development of basic technology; tools and weapons were limited by a trial and error relationship with the laws of nature. A tool worked, or it didn’t. Some tools, such as hammers, have remained unchanged for thousands of years and are used also by other primates, mammals and birds. The development of tools is a fascinating area of study since it is deeply involved with the availability of materials and the human ability to observe and copy other animals and the forces of nature. Tools are entwined with how we use the brain.

Definitions of terms used in Magical Thinking in America

NATURAL: Having a real or physical existence as opposed to one that is spiritual, intellectual, or fictitious.

SUPERNATURAL: A being, location, object, or event that exists outside physical law; a dimension that is a product of the human brain, and which exists nowhere else.

MAGIC: A fundamental mode of human thought, which seeks to control physical reality through ritual and formulae. Homeopathic magic imitates the desired outcome. Contagious magic utilizes objects that have been in contact with the target individual.

ANIMISM: A stage in which the world is seen in terms of human consciousness; creatures and objects are regarded as having souls, spirits, or awareness.

RELIGION: Religion is the ritual presentation of the culture myth –Joseph Campbell
Magic and animism are fundamental to religion. Modern "-isms" such as Nazism, Socialism, Capitalism, New Age-ism. Politics and advertising also fit the definition.

MIND: The sum of an organism's or group's reactions to the environment. Instinct is the source of automatic reactions; other reactions are cultivated. Emotions comprise the fundamental mind.

CULTURE: The sum of an organism's or group's interactions with the environment. These may be instinctual, learned, or invented. All living things have mind and culture; mind and culture aren't exclusive to humans. A bacterium both reacts to and interacts with its environment.

CONSCIOUSNESS: A term that is defined and used so broadly that it has become all but useless. (See sections on co-consciousness and supernatural consciousness.)

HYPOTHESIS: A rational explanation of an event or observation that must be supported or rejected through further observation and experimentation. Results must be confirmed by other scientists.

SCIENTIFIC LAW: A statement of fact that explains an action or set of actions, often expressed as a mathematical equation. Scientific laws must be simple, true, universal, and essential to science.

THEORY: A scientific Theory is founded on proven hypotheses and explains a group of related phenomena. It must be verified by independent research. The popular phrase “just a theory” suggests that a Theory is no more than a guess. This expression adds to the confusion among the public as to the value of scientific knowledge.

PRIMATE: Compared to other mammals of similar size, primates have large brains are slow to mature. They have long life spans and their offspring have a high survival rate. Lemurs, monkeys, and great apes (man) are primates; there are over 300 primate species.

HOMINID: Any of various primates of the family Hominidae, whose only living members are modern humans. Hominids are characterized by an upright gait, an increase in brain size and intelligence compared with other primates, a flattened face, and reduction in the size of the teeth and jaw. Besides the modern species Homo sapiens, hominids also include extinct species such as Homo erectus and the extinct genus Australopithecus. The American Heritage® Science Dictionary Copyright © 2002.

Blood is the most powerful substance in the practice of magic.

Rational Thinking is voluntary and directed thinking. The scientific method is a rigorous application of rational thinking, which in its basic form is the ability to examine one’s own thoughts for correlation with real situations. The process involves gathering relevant information (facts, opinions), organizing the information, and then analyzing the information in order to devise a solution or explanation that works. Results are the test of an idea.

Magical thinking jumps to conclusions based on incorrect assumptions: superstition is the result. Superstition does not provide solutions that work, but which instead delay problem-solving, and often create more suffering for those involved.

Blood has always been a source of power and magical qualities. Many people believe that “the blood” of certain people is “good” whereas other people carry “bad blood" and that this quality persists in families or ethnic groups. They speak of the blood of their ancestors as having provided them with superior characteristics or personality traits. This has been discredited by the discovery of DNA and the genetic inheritability of traits, a product of rational thinking that required dedicated research over many decades, and is now well-established as the program that has created the evolution of life forms. And yet people still refer to the “magic” in blood as the source of pollution, inferiority, personal character, and social status. Many people don't "get" DNA as a code, but merely attribute magic power to DNA as a successor to blood.

This belief in the magical power of blood is obvious in the popular “one drop” rule by which some Native Americans and African Americans define themselves. The idea that one African or native tribal ancestor “erases” the contribution of all other ancestors is a ridiculous superstition, and it is in direct opposition to the goals of human equality, cooperation, and fair treatment for all people, regardless of superficial differences. The political and social idea of equality is supported by the evidence provided in human DNA, which demonstrates that all human beings are members of the same species and that racial characteristics are minor adaptations to specific environments. Race as a valid description of variety in human beings has been debunked by science, and yet the idea persists, and is used without question by Americans, including those who desire to leave inaccurate and ignorant ideas behind us.

An actual Native American woman (Yuman) and a New Age religious fantasy inspired by the magical "one drop" rule.

All art lies.

The power of art is that it convinces the human brain that any idea, no matter how ridiculous, corresponds to reality.

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The connection of art and language to the persistence of the supernatural mind is easy to demonstrate. There are no blue deer or orange pigs in nature, and yet humans have no difficulty imagining or creating these nonexistent creatures in words and images. Our thought landscape is populated by ideas of this type, which persist because of the unquestioning acceptance of images presented to the brain, without regard to the reality of those images. The representation of supernatural ideas as concrete objects, such as angels, super heroes, and imaginary deities confers an illusion of reality on physically impossible objects. Advertising, the media, the fashion and cosmetics industries, and the frankly supernatural activities of religion, politics, and government manipulate the magical mind for sales, profit, and power.
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Physical similarity is key to understanding the origins of magic symbols: human emotion is expressed by the eyes, by facial muscles and in body postures. Reading these correctly is vital for an individual's survival; the eyes especially possess great power to express and deliver harm. This principle (homeopathic magic) is extended to any object that resembles an eye. Animals that have large eyes are invested with the same "power of the stare" which in humans is associated with the Evil Eye of envy. Envy is indeed dangerous when acted upon: jealousy on the part of childless women is still considered in many societies to be the major source of child death or disappearance. The overt theft of children to be sold into slavery, and for use in human sacrifice, made parents justifiably fearful. The principle of "like cures like" is demonstrated by the cure; an eye protects the wearer from the evil eye. Blue eyes are the traditional antidote, likely because cool blue is believed to calm red hot envy.

Some artists transform the sun into a yellow spot; others transform a yellow spot into the sun.
_ Pablo Picasso

An ancient artist drew the body of a person, but replaced its head with that of a bull. A strange being was born, in which the attributes of man and beast are commingled. The new figure made the symbolic statement “Our leader is as strong and as potent as a bull.” The drawing itself is a real object, but the idea it represents is supernatural. A man-bull animal does not exist in nature.

One day a woman idly drew spirals, circles, and wavy lines in the sand. Did these shapes arise from the mechanics of her wrist and elbow, or from an innate geometry that resides in the brain? Manipulating materials with the hands created a new dimension in the brains of early humans. Drawing begins a conversation between the brain and the physical environment: we observe this in the doodles of children, which begin as energetic scribbles that develop into pictures of an ordered, or sometimes disordered, world. Art gives expression to what can't be spoken; images predate speech and persist in our brains as instinctual messages.

Human beings decorate their bodies without fail, as if we feel naked without fur or feathers, or armored skin. We transform ourselves into fantastical birds or composite creatures, into Barbie dolls and testosterone-inflated action heroes, believing that doing so lends us their qualities. A naked human can be difficult to classify, so we adopt visual cues that present a readable façade; I am a married woman; I am a priest. The uninspired business suit, however inferior in design to a person's chosen dress, is worn because it answers questions of allegiance. Jewelry has been worn since the first human strung a shell or pebble on a length of fiber; jewelry, especially that which is given to us by a special person, or which is infused with power by a magic spell, is felt to impert protection; we are social animals that depend for survival on the good will of other humans. Objects can also be weapons of negative power; magical thinkers can literally be frightened to death by “magic.”

Physical transformation is vital to adaptation; camouflage is a frequent natural strategy and is highly developed in a great variety of life forms. Humans copy nature because we recognize the excellence of its forms and strategies. That is where great ideas originate.

Left: Assyrian archer (now Iraq) ca. 600 BCE. Right: American soldier in Iraq, 2400 years later. This photo shows rare insight into the lack of progress in male intelligence, which is limited to the technical advancement of violence. Below: Ridicule of the enemy, which is a symptom of overconfidence, characterizes the male belief in his supernatural superiority. A photo-shopped image of a missile test-fire by Iran taunts the Iranians as being technically inept, a tactic that is as old as the male mind, and which often often proves fatal.

Counter-evidence for male intelligence

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Early people did not have millennia of conjecture to ponder when deciding what started it all. No Big Bang Theory, no sci-fi films, no texts that claim to be the word of god, no gods!
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Too often the assumption is made that early people shared our state of mind because their brains were the same size as ours, but what goes on inside those brains is what counts. We must try to set aside thousands of years of culture to understand their relationship to the environment. Early humans inhabited natural environments, and they sought to explain their experiences by what was present in those environments. Modern people live in complex artificial environments that would have been unimaginable to our ancestors. We are not a better-fed and better-dressed version of early humans; we possess different ideas about being human.
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There is one experience that all humans share; birth and the liberation from childhood chaos is a personal experience. Subjective awareness arises in the brain-sensory system of our bodies, and it is here that we find the coming of order out of chaos. The human fetus is delivered unfinished; the essential body parts are in place, as well as the basic functions of breathing, sucking, crying out, and waste elimination, but the neural connections needed to operate an adult body must be selected and reinforced by repetitive training over the extended period of childhood.
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Human infants are utterly dependent on gigantic all-powerful beings called parents, who must participate in completing the connections between sense organs, nerves, and muscles so that the brain can make sense of the environment and direct the growing child's movement and action within it. Language, which is an instinct and social necessity, also must be activated during a specific period of brain growth in childhood.

xOur ability to learn, which is enhanced by finishing the brain post-birth, is often said to contribute to our superiority among animals, but our unfinished brain also leaves us vulnerable to the damage that results if children are neglected, abused, forced to adapt to poor parenting, or are raised in an unhealthy cultural environment.

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If a child is not told that nature is its proper home, but instead that it owes its existence to a supernatural realm, then it cannot become fully aware of whom it is. The child will not experience the self-confidence that comes from belonging to the physical environment and adulthood may be delayed indefinitely. Cultural adulthood consists in playing a role, a safe but restrictive tradition in human societies that can waste individual potential. In traditional societies this may work well, but the rate of change in modern cultures demands educated and adaptable individuals.
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We see a tragic disconnect between technology and social development in the United States, where comparative freedom has produced the inventions and that benefit mankind, but solutions to critical social issues remain trapped in an archaic religious model of male despotism; this Stone Age mind set is inadequate to meeting complex challenges. Stone Age social structure, which is characterized by rigid and violent male dominance, keeps millions of women and children in poverty: Top Males corner the earth's resources and dictate their distribution and use. The earth’s resources are not being used intelligently, but are being exhausted, not replenished or conserved. Disaster does not lie ahead, it is already with us.

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The United States has made progress toward social equity, but fundamentalist thinkers desire to drag us back to the dark vision of man in the Bible, with its wildly violent and unjust Top Male, Jehovah, leading us to Armageddon. Fundamentalists want to collapse the world of Archimedes into the flatland of the Bible. Magical minds that are trapped in patriarchal oppression, that believe wholly in a violent myth that was current two millennia ago, are not equipped to manage a dynamic world of our own making.
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Human population has flowed across the planet, a feat of adaptation made possible by clever invention, but this success has been at the expense of earth's environments and thousands of plant and animal species. The belief that a life-hating supernatural being has ordered man to exhaust and destroy everything he encounters, has cut a wide swath through the resources of the planet, and the result is that the much of the environment has been ruined by the trash and toxins we have created.

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Domination by a Top Male and his hierarchy continues to be the most popular means of organizing human beings. Force, intimidation, brutality, degradation of the land, religious war, torture, poverty, legal gridlock, and pathological killing persist worldwide, and rather than decreasing, the horror of war continues to expand.
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The Top Male model of power guarantees that violent interaction, destruction of the physical environment, and the wasted potential of 'lesser' humans, will continue unabated. Killing is what men do. Man's technical excellence serves his passion for death and power: that is the reverse of intelligence.

Magic is in the mind .

Religions large and small are cluttered with magical practices, as are social organizations, governments and corporations, because magical thinking is the default mode of the human brain. Child development experts confine magical thinking to a stage of childhood, but in practice it never goes away; magic is fundamental to how the human brain interprets and interacts with the environment. Essential to the practice of magic is the belief that the power to manipulate reality resides within the individual, who attempts to do so by means of incantation or ritual. Magic is a precise activity. Words and actions must be repeated accurately, or the desired outcome will not be obtained.

The instinctive use of magic ritual is often a reaction to stress. A person preparing for a job interview may pay special attention to his or her appearance, wear a lucky shirt, carry an amulet, and repeat affirmations learned from a success guru. This ritual behavior may reduce stress and thus help the interview go well, but it will not make the candidate more qualified, nor magically shuffle his or her application to the top of the pile.

The contagious magic evinced by sports fans, from wearing replica jerseys to collecting autographs and memorabilia, is obvious and widespread. The desire to meet a top athlete is a manifestation of the universal belief that power can be transferred from person to person, either by simple proximity, or by obtaining an object that has been in contact with that person. The obsession with celebrities and religious figures results from the principles of magic, and is no different than the ancient adoration of the gladiator, or the quest for the supposed relics of saints. Magical thinking is woven into layers of culture that have accrued over thousands of years. Desire for personal power, and over others is fundamental to being human.

In true magic, power resides not in a god or gods, but within the individual, who must precisely manipulate words and objects in order to obtain results. The later addition of deities marks a profound shift in power away from the individual. Instead of being the locus of power, the individual becomes a supplicant to an unseen power. How did this shift come about? The underlying thinking might go like this: man makes things, but man cannot make the sky, or rain, or a tree. Something that is like a man, only much greater, must make these. Whatever causes storms, rain, and lightning, must be very powerful and it must live in the sky. This radical change benefits humans; magic depends on the power of the individual, but what if he or she is weak? If a powerful being can be put to work on one's behalf by flattery, pledges of obedience, and sacrifice, respite from life's problems might be achieved.

The gods began their existence as real ancestors. We know this because people ply the gods with objects that people like, especially food and luxuries that supernatural beings obviously don't need. The steps from ancestor to god are somewhat straightforward: when a person dies, the 'life' essence of the person automatically becomes supernatural. The person that we knew no longer exists, but he or she must have gone somewhere; there must be a world where only the dead go. It can take time for the missing essence to make the magical transition to the land of the dead (because they remain vivid in the memories of the living) and cultures have various techniques to ensure that the dead don't return to harass the living.

Death is universally feared: the dead ought to remain dead. Thanks to the strength of human memory, dead people persist in the mind, and significantly, in one's dreams. We forget that dreams had no rational explanation until recently, and people reacted negatively to the walking, talking 'ghosts' that visited them during sleep. Inhumation, especially with red pigment that represents the blood of childbirth, is meant to insure rebirth in another world, as much as it is done to protect the body from scavengers. Cremation prevents reoccupation of the body by the spirit-ghost.

The invention of a heaven or afterlife that promises a happy and eternal reunion with the ancestors, family, and in-laws, and perhaps with one's entire clan, such as Christianity offers, combines ancestor worship with an attractive location in the supernatural realm, a nice place in eternity that is intended to keep the dead, dead. Today's concept of heaven as a perpetual family reunion is a sentimental Victorian creation.

Literal rebirth, as shaped by Hindu religion, may also arise from the eerie fear that the dead will return to terrorize the living. Ensuring that life is miserable can be useful in a caste-bound society. A wealthy person would surely want to live again. A poor but optimistic person might see rebirth as an opportunity to be better off, to climb a step on the social pyramid. The negative positioning of rebirth confines the mass of humanity to a future of recurring misery. For the poor there is no point in wanting a better life; it's better to be permanently dead.

The gathering of ancestors into pantheons was a process of practical consolidation as human populations increased and spread, clashed and united. The Ancient Romans were particularly adept at conflating other gods with their own; importantly, magic ritual persisted through the time of empire in private and public life, and was codified in the Roman Catholic Church.

Pantheons were insurance providers
In the ancient world, travelers greeted each other with the question, "Which gods do you worship?" Deities were compared, traded, and adopted in recognition that strangers had something of value to offer. An exchange of earthly ideas and useful articles also took place, and a more comfortable daily life was obtained through expanded availability of materials, tools, foods, and skills.

Pantheons were the ancient world's insurance providers. Diverse deities protected women, children, tradesmen, sailors, butchers, farmers, and soldiers, regardless of status. No pre-existing condition prevented a person from finding a god, goddess, or spirit protector. Each person or group had a sympathetic listener, who might increase one's chances for a favorable outcome to life’s ventures, large and small. The non-racist and religiously inclusive mind of the Romans was a powerful factor in the success of their multicultural empire, which abolished barriers to travel, trade, and information across the Mediterranean world, and in Europe and North Africa. More people wanted to be included in the Roman Empire than wanted out.
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Monotheism ruined all that.