I have this friend, N, that has recently started believing things very out of the ordinary. He said that he’s been getting into paganism and studying runes and candles. I told him that was very interesting, it sounded like a fun time and a good hobby to have. N let me know that it wasn’t just a hobby, but that it had a function and purpose, a sort of witchcraft.
I come from an academic background; it doesn’t seem healthy to me to actually believe and try to practice witchcraft, not because it might be real, but because of the mental health associations with it. So I told my concerns to N but he brushed them off, saying that people have the right to believe in what they want. I respect that, but I do not want N to fall into delusion. I let him know, as respectful as I could, that believing in witchcraft does not make it real and that it wasn’t healthy to believe otherwise. He got really bothered when I told him he should talk to his therapist about this stuff. N has a history of mental health issues and was in a deeply abusive relationship for a few years which cause him a lot of grief. I was accused of being rude and trying to impose my beliefs. His last message to me was him asking me to stop and that anyone has a right to believe what they want.
I cherish N a lot as a friend, I do not wish them any harm. I respect that anyone has a right to believe what they want, but I really don’t think this is healthy for my friend. Is there any way I can help him? Is the best way forward to just stop and let him be?
I can repeatedly use money to buy things with a 100% success rate, which is a bit higher than praying.
Yes, faith in the current value of money is what gives it the current value, but money as a thing does not require faith to see it working as a way to make trade easier than barter.
Faith can be a positive thing, but it is the opposite of something that literally exists and people interact with every day.
Yes, you can use money to buy things, and it works consistently. But let us not forget that beneath this seeming functionality, money is nothing more than a piece of paper or a digital representation. Its value is not inherent but a construct, a Symbolic order as Lacan would say, imbued by our collective belief and trust in the system.
Just like how the Lacanian ‘big Other’ is a social construct that regulates our social reality, money too is a sort of ‘big Other’ - a shared illusion that maintains its power as long as we continue to believe in it. It’s not about the physical money itself, but the social contract it represents.
In the same way, religious and philosophical beliefs, such as our friend’s belief in witchcraft, are also part of the Symbolic order. They are systems of understanding and interacting with the world, constructed from collective agreement, belief, and faith. These belief systems may not align with empirical reality as we understand it, but that does not diminish their power to shape individual behavior and interaction.
So, if we are to follow Zizek’s line of thought, all ideologies - money, science, witchcraft - are like the glasses we wear to view the world. They are the fantasies we construct to veil the unbearable Real. As Zizek famously said, “We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.”
The lenses may vary from person to person, but all serve to mediate our experience of the world and give it meaning. Our friend’s belief in witchcraft is just another lens, another narrative to make sense of the chaos of existence. We may not agree with it, but it’s crucial to remember that the ‘Real’ itself is inaccessible - all we have are interpretations and narratives. In that sense, his belief system is not fundamentally different from our trust in the value of money or the validity of scientific models.