creative magic in the real world

You think it is hard to do magic?

Far from it, one touch is all that it takes, anybody can do it.

Magic is not science. It does not need hard evidence to make it true, and its laws changes with the perspective of the viewer. In science, even something as vastly out of the realm of human understanding as the very beginnings of the universe can be charted and foreseen. Theories can be crafted with mathematical formulas that can be proven and disproven according to what scientific paradigm that currently is closest to the truth. Magic has no proof of its existence.

Magic is not religion. There is no praying to a higher authority, no sense that when something beneficent happens, it is because prayers have been granted or our karma has been good. In magic, there is no faith that there is some greater goodness out there that, as long as we follow the rules, will take care of us. In a way, religion is socialism for the soul, if one believes that either of those concepts exists. In magic, there are just us.

Magic is Art, and has been such since our ancestors painted cave walls with dirt and ashes and named the patterns for animals and had others agree that it was so. Their act was to tame the world and draft it onto stone, their palm prints forever reaching for more. But today, the true Art, the powerful Art is not done with brushes and paint any more than it is done with wands or cauldrons.

No, magic lives in our collective subconsciousness, existing only because we have agreed that it does. As an Adept you do not pray, you make things happen. You can rely on nobody but yourself, and when you fail, it is because your reach has been larger than your grasp.

The laws of magic are laws in word only. They are crafted with a singular purpose in mind; to make others believe in them as well. They are viral ideas out to infect the human subconsciousness, leaving us Adepts with the advantage because we know in our hearts that the rules are false. They are there because we, or someone much like us, made them, committed them to paper because people are followers at heart. If we have made the rules that they follow, we will be able to predict what they will do.

We dress our Art in clothes of science, craft mathematical formulas of such intricacies that none but the scientists themselves understand that they are lies, based on false presumptions. They decry us for false imitators, but lack the words to explain what the difference is between us and them as the surface is indistinguishable to everybody else.

We cover our Art in the guise of faith; we make it desirable, something to replace or complement the true gods while asking for so very little in return. Our path is a simple one, and though priests and proselytes rail against our words, more and more of them are turning to our path, where the rewards are in this life, and not the next.

There is not a single path of magic out there, but there are some that are more powerful than others. I am an Adept of the engine that turns the world, the most powerful of them all, its history ranging back hundreds of years. Billions of people worldwide feed into our power, all agreeing upon one thing; our system is real. This belief supports us, gives fuel for me and my fellow Adepts. This agreement between the rest of humanity and us bestow upon me my powers of creation and destruction. Without the belief of others, I am nothing.

Every morning, when I prepare for the day ahead of me, I take a moment to give thanks to my forerunners. Did they know what they begun, all those hundreds of years ago when they managed to convince the world that a simple piece of stamped metal could represent something other than what it appeared to be? Did they understand that they were giving birth to a system, where arbitral values would suddenly be assigned to objects that were useless outside of it? What act of faith and power was needed to make the first person accept a piece of paper in exchange for a bull? Think about it. That is magic.

Today, things are different. We weave our Art on a grand scale, my fingers on the keyboard control the sorcerers’ stone itself, or as we Adepts call it, the stock market. With a few keystrokes I can make currencies crumble, or raise them to the skies. I can weave a web that will cripple companies or indeed make gold from what is worthless. We can dress ourselves in the guise of good deeds. This is my Art, what some call Economics, and others Capitalism. But those are just names we use to cloth our true purpose.

We name it the science of Economics, and make imaginary connections to true science, by giving prizes of pretension and write books with rules that is said to guide our progress.

We name it Capitalism, the new faith of freedom and progress, what one can believe in when the gods no longer shower us with miracles.

And then, when the rules that we have created enable too many to profit from them, we simply rewrite the very laws themselves, and people let us do so because they do not understand what we are doing. They call it a failure and a crisis, but for who? For them, not us, we have entrenched our positions and thrive on the losses of everybody else.

So I name it Magic, because what else can it be? With one touch of my finger I can make interest rates soar, and make you lose your house. With one touch I can sell all my shares in the company you work for, and send my fellow Adepts scurrying for cover, and leave you without a job. With one touch I can ruin you, because you foolishly believe the rules we have told you, and you have agreed that I do have this power over you. Everybody does. If that is not magic I don’t know what is.

Just one touch.