This 33000 word essay ^[1] develops the ideas that I presented in the speech I gave on November 10^th 2002 at the Liberty 2002 Conference organized in London by the Libertarian Alliance and the Libertarian International. The essential intuition I had already exposed in articles previously published in French: L'étatisme, forme moderne de la magie noire (QL #108), and Magie blanche contre magie noire (which latter article was since translated to English as White Magic vs Black Magic). However, the present essay is considerably expanded as compared to the previous articles, and contains developments in economics, psychology, philosophy, epistemology, sociology and ethics (pphew!). Note that the slightly edited contents of section 2 of this essay was published as an independent article: Public Goods Fallacies — False Justifications For Government. The essay has been published in the Québécois Libre as a series of three articles: Part One (QL #126), Part Two (QL #127), Part Three (QL #128). I also feel particularly honored that Christian Michel selected this essay for publication on his website Liberalia.com (section Knowing). I since translated the essay to French: L'État, règne de la magie noire. Subsequent speeches I made at Libertarian International events can be considered sequels to this one: The Enterprise of Liberty vs The Enterprise of Politics (October 2004), Capitalism is the Institution of Ethics, (April 2005).

1 Introduction
   1.1 A Grim Conclusion
   1.2 The Question of Government
2 Government: The Official Justifications
   2.1 Public Goods
   2.2 The Ad Hoc Fallacy in Any Collectivism
   2.3 A Brief Review of Statist Justifications
3 Explaining Irrationality Rationally
   3.1 Opinions And Interests
   3.2 Patterns In Irrationality
   3.3 Government: The Unofficial Justification
4 Black Magic vs White Magic
   4.1 Two Opposite Attitudes
   4.2 The Magic Color Of Life
   4.3 A Comparative Table
   4.4 Magic Formulas
5 The Magic of Human Action
   5.1 Good, Knowledge of Good, and Action toward Good
   5.2 The Hierarchy vs The Enterprise
   5.3 Statistics vs Cybernetics
   5.4 The Law of Eristic Escalation
6 Black Magic At Work
   6.1 Human sacrifices
   6.2 Black Magic Spells
   6.3 Staging the Worship
   6.4 Does Black Magic Work?
7 Conclusion: The Real Enemy
   7.1 The Enemy is Enmity itself
   7.2 Know Thy Enemy
   7.3 Strike The Root
   7.4 Hope Ahead

Unless you visited my website recently and consequently see what I mean ^[2] you are probably befuddled by the title of my essay: ``Government is the Rule of Black Magic, On Human Sacrifices and Other Modern Superstitions´´. You're wondering: ``is this guy some kind of looney? is he going to tell us that government is not our real Enemy, but only the visible manifestation of hidden forces of Evil that dominate our world through black magic?´´. Well, yes I'm a looney, and yes this will be more or less my conclusion. But my bet is that before you reach the end of this essay, you will also be the very same kind of looney, and you will agree with this conclusion. Actually, since you're reading this page, you probably already agree with me and just don't know it yet. To convince you, I will only have to cast a new light on this Evil the manifestations of which are all too familiar to you ^[3].

But first things first. If I am to tell you the intellectual trip that led me to this grim conclusion, I might as well start from my point of departure. The question that bugged me is a question that must bug most rationally inclined libertarians at one point or another. And most libertarian activists are probably the same kind of rational cerebral libertarian as I am (i.e. NT in the Myers-Briggs typology ^[4]). That question is: are there any rational justifications to the existence of government? What can we say of existing explanations that serve as official justifications? In other words: is government the answer to the problems it claims to solve?

Of course, the answer that we libertarians have reached is that no, there are no rational justifications for government ^[5], its official explanations are bogus, and not only does it not solve the problems it claims to solve, but it creates these problems to begin with. This answer even defines us as libertarians. But this answer is not enough. It is a mistake to close the debate there and think that we've solved the problem — just our knowing that government is wrong won't in itself make government go away. We must ask: if these explanations are fake, then what is the real reason for people to believe in government? What is the rational explanation for these irrational explanations ^[6]? In other words: if government is the answer, then what was the question?

That's how I'll uncover the dark secret of government. Then, I'll develop the theme of black magic: its principles; the principles of white magic, its opposite; how black magic manifests itself, etc. I will conclude briefly with the task that lies ahead for us.

The most popular tentative justification of government in rational terms is Public Goods theory and its variants^[7], whether presented from a utilitarian point of view (often with the help of its econometric toolbox), or from a moral point of view: some activity is of a special nature or has a special importance, and therefore must be managed by a central agency ``in the interest of the public´´. Without analyzing the details for the moment, suffice it to say that all other justifications of government somehow boil down to a more particular or more general case of the Public Goods argument. The ``public good´´ considered may be some form of service related to security (police, justice, army), infrastructure (transportation, telecommunications, education, health), ``harmonization´´ in some matter (information, education, language, industry standards), certification (identity, land registry, verification of conformity to standards), etc.

Unhappily, many libertarians concede some ``public goods´´ to the statists, but then they are on a slippery slope, for there is no reason to stop the public goods argument to any particular service. To paraphrase Emile Faguet: minarchists are libertarians who do not have the courage to accept the full consequences of their ideas; anarchists are uncompromising libertarians <sup>[8]</sup>. Indeed, using arguments of the ``public goods´´ type, government can intervene in just any domain — and once it does, it will make sure that the domain is so messed up that, by the same argument, it will have to extend its grasp over it until the domain is both completely under its control and completely messed up — and neighbouring domains in turn suffer. But of course, intervention is based on the premise that government intervention is useful, to begin with — and this is precisely the point that statists posit as a petition of principle; it is precisely the point that needs to be disputed.

The arguments for the collectivization of some service into a state-managed ``public good´´ contains an intrinsic ad hoc fallacy: Why pick any particular form of collectivization?

Indeed, why collectivize or not collectivize, say, ``toilet paper´´? Isn't there but a more specific need to collectivize ``green soft toilet paper in 5-inch-wide rolls sold under a brand the name of which ends with an S´´? (After all, some company may very well have a dangerous monopoly on these!) Or why isn't there instead a need to collectivize production of all paper? Why collectivize at the scale of Great Britain? Why not collectivize at a smaller scale, say Westminster or the block next door? Or at a larger scale, say Northern Eurasia, or our quadrant of the Milky Way? And why collectivize it on a geographical scale at all? Why not collectivize for people whose name begin with an ``R´´, or for people who wear black socks?

As for arbitrarily choosing the scale, we could as well argue that the considered services are of such a particular nature or importance for an individual that he shouldn't be deprived from his own ability to choose without being coerced, as an independent individual, how these services should be provided to him. Or if we are to take the opposite view, why stop? If collectivization of the considered service is of such an importance that the necessity for everyone to obey the same orders is an absolute priority that justifies coercion and violence until everyone agrees, then we should stop all other activities, withhold all human rights and wage world war until there is a world government so that at last everyone will be under the same rule. And why stop there even? Before we have any respect for individual rights, it is also urgent to send space ships to conquer the universe and compel space aliens into accepting the same social laws as we have.

Collectivists implicitly accept that their argument is not universal: their claim verily supposes the existence of an important counter-effect that becomes preponderant and limits the applicability of their argument. What are these counter-effects, their relevance, their limits? Only by identifying and studying these counter-effects can the possible applicability of their argument be established. In other words, their claim contains its very own contradiction, which they dismiss by voluntary ignorance. Their call for governmental coercion is based on a one-sided view of government. This is the case of all statist justifications ^[9].

Here is a brief review of the justifications given by statists to argue for the necessity or utility of government. Other arguments for ``public goods´´ can be found to be fallacies as well ^[10]. See footnotes for details.

• The Externalities Theory of ``public goods´´ states that some activities intrinsically imply externalities <sup>[11]</sup>, and that government is a magic solution to managing these externalities, — whereas it is but a way to coercively concentrate externalities, from lots of small, manageable ones, into the huge and overwhelming externality of ensuring there is a ``good´´ government, which turns out to be completely unmanageable ^[12].
• The Game Theory version of ``public goods´´ similarly considers government as an external all-knowing benevolent God, that will help people choose the average best scenario in interactions modelled after simple mathematical ``games´´, — whereas the government is actually made of people with their own self-interest, so that if we are to correctly use Game Theory, we must consider government officials as self-interested players among others; the only particular characteristic of political action is that government agents have the power of legal coercion, which in Game Theory translates into their being able to impose to their own benefit negative-sum games of their choice ^[13].
• With the Impossibility To Exclude and Impossibility to Divide theories, many economists define ``public goods´´ as goods from which the exclusion of third parties is allegedly impossible, or the division of which into individual shares is impossible. They then introduce the notion that government is a magic solution to manage these goods and has a ``natural monopoly´´ on those goods. This ``natural monopoly´´ of course is nothing else than the allegedly impossible exclusion of people who will not fit government-established rules, and the allocation of shares of the allegedly ``indivisible´´ common good according to the government-imposed criteria ^[14].
• The Catastrophe-Prevention version of ``public good´´ agitates the straw man of a simultaneous failure of all suppliers of some service to justify government intervention in the market of said service. Now, the only way that there could be a catastrophic simultaneous failure of all suppliers of said service is that there be a single simultaneous management of all supplies by a de jure monopoly — which is precisely what government introduces <sup>[15]</sup>.
• Collective will theories, whether the democratic version of ``Will of the People´´, the nationalist version about ``Identity of the Nation´´, or the socialist version about the ``Good of Society´´, go on to suppose that individuals must be coerced into joining a particular utopia. The utopia is assumed to be good in theory, because people willingly adhere to it; yet at the same time, it is admitted in practice that people do not willingly adhere to said utopia, since they must be coerced into adhering to it ^[16].
• The Broken Window Fallacy supposes that there are some goods, ``public goods´´, that government can create out of the blue by its own sacred power of coercion. Of course, when individuals not blessed by this sacred power dare to do the same destructive and freedom-infringing things as government does to ``create´´ those goods, they are immediately spotted as criminals and treated as such — and rightly so ^[17].
• The Moral Fallacy supposes that man is too evil (or too ``something´´) to govern himself regarding some ``public goods´´ that must thus be confided to the government — but the government itself is made of men who are not less evil (or less ``something´´) than the rest of mankind. Government is not determined by an external superior force, but by men among others. Actually, its coercive power is of a corrupting nature that will make government officials evil rather than good, both by changing those who embrace it and by selecting those who seek it <sup>[18]</sup>.
• The Altruist Fallacy is a particular misconception often used together with the Moral Fallacy, to justify the necessity of government: it affirms that people are naturally egoistic, and that there needs be an external force to make them behave in altruistic ways in spite of themselves, so that they may survive. This fallacy once again supposes that government is moved by an external force outside of the public, whereby statesmen and their henchmen would be more altruistic and less egoistic than the citizens. But it also supposes that altruism is in opposition with egoism — which is false. And which is so obviously false, that it is by appeal to people's egoist interest that the self-proclaimed altruists try to convince people to follow them in their statist schemes <sup>[19]</sup>.
• The ``Long Term Interest´´ Fallacy combines the Moral Fallacy with the Catastrophe-Prevention Fallacy: it supposes that only government can take into account the long-term interests of people. Now, only people with property rights truly secured on the long term can and will commit to coherent long-term investments. However, governments are never secure in their remaining in power, unless they may use extreme oppression, which both makes obvious their lack of benevolence and spends the resources necessary for long-term investment ^[20].
• The Uniformity Fallacy assumes that uniformity in some matters is good in itself, and is a ``public good´´ such that common government regulations over as large a territory as possible is the only or best way to achieve the desired uniformity in these matters. However, uniformity is not always good in itself; coercion by governments is neither the only way nor the best way to enforce standards; moreover the domains that standards will optimally regulate are seldom either large or territorial; and most importantly, a system of coercion hampers the very discovery of which better standards should be commonly adopted and enforced, because it destroys the points of comparison, neglects most opinions save that of the authority and its lobbyists, and prevents dynamic adjustment to varying and evolving individual circumstances ^[21].

It is one thing to know that statist arguments are logical fallacies, but it is quite another thing to understand why and how these fallacies arise. What are the mechanisms of thought that lead to developing this kind of beliefs and this kind of justifications? How come so many people take it for granted that government can magically solve any and all problems that they fear or encounter?

A common way to answer these questions is to analyze the popularity of these fallacious opinions in terms of the interests of the people who spread them and who accept them ^[22]. From this perspective, these people will better prosper who spread or accept opinions from the respective popularity or displayed acceptance of which they derive higher marginal benefits and lower marginal costs ^[23]. This point of view has been successfully used to develop Public Choice Theory, that explains the underlying mechanisms of political decision in democracies. It is a very important tool to understand the strength of the forces that underlie political oppression and plunder throughout the world.

These forces are such that any time there is a potential for exploitation, someone will come and use this potential to his profit. And the potential in this case is the acceptance by people of their being exploited ^[24]: any time people have beliefs that make them willing to be exploited, then political entrepreneurs will rush to turn this opportunity into actual exploitation. Note that this is another reason why government subsidies are never useful and can always be counted as almost pure consumption: because any promise of potential exploitation generates lobbying toward collecting (and keeping) the subsidies, up to the amount when the marginal gain (subsidy minus lobbying cost) equals the marginal return on investment in other industries ^[25]. People specializing in ``political entrepreneurship´´ will discover or create new untapped resources that they will exploit, all the while preserving and intensifying the existing exploitation ^[26].

The conclusion of this analysis is that the battle for freedom is not a battle between people, it is a battle between ideas. In as much as the ideas that currently allow for exploitation to exist are in widespread acceptance, the actual potential for oppression remains just as strong, and fighting current oppressors and abolishing current forms of oppression will only lead to different oppressors taking control and instituting new forms of oppression. It is the voluntary servitude, as La Boétie called it, the acceptance of power, that must be fought.

Now, as far as suggesting ways to fight fallacies, this approach does not offer very encouraging answers; it certainly gives general recipes for how to lobby or not to lobby, but such advice is worthy whether you're lobbying for or against liberty, and it seems that the enemies of liberty already have a headlong advance at levying such techniques ^[27]. If we are to go further and actually fight these fallacies, if we are to choose actions that will better the statist propaganda, then we have to take an approach that is qualitative rather than merely quantitative. Why are these fallacies surviving, rather than other fallacies? If these fallacies were successfully dispelled, would exploitation be vanquished, or would the interests at stake just spawn different fallacies to replace them, with exploitation remaining just as intensive? Is there something in these fallacies that can be traced as the Evil to be struck, rather than the superficial shapes that it can replace at will when they are defeated? To find out, we must analyze the common patterns of thought behind the fallacies used to justify government.

A first obvious common point in all the justifications for government: they all suppose that government somehow provides some kind of goods for free, without any costly counterpart. The existence of this pattern among statists is not anything new; we libertarians even have a mantra to dispel this pattern: TANSTAAFL ^[28]. However, what is remarkable is that all statist justifications include this pattern, albeit sometimes in a less than obvious way. The pattern is most visible in the trivial cases, where the goods to be provided for free are the subsidies that are not compared to the corresponding taxes. In more subtle cases, the pattern is hidden behind the increased complexity of the situation, but it's still there: for instance, government is supposed to bring the coordination of people toward some common good for free. Ultimately, what government is supposed to bring is some kind of a warranty that evil won't happen; some special sense of security. But in all cases, government is supposed to conjure something out of thin air ^[29]: The only thing supposedly required for government to grant us its blessings is to demand them by petitioning it with enough faith.

A second pattern that can be found to accompany the first pattern is that government is seen as an external entity, something outside of society and above it. And this divine nature is precisely what allows it to create and dispense goods, services, trust or whatever, at no cost. This divine nature can be put clearly in evidence through the awe of people before the visible power of the State: ``how could mere individuals accomplish that?´´ will they wonder, when it is suggested that a government monopoly on this or that activity should be abolished. Yet, government monopoly or no government monopoly, it is always ``mere´´ individuals doing things! Of course it is, and it cannot be otherwise. Politicians and government officers are not more than other individuals; actually, experience as well as theory shows that they are usually less than other individuals — because they are irresponsible. Government doesn't sprinkle any pixie dust on its masters and servants, it doesn't endow them with any magic power. Actually, Government does grant them a special ability that normal individuals don't have — and this ability is indeed what characterizes Government: it is the ability to recourse to legal coercion against those who refuse to obey. The God that statists worship is Brute Force. So, translated in real terms, without the veil of magic, the question that those awed people wonder about really is: ``how could this be achieved without coercion?´´ And the answer is then obviously ``with less suffering´´ ^[30].

As we progress toward the dark secret behind statism, we find a third common pattern among justifications for government: they all introduce a false tradeoff between liberty and some good, where government is supposed to be the divine entity with which trade happens. Divine, because it is clear to everyone, including the statists, that no human force could propose such a deal ^[31]. But statists either ignore human behavior, or classify the State out of it — to them, Government is a God, a superior collectivist entity with which to trade. (Where's my invoice ^[32]?) The way they evade the crucial question: ``Who warranties the warrant ^[33]?´´ is by pushing it back behind a veil of ignorance and blind faith. Once again, some supernatural force is meant to create trust out of nowhere, for free. Magic mantras, sacred texts with magic power, such as constitutions ^[34], the complex rituals and formal apparatus of the State and its administration, all contribute to lure people into attributing a divine aura to the State.

Finally, a common point between all of these fallacies is that all their arguments contain dynamically self-destructing notions. That is, they imply the dynamic opposite of the axioms used to justify them. They rely on premises the effects of which lead to the quick disappearance of the premises. This particular kind of contradiction shows that underlying these fallacies is a way of thinking that ignores the dynamics of human action through causation and focuses on static assessments about society using correlations. Such dynamic contradictions are based on some kind of static reasoning that ignores the very basics of dynamic human behavior — that ignores the very nature of man. This makes it paradoxical that statists often accuse libertarians of being utopian and unrealistic and ignorant of human nature, whereas it is precisely the statists who deserve such comments! But this kind of paradox is frequent with statists.

All in all, the justifications for statism are not a collection of isolated mistakes; they stem from a systematic line of flawed reasoning, from a strong paradigm, from a view of the world.

From our study of them, it appears that all the justifications of the State ultimately boil down to this: religious worship of the State as an almighty supernatural authority. The State is the idol of a self-denying pagan cult. Belief in such nonsense would be considered a mental disease, if it were not so common. And hopefully, in a not so far away future, it will indeed be considered as a mental pandemic, an infantile disease that swept away the world at a time when mankind is still very young. However, for the time being, it is still up to us to devise a cure — and to be able to do so, we must first understand the disease, how it survives, how it propagates. We must investigate the psychological mechanisms underlying such a belief system, identify the weaknesses of the mind through which this parasite belief enters people's mind.

Governments are assuming undue authority. Thus, in as much as the structure of human feelings is a common genetic heritage, any strong and coherent tendency in a lot of people to believe in government has an explanation in terms of the usurpation of some natural sentiment of submission to authority. Natural sources of authority are not many: parents have some authority on their children, in as much as they provide for them; friends give their opinions to be taken into account in as much as their alliance is to be preserved; chiefs lead people in short times of emergency (war, fire, natural disaster, etc.); elders or great achievers have authority on laymen, in as much as their wisdom is acknowledged. In evolutionary time scales, these are probably as much complexity as could make way into the innate structure of the human mind ^[35].

The first kind of natural authority in human life is parenting. And the fallacies used as justification for government are fallacies of parenting indeed — they ride on the primitive mental mechanisms by which young infants relate to their parents. To a young child, the parents appear as external superior entities that give one goods for free, if only one moans and cries, without one having to think about the ins and outs of the production of the goods thus bestowed. Parents are understood as well-meaning, having with their children a relationship of mutual love; young infants have an absolute trust in their parents ^[36]. Finally, it is almost universally accepted that parents have an authority to decide for their children, and even to punish them in certain cases — though the precise limits of parental authority are debatable ^[37].

There is no doubt that governments pretend to assume the role of parents. In autocracies of all times, the personal tyrant has always posed as Father of the Nation ^[38], Big Brother, or something similar ^[39]. In countries where power is more diluted, no single statesman might dare claim such a pompous title — though it is not uncommon that powerful and lasting politicians be given by journalists both flattering and joking a surname of the same vein ^[40]; but even in these countries, government as a whole nonetheless claims the role and powers devolved to parental care: the mythology of government as a parent, or of the Nation as a parent of which government is the spokesman is still very present in the public discourse about government. This is revealed by the ease with which are generated and accepted such common symbols as Uncle Sam or the motherly personification of various nations. And it is not uncommon, when discussing with statists, that they will explicitly appeal to the notion that government fulfills the role of parent with respect to citizens, who are maintained within the role of irresponsible children.

Now, the statist disease doesn't just substitute government for parents: it attempts to confer government authority from all possible sources. Democracy, the concept of Nation, and the notion of ``Social Contract´´, are tricks for the State to assume the authority of a voluntary alliance of friends, although there lacks the basic premise that would give validity and a friendly nature to such an alliance, namely its voluntary nature, — in other words, the liberty to enter it or refrain from entering it, and even exit it. Governments assume the role of a chief in times of emergency. They begin by excluding any competition; then they reinforce their power by creating a permanent climate of emergency. The failings of governments are thus instrumental to their self-preservation, by prolonging and extending the emergency that governments are meant to solve. Finally, governments, through the heavy subsidy of whichever alleged ``scientists´´, ``artists´´ and ``experts´´ support their authority, thereby claim the endorsement of human wisdom for their edicts.

Even if all these roles were legitimately assumed, they wouldn't endow governments with any of the political rights they claim: to enslave citizens and non-citizens part-time, to rob and imprison those who won't cooperate, to kill and torture those who resist — and most importantly, to make laws. Law-making is the godly power to unilaterally define and redefine the rules that relate governments to people under their dominion, and that relate these people to each other. Parents, friends, wise men, and even chiefs, have none of these prerogatives upon those who voluntarily accept their authorities, not to talk about those who decline their authorities. Through all these tricks of emotional fraud, governments are really trying to impersonate God — the supreme authority ^[41].

So as to achieve its emotional and intellectual fraud, the statist meme ^[42] does much more than just divert existing emotions from their rightful targets: it severely distorts the way infected people view the world, to begin with. It must bypass the natural defense system of the human mind, its immunity system: reason, the bullshit detector. And it must take constantly renewed measures to keep this defense system disabled as far as it is concerned ^[43]. Yet at the same time, it cannot simply destroy all human understanding, otherwise infected humans would not survive long enough to be infected and propagate the meme ^[44]. The successful parasite must selectively destroy understanding; it must condition the application of its fallacious content so it doesn't prevent basic surviving skills; it must leave enough of the mind alive and well so as to nurture and transmit the illness ^[45].

This circumvention and selective destruction of the immunity system is the essence of the statist disease, as of all diseases. It is the fundamental point about the statist disease, the source that enables all errors. It is the flaw through which the disease can invade the whole of a human's understanding of society and the universe. It is the cause that fatally leads to terrible consequences. It is the cornerstone to all intellectual and emotional frauds; it is the key that justifies all massive criminal behavior. Only by identifying this flaw can we build new defenses and find a cure. Therefore, we must study more deeply the immunity-altering mechanism of this mental disease; we must fully analyze the ur-Evil of this statist meme that infects human minds. And to begin with, we must give this Evil its name: Black Magic.

Like all diseases, Black Magic can be characterized by its symptoms. We find a fine, precise and concise summary of these symptoms in an entry of The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce:

Pray, v.: To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.

Black Magic is best evidenced by contrasting it with the opposite attitude of White Magic, that is adopted by sane minds ^[46].

Everyone seeks happiness, success or redemption; but we can distinguish two radically opposite path to follow while striving for them. A follower of Black Magic begs for grants, he humiliates himself, submits to superior forces. An observer of White Magic earns rewards, he develops self-pride and mastership of nature (in a non-hierarchical sense). A follower of Black Magic tries to obtain favors from superior forces by making sacrifices, by destroying things or people, by making a show of one's friendly intents, or even by humiliating himself in groveling submission. An observer of White Magic tries to obtain satisfactions from earthly things and people (in a non-hierarchical relation ^[47]), by enhancing himself and his property, by creating goods and services, by doing actual work, by proudly developing his skills. Followers of Black Magic are ignorant of nature and how it works, and they rebel against it when it doesn't satisfy their whims. Practitioners of White Magic try to understand nature and its mechanisms, they accept it as it is, and use their knowledge of it to achieve satisfactions. To followers of Black Magic, Gods are supernatural beings above us; their nature is Holy and suffers no questioning. To practitioners of White Magic, in as much as things can be explained in terms of Gods, Gods are but aspects of Nature itself. To followers of Black Magic, the ultimate goal is the fulfillment of all wild desires, with impossibility being vanquished in a surreal paradise to be granted to worshippers in some far future or after death. To practitioners of White Magic, the ultimate goal is to achieve appreciated satisfactions before death, with the wisdom to reevaluate one's desires so as to fit the realm of the possible.

This is what I call Black Magic — the belief and practice of seeking good things as miracles bestowed by a certain kind of jealous and venal Gods: Gods who require you to humiliate yourself before them; Gods who reward sacrifices that prove subservience; Gods who relish the abjection of their believers, and the reduction of unbelievers into subjects; Gods who rejoice from the destruction or debasement of oneself and other people; Gods with unlimited powers and arbitrary whims, that are not bound by any law knowable by reason, but are meant to be influenced by a display of compliant intentions from their humiliated followers. Of course, awful gods who could be corrupted by such an attitude would not deserve being worshipped at all. They are monstruosities against which any self-respecting human being can but revolt. Those that grovel at the feet of such gods are slaves, swine; they are creatures lacking the dignity of their own free will, and they are prompt to forsake their free will indeed.

On the contrary, White Magic is a wholly different set of beliefs, involving a wholly different kind of incorruptible but well-meaning Gods: Gods who require people to improve themselves; Gods who reward the creations that proves one's mastership with the creations themselves; Gods who relish from the self-esteem of believers, and the raise of unbelievers into partners; Gods who rejoice at their observers' self-reliance and pride; Gods who have limited power, whose behavior is circumscribed by knowable laws of nature, who are only moved by appropriate engineering by proud observers. These Gods are not to be worshipped, but understood. They are facts of nature that humans must learn to know and accept. Those who master these Gods become better humans; they are moral beings exerting their morality by making choices, and who indeed seek liberty and its dual face, responsibility, as the mother of all virtues.

Black Magic and White Magic are two opposite poles in the universe of attitudes that humans can have toward Life. In actual human behavior, in actual human beliefs, religions and discourses, within the complexity of any single person's mind, the two opposite attitudes may be simultaneously present, and their many instances interwoven, combined, and blended. The reality of human behavior oscillates between these two extremes, and more often than not yield shades of gray. But this gray doesn't mean that black and white do not exist: the very notion of shades of gray presupposes that black and white exist, that they can be separated and that you can be closer to one than to the other.

Separating white from black is not easy. Indeed, both aspects are simultaneously present in traditional cultures and religions; the very same words will contain several meanings with radically different colors; and most people will conflate these meanings into a vague confuse concept that prevents them from distinguishing the opposition between those meanings. Thus, confused or deceiving people will often resort to patterns of thoughts that jump from one meaning to the other without most listeners noticing the mistake or fraud. And this permanent confusion is no sheer bad luck: Black Magic systematically develops deceitful appearances: it will impersonate white magic so as to claim its creations, and thus to usurp power and legitimacy. Black magicians, the great destructors who dominate society, will dress in white, and claim to be great creators, whereas they will dress in black the enslaved white magicians who actually create.

Thus, people who believe what they are taught by schools and mass media will often have an inverted idea of what is white magic and what is black magic, of who is being exploited and who is exploiting, of what are the principles of creation, and what are the principles of destruction. The more gullible people will indeed invert black and white on a wide area of issues, wherever the official propaganda is efficient. Less gullible people will be confused into seeing gray everywhere. Of course, people find it usually obvious to distinguish what is constructive and what is destructive when it concerns themselves directly, so that the black magic propaganda can seldom deceive people regarding their immediate self-interest; but it can deceive them regarding their long-term self-interest, and regarding the self-interest of those people they don't know well. It inverts the long-range moral vision of gullible people, and induces moral myopia in less gullible people. This inversion causes a lot of confusion; it creates for each believer an intermediate area where everything is blurry or self-contradictory, between their correct short-range understanding and their inverted long-range understanding; this in turn induces a feeling of absurdity about life. In the end, this leads to a form of schizophrenia among those who accept theories too far from everyday practice ^[48], to self-destruction by those who will not adopt practices opposite to their theories; and to atrophy of the minds of those who seek to avoid mental conflict by rejecting theory altogether.

So as to understand the world, we must learn thus to untangle the tree of white magic from the parasite lianes of black magic that surround it. So as to assess the effects of various attitudes and deeds, we must examine the respective influences of Black Magic and White Magic in human behavior. Black magic always wins in appearance; you will always see it dominate the established institutions, glorified by formal rites and astonishing shows. But it is white magic that actually makes the world go round, even if it requires discernment to see that. Black magicians are expert in wishful thinking, idle imprecation, and deception of themselves and other people; but only through the dedicated work of white magicians does the world actually progress. All creation stems from the principles of white magic. White magic serves as the basis for civilization itself. And Black Magic itself can survive but as a parasite to White Magic, — for if there is no creation, there soon remains nothing left to destroy.

Murray Rothbard, in the conclusion of his book Power and Market, made a small comparative table between the consequences of what he called ``The Market Principle´´ and ``The Hegemonic Principle´´. We may very well extend his table to summarize the opposition between the broader underlying principles that are White Magic and Black Magic. Actually, considering this table, we may equally name these principles respectively the Libertarian Principle and the Authoritarian Principle, or else the (classical) liberal principle and the statist principle, the merchant principle and the warrior principle, the principle of economics and the principle of politics, the voluntaryist principle and the coercitive principle, etc.

Some Consequences of
The Market Principle	The Hegemonic Principle
individual freedom	coercion
general mutual benefit (maximized social utility)	exploitation — benefit of one group at expense of another
mutual harmony	caste conflict: war of all against all
peace	war
power of man over nature	power of man over man
most efficient satisfaction of consumer wants	disruption of want-satisfaction for citizens, made secondary to the whims of political masters
economic calculation	calculational chaos
incentives for production and advance in living standards	destruction of incentives: capital consumption and regression in living standards
White Magic	Black Magic
Praxeology — rational thinking on dynamic choices	Magic Thinking — wishful thinking on static parameters
Science as a process of free inquiry	Superstition under the authority of official dogmas
Simple universal rules	Complex ad hoc statements
Logical demonstrations	Paradoxes
Internal consistency — reason as an unescapable filter for beliefs	Double think — withholding reason to preserve beliefs
Understanding Nature	Worshipping ignorance
Accepting Facts	Revolt against nature
Realizing Actual Potentials	Running after whimsical ghosts
Economics is a point of view on all human action	Economics is about monetary payments, to be taxed by the State
Those who can actually make useful predictions reap rewards on the market	Those who make useless statistics are paid by the State to justify its plunder
Earning one's life	Being granted one's life
Production: mutual exploitation for mutual benefit	Predation: unilateral exploitation to one's benefit and the other's loss
Harmonic interests, positive-sum win-win games	Conflicting interests, negative-sum win-lose games
Convincing with persuasion	Coercing with force
Creation	Destruction
Life	Death
Internal discipline of self-help and exercise	External rituals of helpless begging prayers
Rational Arguments	Emotional arguments
Causality	Correlation
Cybernetics	Statistics
Right to dissent	Obligation to comply
Consent	Compulsion
Liberty, Mother of Order	Order, Pretense for Oppression
Emerging Order	Imposed Chaos
Morality based on good actions, intents behind actions being irrelevant	Morality based on good intentions, any outcome of actions being irrelevant
Justice based on respecting and restoring the individual property rights of everyone	Justice based on coercing individuals into the collective utopia
Dynamic choices	Static wishes

White Magic and Black Magic attitudes are pervasive. Indeed, it is by structuring the way people think that they influence the way people act. Like all self-reproducing memes, they spread and survive in as much as the act they entail will in turn contribute to spreading the meme. A major target for the memes is thus the center of language, the mechanisms with which individuals associate meaning to words and relate words to each other and to emotions, the way people understand the world.

George Orwell, in his famous novel 1984, described how totalitarian regimes try to limit the way people can think, express and exchange ideas that may be subversive to their established order, by reshaping the language into what he dubs novlang: the vocabulary is reduced; the terms are redefined to mean only what the party wants; and to have the connotations in line to the party ideology; the subversive words and meanings are eliminated, etc. ^[49] When the enemies of liberty do not hold totalitarian power, they cannot manipulate the language at will; however, they can still spread their connotations into words, and add enough secondary meanings to existing words so as to render them useless (or at least much less useful) at conveying opposing ideas, or precise ideas at all. Indeed, Friedrich Hayek has observed how the adjective ``social´´, when a prefix to such terms as ``justice´´, ``contract´´, ``responsibility´´, etc., was actually used to have justice, contract, responsibility, etc., mean the opposite to what libertarians would use these words for. Philosophers like Henry Hazlitt or Ayn Rand have also observed how the words ``egoism´´ and ``altruism´´ were being used by enemies of liberty with grossly incoherent meanings, promoting them as incompatible and opposite to one another, with egoism being evil and altruism being good, thus justifying the sacrifice of individuals to the collectivity, as incarnate in its government ^[50].

We may pinpoint a case where Black Magicians have strongly biased a word in our preceding comparative table: the word ``exploitation´´. Exploitation means fulfilling some potential of usefulness; bringing the good out of something or someone. So mutual exploitation is something quite good, that allows everyone to be better off, with a net result of creation of wealth for everyone — mutual exploitation is the root of everything good in society <sup>[51]</sup>. But the black magicians have loaded the word ``exploitation´´ to specifically means unilateral exploitation of one to the benefit of the other, with a net result of destruction of wealth. Once again, they want everyone to implicitly admit that society is not based upon relationships of production, but only upon relationships of predation. Black magicians think in terms of predation; then they reproach exploitation as evil when other people do it, and they claim it as good when they do it (though they won't utter the unholy word ``exploitation´´ in this case). Actually, since a society based exclusively on predation is impossible, in the end, Black Magic will be based on a fraud wherein most followers of Black Magic will themselves be enslaved producers, victims of predation, but who are completely delusioned about what is production and what is predation. The belief in Black Magic will thus be a parasite infesting people who actually live thanks to the creative rules of White Magic; it may allow few real Black Magicians to live at the expense of these people; but it may even survive without benefitting much anyone.

Sometimes, White Magic wins in the battle over vocabulary. My favorite witness is the word ``to earn´´, — a typically English and American word, that has no real equivalent in French. It implies a dynamic relationship between a result and the means to achieve it: through hard work, you get something valuable that you deserve. A whole morality of creation, productivity, honesty, individual property, personal responsibility, and liberty lies behind this word. Yet, even as I try to describe the meaning of this libertarian word, I have to use words that can cause confusion, and that the authoritarians will happily hijack: hard work, productivity. Black Magicians, who are unaware of causation relationships, will disconnect work from its result, and will either blame all work as bad in itself <sup>[52]</sup>, or otherwise praise the virtues of work as good in itself <sup>[53]</sup>. White Magicians value ``hard work´´, not in proportion to the intensity of the efforts, but in proportion to the intensity in results ^[54]. It is understood as a law of nature that easy gains will be quickly reaped and considered as acquired without particular care (any required care means the gain is not so easy). Thus, any fruitful work that predictably yields a valuable result will probably imply some intense efforts or some rare insight. And it is precisely the propensity to sacrifice obvious immediate pleasures to a remote unobvious result that deserves praise — in as much as the remote result is indeed a net gain. Still, what is praised is the readiness to see and act beyond immediate gains — the ultimately greater good made possible by the immediate sacrifice; it isn't the immediate evil of the sacrifice itself ^[55]! The praise or lack thereof deserved by hard work can be related with the praise or lack thereof deserved by intense reflection: what matters is not the effort spent in thinking per se, it is the result in terms of depth of the thought reached. And even this depth is to be valued only through the improvement in behavior that it allows; in turn, this improvement is to be measured in terms of enhancement in satisfactions in one's life (including the indirect satisfactions achieved through cooperation with other people who can be more directly satisfied thanks to this understanding). The goal is ``less thought, more results´´, and not the other way round ^[56]; deep thought is good only if on the overall it enables new strategies of behavior that save the need for future thinking while achieving a same or better result — it's a capital investment.

Black Magic, the Authoritarian Principle, is a meme that profoundly distorts its victims' view of the world, as opposed to the correct view that is achieved with White Magic, the Libertarian Principle. If we libertarians want to cure people from the Black Magic meme, we must take the full consequence of the way Black Magic distorts the understanding of its victims. For we can cure them but by convincing them, and while communicating with them, we will have to cross the semantic gap between the words as we understand them, and the same words as these victims understand them — with each victim having his or her own subtly different set of distortions ^[57].

In the previous section, we have identified the basic attitudes of White Magic and Black Magic as two competing memes (or a family of pairs of competing memes). Now that we have studied them from the memotypical point of view ^[58], we shall proceed with the phenotypical point of view: how these attitudes translate in terms of dynamic individual behavior.

One crucial step of feedback between one's understanding of the world and one's actions upon the world, lies in the way that one decides what is good and what is bad, which actions to prefer and which actions to avoid, which goals to actively seek and which goals to actively shun. These questions define not just personal morality, not just personal taste, but personal life. So the first question of ethics is: is there in the world anything sacred, holy, good, or whatever the name? The second question of ethics is: how can we identify the sacredness, holiness, goodness, or whateverness, with enough precision to distinguish it from what is base, unholy, evil and unwhatever? And the third question of ethics is: having identified these worthy goals, how can we best promote them ^[59]?

The first question of ethics is answered easily enough: the very asking the question, the very breathing of the asker, supposes that life is worthwhile; we know some things are better than other things, we feel it, and that's why we act to begin with ^[60]. This dispels moral nihilism.

With the second and third questions, Black Magic and White Magic entail opposite approaches, opposite epistemologies. Black Magicians have a static view of the world; they see information as flowing unilaterally, from Authority to you, and from you to those who are further from authority. White Magicians on the other hand have a dynamic view of the world; information is not known wholly in advance, and how we interact with the world is instrumental not only in furthering good, but also in discovering what is good to begin with.

This leads to two very different structures of social organization: the ur-structure after which Black Magicians will model social interaction is the hierarchy; the ur-structure after which White Magicians will model social interaction is the enterprise.

With Black Magic, each man is an ``end in himself´´, distinct from all other men and opposite to all of them. In-fighting is the natural mutual condition of men, and only an externally imposed order may keep them cooperating; and this cooperation itself may happen for only one possible common goal: fighting common external enemies, be them actual enemies (wild animals that may be predators or preys, foreign people who may either invade and enslave ``us´´ or be invaded and enslaved by ``us´´), or symbolic enemies (that may be invaders like unemployment, poverty, illness, or potential slaves like commercial processes, electricity, space). The externally imposed order takes the form of a command structure above men; this command structure is actuated by men who must themselves be coordinated by a command above them, and so on, in a hierarchy, until one man holds the ultimate command, and obtains his Authority directly from the official ultimate Black Magic principle of authority: The Right of Conquest, The Ruling Class, The Superior Race, The Natural Order of Things, God, Religion, The People, The Nation, The Indivisible Republic, Democracy, etc. Nature is seen as a struggle at many levels, from the Cosmic to the trivial, and social organization matches the structure of nature, by being divided in a nested hierarchy of groups with common external enemies and otherwise internal conflicts forcefully solved by an authority keeping subgroups from freely interacting. The prototypical figure of Black Magic is an administrative manager of men, who commands to people below him and receives order from above.

With White Magic, each man has ends of his own, but the ends of men are not intrinsically incompatible or opposite: men benefit from cooperation, and their ends can thus be seen as harmonic. Each man is thus a legitimate mean to the ends of each other man, with cooperation being achieved by people mutually helping to fulfill the ends of each other, both being used and using in mutually beneficial mutual exploitation ^[61]. The natural condition of society is thus an emerging order of cooperation; and this cooperation happens by each man tending to his own ends, and using other freely cooperating people as means. Together, people may build, improve, replace and abandon rational structures, both mechanical or social, to master nature, to put it into motion, to react to its events, adapt to its changes, etc. We produce the satisfactions of the self-defined goals of our lives by engineering natural processes into serving these ends of ours; we implement the structures that satisfy us with the available resources ^[62]. The organization of defense against aggressors is but a particular case of ensuring that the structures we create are not destroyed by external forces; and this taking into account of the adverse forces that decay and destroy the structures we create is itself an integral part of our engineering of these dynamic structures. Just like any other problem of life, the danger of aggression is to be solved through free cooperation so as to maximize output and minimize input. The organization of society is a dynamic adaptative structure of cooperating individuals, coordinating through voluntary contracts tied on free markets. To White Magicians, Life is a Creative Enterprise. The prototypical figure of White Magic is an entrepreneurial engineer, who masters a technique and seeks cooperation with other men to use it at building structures that make the most satisfactions out of the least resources ^[63].

To Black Magicians, certain knowledge flows from the Authority to the mere mortals. The ideal society of Black Magic is thus organized hierarchically around the Authority, in a caste division: At the top are the priests, wise men, brahmins, inner party members, official intellectuals, politicians, or whatever the name, from whom flows the order of society. Afterwards are the military, warriors, policemen, administration clerks, civil servants, teachers and other political commissars, who disseminate and enforce the superior order upon society. Below is the mass of producers, workers, peasants, craftsmen, technicians, engineers and other slaves, who do the grunt work; though a minority of them may have advanced skills regarding mastery of nature, they are themselves considered socially but as tools in the hands of the elite; and while these skilled laborers have to be paid more (or else they would abandon their skills and do grunt work like others), the official ideology will make them less than physical laborers. At the very bottom, barely tolerated if at all, are the traders, merchants, money-lenders, speculators, who do some despicable job, that is best understood as scavenging the leftovers of the orderly administration, profiteering from the misery of people in mysterious ways, doing dirty tasks that are below the current higher concerns of the Hierarchy.

As caricatural as it may seem, this is exactly the model of all the totalitarian utopias: it is the ideal followed by the ancient empires of Egypt, China ^[64] or Andies; it is the model proposed in Plato's The Republic, in the theories of indian brahmins or european legists; it is the vision of communism and its softened social-democrat spin-offs. The fact that there is hardly any variation among all the many totalitarian ideals from so many different times and places, even in absence of intellectual communication with each other ought to have been a strong hint of a common evil behind: the Authoritarian Principle, Black Magic.

Also, we see why a Black Magician will both revere Power in itself, yet hate whoever is in power, if said powerholder does not follow the One True Authority as understood by said Black Magician: the world in its current state is quite a dystopia to a Black Magician who won't fully identify with government; yet, with the pace of change in the world in general and in governments in particular, and with the variety of flavors of Black Magic, full identification of people with their government is forcibly rare. Black Magicians who identify enough with their government will seek to take hold of it, and to reform it toward a better match with their ideals. Black Magicians, horrified by too great a discrepancy between their view of Good and the current reigning authority that they reject, will seek a revolution, or, if they are too weak, an escape, or else, they will live as antisocial parasites ruining a society they abhor.

An essential myth on which rests the Authoritarian Principle is the myth of objective knowledge, whether it is justified as stemming from the ``true religion´´, or, in contemporary days, from ``established science´´: beliefs that must be accepted without possibility of dissent by the people who receive it from the high priests; knowledge the search of which is good if done by the official elite, evil if done by others. This objective knowledge is to be contrasted with the relativism claimed by Black Magicians of late about reality when justifying the variety in arbitrariness of the many tyrannies they defend: if reality contradicts their theories, then reality is wrong, or it is ``plural´´, so that they are exempt from the rational need of logical coherence.

White Magic, on the other hand, rejects the premise of an objective knowledge about a relative reality, but is instead based on relative knowledge about an objective reality. All knowledge is conjecture, but reality provides a solid framework against which to test and enhance our knowledge; though it is more correct to reverse the direction of previous sentence: reality doesn't exist to try our knowledge and discriminate godsend truth from devil-inspired falsity; quite on the contrary, we develop knowledge to organize our behavior within reality, to adjust this behavior so as to implement internal goals of ours.

Note that looking at the fact that all knowledge is conjecture from the static point of view of Black Magic precisely leads to the fallacy of relativism, the negation of reason, and the preeminence of brutal force as the ultimate criterion for ``truth´´. On the contrary, looking at that fact from the dynamic point of view of White Magic leads us to seeing knowledge as a bet and to realizing that every act of life is an entrepreneur's choice ^[65]. In the paradigm of Black Magic, Life is Struggle, every man is a fighter for his own sake in an absurd world. In the paradigm of White Magic, Life is Entrepreneurship, every man is the entrepreneur of his own life in a world made meaningful by his own purpose.

Indeed, any knowledge we have about the future can only be obtained from past experience by induction. David Hume showed that induction could never lead to certain knowledge, but only to conjectures, for any general rule we may induce from past experience can always be invalidated by future experience ^[66]. There are infinitely many ways to digest data into a set of rules. However, some of these ways are simpler, considering the background knowledge that varies with individuals and with time; and it is in a strong sense an optimal strategy to give exponentially more credit to simpler explanations than to more complex ones: such strategy minimizes the amount of time and energy being spent while leaving the least leeway for manipulation by memes attempting to parasite us by inserting themselves in explanations ^[67].

Now, though the same strategy, disregarding the initial knowledge, will ultimately lead to the same asymptotic behavior when faced with the same sequence of events (and this constitutes its weak criterion of consistency), in practice, we each start with a different initial knowledge, we each have a different intellect, we each face a different sequence of events, and our life is too short to ever get near the asymptote. Thus, in the end, knowledge is something subjective and personal: it is based on experience that cannot be wholly shared; it is adapted to each of our lives; it is unadapted to any other person's life; it improves from the feedback of decisions taken based on it; it goes wild without proper feedback.

The social model proposed by White Magic is thus not a hierarchy, but an interaction, where each individual takes intrinsically personal decisions, with a paradigm that yields simultaneously self-improvement and respect of other people: liberty, responsibility, property.

To Black Magicians, knowledge is sacred; it is objectively gained by following the Authority. To White Magicians, the learning-living process is sacred; subjective knowledge is born out of respecting Liberty. To Black Magicians, knowledge preexists and must be followed. To White Magicians, knowledge is one kind of good among many, that may be generated, at a cost, when we bet that it will be relevant to making better decisions, for an improvement worth the cost ^[68]; knowledge is never perfect, but it doesn't ever need be perfect, it just has to be good enough — or rather, it's one among the many parts of our individual entrepreneurial capital.

Black Magic and White Magic have opposite approaches to knowledge. We saw how this led to two wholly different models for the organization of society. But it also implies opposite approaches to how social knowledge is achieved. Indeed, in Black Magic, those people who hold social power still need base their decisions upon some information; while in a simple rigid society, a fixed hierarchy may be enough to get orders transmitted without discussion from top to bottom, as the society being parasited by Black Magic grows in complexity, such a rigid hierarchy just cannot scale; thus, the Black Magic institutions develop tools of their own, to produce information that Black Magicians may agree upon, so as to take decisions as to how to prey upon the parasited society. By contrast, in White Magic, the freedom to acquire and use knowledge and provide knowledge-based services to other people means that various people will specialize in various forms of knowledge, so that other people may ignore them and still benefit; none of the specialist will have any a priori authority, but instead, each will have to sell his services on a free market; nonetheless, methods will be developed for specialists to acquire knowledge as well as for laymen to detect good specialists, in a competitive cooperative environment.

The Black Magic approach to understanding the world is static. It tries to describe the world in terms of parameters, the relevance of each of which is measured by the emotional resonance of a change in its value, rather than by any rational theory in terms of causation chains in events that affect these parameters (though as we saw in the case of public goods justification, an appearance of rational explanation may be given to satisfy the refrained White Magic urges of parasited people). These parameters are in turn measured, and the measures and their science, the statistics, are the heart of the Black Magic approach to knowledge; they serve to justify statist policies, where the State, considered as an entity outside of society, takes measure to magically modify parameters toward a more desirable value (as claimed to be by the statisticians).

Now, since there are infinitely many parameters that may be affected by infinitely many events, the statistical point of view always gives a partial, false, and ultimately fallacious image of the world. Given a static set of statistic measurements, you can always invent a statist intervention that will make them produce better-looking figures, by ``sweeping the dirt under the rug´´: that is, those aspects that are measured will be enhanced by worsening everything that isn't measured; and those aspects left unmeasured will comprise those preconditions indispensable for the preservation of the meaning of the measured quantities; so that a possible positive variation of the measures that would follow intervention wouldn't even signify a partial betterment. Thus, when statistic measures are used as goals (as in ``convergence criteria´´, or governmental bragging rights about the reduction or increase of some figure) the result is that governments will intervene in such a way that unmeasured things will get worse and that the measures themselves will become meaningless ^{[69] [70]}.

The statistical justifications for government thus always consists in (1) focusing on a particular set of measured parameters as the ``problem´´, disconnecting these parameters from other parameters required to make the measure meaningful. (2) applying an instance of the What Is Seen And What Is Not Seen Fallacy to show how some scheme could improve the measures, without regard for fact that this intervention actually worsens the unmeasured parameters to the point of being harmful (3) positing governmental coercion as the magic solution to the problem of imposing the devised scheme, since it fails to appear by itself.

The statistical attitude doesn't require figures to be wrong: the partial focus on static parameters, the disconnection of modifications done to these parameters from the dynamic consequences of the means used to modify them, the invocation of government as a magical god that can intervene for free — all these define the statistical point of view, and explain why it is an intellectual fraud in itself. Figures are but a way to give pseudo-scientific value to the statistical attitude. They are just a ritual ornament meant to inspire awe, in the religious staging of the statist black magic religion ^[71].

Of course, the more elaborate the coverage of the statistical measures, the more complex the technocratic apparatus needed to intervene in ways that better the measured figures (to the detriment of the public at large). When statistical goals are used as a guide to develop public administrations, the weight, cost and effectivelessness of these government agencies will increase, producing more statistics and more complex interventions, up until the point when even such new measures can't improve the figures anymore; beyond that point, the government is in a permanent atmosphere of crisis, where it works hard with no positive results, even by its own crooked standards ^[72]. Statistics are the tool by excellence by which governments play the fallacy of what is seen and what is not seen. Some try to use the government's own tool to push government intervention away from them: they will produce counter-statistics, etc. But it will cost them a lot to maintain these statistics, that will be disputed by the government, and in the end, the best they can achieve is that government will include new parameters in its statistics, leading to increased, more complex and more subtle government intervention. Counter-statistics can be an effective way to lobby for government intervention in your favor, if you manage to get your statistical measurements adopted by government, or if you manage to sell to government your remaining quiet. But counter-statistics cannot be used as a way to diminish overall government intervention.

Actually, statistics were born as a tool for fiscal accounting; in effect, it is the way for the State to track its assets. The ``economic´´ calculus of Black Magic is indeed based on accounting and statistics, focusing on who possesses what riches and who exchanged what with whom, so as to tax them ^[73]. Citizens are forced to declare all they own and all they earn, so that the government can take some of it away; government in turn promises reprisals and confiscation when citizens do not properly declare everything to the administration. The use of statistics as a paradigm for deception is an outgrowth of this original accounting purpose; it is an evolutionary adaptation of the State, when faced with a technical society where it is indispensable that some rationality be widespread in the people, so that raw force cannot be used without taking the deceptive appearance of reason.

White Magic is based on a completely different epistemology. It has a dynamic approach to understanding the world in terms of causation, of decisions taken based on information, of dynamic flow of information and energy, etc. It is a cybernetical approach. The basic notions it considers are decisions, events, choices, each with its dynamic implications, instead of aggregates that give static figures independently of any causal chain. In other words, the White Magic view of the world is still partial, but it focuses its study on understandable means rather than ununderstandable ends. It allows us to take decisions that are not flawed by the systematic bias (whether voluntary or involuntary) of the statistic-making process. And indeed, the information we process can eventually influence the world but through the decisions we make. Decisions are thus the basic element with which human life is built. They are the very fabric of life: not static joy and pain, but responsible decisions and their consequent feedback.

The accounting fallacies of Black Magic compare the present to the past (within the scope of a few parameters, while others are hidden); they attribute credit to ones and debit to others (in practice, the privileged get the credit, and the exploited pay); accounting is a record of property transfers; it gives information on what happened, but cannot in any way predict what will happen to adapt to the inevitable change of life. Now, when one makes a choice, one is never, ever choosing between the future and the past; time flows, whether one agrees to it or not. One is always, forever, choosing between multiple futures. Hence morality and economics (and actually, economics is the very same as morality) is never concerned about accounting costs; instead, it is always concerned about opportunity costs, that is, expected difference of outcome between the various opportunities. Accounting costs are irrelevant; the only people who ever care about accounting costs are tax officers — in other words, robbers ^[74].

Economic calculus in the White Magic paradigm is thus praxeological reasoning: It considers the opportunity cost of various decisions, rather than the irrelevant accounting costs. It compares the present to several possible futures, as indexed by the various actual choices that one faces, rather than by miraculous changes in external parameters. It tries to evaluate what are the difference between the various outcomes that each available alternative can bring (which difference is the economic cost of the alternative, also known as its opportunity cost). It gives information on what could happen, and is a tool for decision-making. It serves as a guide to allocate each resource to one project rather than one another.

Given the knowledge of the various opportunity costs, and the preferences of individuals, the praxeologist proceeds to determine which decisions will be preferred and taken. Of course, the knowledge of the various opportunity costs might be but partially known, and these costs evaluated differently by various individuals depending on their own knowledge and preferences. But this can itself be viewed as an opportunity: it means that exchange of information between people can help them take better decisions, by having better models of each other's and their own preferences and opportunities, so as to adapt not only to what nature can do but also to what each other will do. Thus even though this information about opportunities and preferences ^[75] may depend on a lot of unknown or unmastered factors, it is possible to make useful predictions; moreover, cooperation between people allows to actually diminish risks and lessen the effects of unmastered factors, by sharing knowledge, by building elaborate strategies based on coordinated action, by distributing responsibilities about each subject to those who know better about the field, etc.

The precise prediction of the outcome of the combination of all human choices, considering all the particular conditions in which these choices happen, is out of reach of any person or combination of person — if only because the knowledge on which to base this prediction is itself not available. We can never know for sure which of two choices another person will prefer, unless we do offer him to make the choice, and see what he chooses, at which point it is too late to make a prediction. And that is for one choice only, whereas the combination of all human action is much more complex. Thus, the full understanding of human society is beyond the reach of anyone. But that doesn't mean more partial forms of understanding are unachievable, and that no useful prescriptions are possible. Indeed, it is possible to discern immutable general laws of human behavior, that are no less laws of nature than are the laws of electromagnetism; and from the knowledge of these laws, it is possible to deduce general principles of behavior, and an art of behavioral engineering, much like there are general safety rules for the use of electromagnetic devices and an art of electrical engineering.

From the rules that people explicitly acknowledge or implicitly follow, an order emerges in society. This order is seldom if ever used as an explanation to justify the rules to follow — what matters, though, is that said order is actually an inevitable consequence of the acceptance of the rules. Cyberneticians are interested in these rules, what they are, what they can be, how they affect the emerging order, how to change them, within what limits they can be changed, what recipes can be followed to build better behavior, etc. While studying rules of behavior, cyberneticians will pay particular attention to variants and invariants: which potentials and which information are being conserved by which kind of events, and which are irreversibly spent; which phenomena are the locus of positive feedback, and are conducive to evolutionary forces; which phenomena are the locus of negative feedback, and are conducive to partial equilibria; which events modify available opportunities, etc. With such an analysis, it becomes possible to systematically weed out such fallacies as that which is seen and that which is unseen that defy basic natural laws of conservation, and to focus energy and attention on plans that may actually work.

White Magic and Black Magic differ not only in the way they encourage us to gather information and determine what is good, but also in the way they have us act toward what we think is good. Whereas the static thinking of Black Magic implies an ends-oriented theory of moral action, the dynamic thinking of White Magic implies a means-oriented theory of justice.

The Authoritarian Principle argues that some people know what is good, that they have the authority to determine what is good. Consequently, for authoritarians, people who go against opinions expressed by this authority are acting in evil ways, and should be prevented from doing it; coercion is thus considered as a legitimate way to enforce against dissenters the opinions of authority upon its acknowledged domain.

On the contrary, the Libertarian Principle argues that goodness in general and useful knowledge in particular emerge from each person being free of choosing and responsible for one's choices within the limits of the property one creates and acquires. To paraphrase Hayek, we libertarians do not deny that there are superior people, better choices, moral and immoral deeds, etc. What we deny is that anyone would have the authority to decide who these superior people are, what these better choices are, which deeds are moral or immoral, etc. ^[76]

Indeed, assuming that some people know better, how do we establish who these people are? Authority does not solve the problem of the knowledge of what's good; it only pushes this problem back, to be swept under the rug of irrationality. Ultimately, each individual, so as to determine which authority to heed, will still have to use one's own reason, one's own experience, one's own traditions (that are but experience accumulated for centuries). One's own mind is irreducibly the ultimate criterion for one's own choices, even if one chooses to delegate; some personal liberty and responsibility cannot be negated, even by the most authoritarian setting.

For even if you accept some authority, even if God speaks directly to you and you know it, other people might not know it. They have no means to ascertain your claims, and thus they have no reason to believe you a priori, to follow the exact same authority, etc. There's no way they can reasonably trust your word for it. And even if they agree with you in a formal way, agreeing to your opinion, using the very same words as come from the very same authority, they might actually have a different interpretation of these words, they might understand them with a different meaning, with subtle but essential differences. So even with a formal agreement on a common authority, there remains the question of how one can communicate one's actual ideas of what Good is, and have them prevail against opposing ideas. Supposing one knows what good is, how can one have other people also know what good is? Assuming that one's notion of good has a potential meaning to other people that one wishes to transmit, what are the legitimate or efficient ways to achieve this transmission?

This is another way by which the Authoritarian Principle cannot evade the practical necessity of having to convince people through peaceful ways: every would-be authority doesn't have the direct individual resources to coerce at most but a few other people into doing one's bidding; it is only by acquiring the cooperation of minions, henchmen, followers and accomplices that one can extend one's grip on unconsenting individuals. And all these servants and accomplices have to be convinced, seduced, or otherwise persuaded, not out of a preexisting authority, but out of non-authoritarian means. Now, in the case of Black Magic, these non-authoritarian ways include fraud and deception, the culture of superstition and irrationality, as well as gangs of consenting mobsters victimizing unconsenting third parties.

On the contrary, the Libertarian Principle, since it bars authority, coercion, fraud, deception and any kind of victimization, induces the development of very particular means to acquire the cooperation of other people: rational discussion, or at least seduction in a way compatible with rational criticism. It can even be said that rational or otherwise logical reasoning in general are born out of the liberty to negociate under what terms to cooperate, and to ultimately choose whether to cooperate or not. And therefore it is no surprise that axiomatic mathematics was born in the freest cities of Greece. Indeed, when free people have to gain the voluntary acceptance of other free people, including foreigners from other cities, so as to cooperate, one has to convince other people that it is their interest to cooperate, and at the same time one must avoid being foolishly convinced against one's own interest. Thus, in a society of mutually free individuals, everyone develops to some degree skills in both communication (rhetorics, dialectics) and analysis of communication (logic, politics). And these skills are only developed in such societies of free and responsible people: for there is no interest to invest in reason when one is not going to decide or when one is not going to suffer the consequences of one's own decisions, whereas one has to decide well when one is free and accountable. Hence coercion makes people irresponsible and irrational, whereas freedom makes people responsible and reasonable. That irrational seduction develops and prospers is a sure sign that the principles of freedom and accountability are not being respected.

Let us now investigate the quintessential legacy of the Authoritarian Principle: coercion made a legitimate means of action. Coercion does not convince — it cannot. Its very principle is to eschew conviction and the means to achieve it. It can make people do what you desire — but only if you're the strongest — and only for a moment, after which things are even worse than before. For not only will people have remained unconvinced, they will also have abandoned the now unnecessary mental tools of rationality and responsibility necessary to develop deep conviction. This is why coercion can never be used to make people moral, according to anyone's idea of morality: they will remain as immoral as before, just more so for accepting the rule of their masters, while the masters themselves become monsters. It makes the subjects hypocrites and the masters haughty. In one case, they are under the power of other people's will, and lose all sense of responsibility. In the other case, they are unaccountable of their decisions as long as they remain in power, and become prisoner of their violent means of living. In both cases, they end up being both unfree and irresponsible.

The eventual vanity of coercion as a principle of action has been nicely summarized by discordians. Discordianism is some kind of ``ha ha, only serious´´ religion made up by a particular kind of libertarians: the funny kind. In one remarkable discordian website, Hyperdiscordia, you can find the divine ``Law of Eristic Escalation´´, originally from the Principia Discordia, thusly commented (bold emphasis is mine):

This Law (originally found in the Honest Book of the Truth, Gospel According to Fred, 1:6) pertains to any arbitrary or coercive imposition of order. It is:

Imposition of Order = Escalation of Chaos

Fenderson's Amendment adds that the tighter the order in question is maintained, the longer the consequent chaos takes to escalate, BUT the more it does when it does!
[The Thudthwacker Addendum to Fenderson's Amendment goes on to prove that the presence of a nonlinear term which crops up in Fenderson's calculations serves to cause the escalation of chaos to be completely unpredictable in terms of the original imposition of order — Ed.]

Armed with the Law of Eristic Escalation and Fenderson's Amendment [And Thudthwacker's Addendum — Ed.] any imbecile — not just a sociologist — can understand politics.^[77]

Now that we saw the static and dynamic principles of Black Magic, we can examine the effects of Black Magic in real-life, and relate its modern expressions to their traditional archetypes.

Human sacrifices: Black Magicians invoke sacrifice as good in itself, something that pleases the gods, with the ultimate sacrifice being human sacrifice. They will thus justify killing for the good of the people: for instance, Aztec priests used to sacrifice humans everyday, so that sun would rise again tomorrow. Nowadays, the primitive form of human sacrifices is not so frequent, but such sacrifices still exist in disguised forms: wars, embargoes and other governmental operations cause many direct deaths, collateral damages and other ``inevitable casualties´´ that serve to satisfy the power trip of political managers, under the pretense of domestic security, the defense of democracy, national interest, the indivisible union of the republic, etc. directors of intelligence agencies may even let the people they are meant to protect get killed so as to promote their agenda of stricter ``security measures´´ toward the public opinion. To Black Magicians, individual human lives are ``expandable´´ before the superior motives of the collectivist entity they claim to dictate.

Zombies: Black Magicians create beings that are more dead than live. For that, they typically hypnotize and drug their victims, that they then use as slaves until they die; such people might not be very productive, but the magicians don't care since they get to benefit, even though the operation is a greater loss to the victims, and a net loss for global welfare. The chosen victims were often first drugged into faking death, so that the Black Magician could pass as its resurrecter and savior. Nowadays, workers are forced to surrender the four fifth of their lives; citizens are deprived from the responsible choices that are the very stuff life is made of. They are not so much of living beings, though they aren't completely dead either. Yet, the Black Magicians of government claim being their saviors, and their owing the little life they have left to government intervention. And indeed, since the official statistics don't make the difference between a living man and a zombie, they will serve as a justification to whatever policy will ``enhance´´ the visible official statistics at the invisible cost of transforming humans into zombies.

Material Sacrifices: Black Magicians will require destructions meant to appease the gods: valuable goods are destroyed in the hope of a magic reaction from the gods, outside of any rational mechanism of natural causation that will link the sacrifices to any positive effect. Of course, Black Magicians will insist on the importance that a properly anointed priest should control the sacrifice (and be paid for his office, obviously). Non-ritual sacrifices will be recognized for the murder, vandalism, robbery and fraud that they are; whereas ritualized sacrifices under control of Black Magic priesthood will be presented as valid and working invocations. For instance, private forging of money somehow will be decried as robbery and decreasing total wealth, whereas government-backed inflation, which amounts to the same forging of money, will be boasted as somehow increasing wealth. Governments will build great public monuments at great expenses; they will build roads, plan up massive economic intervention, etc.; for that, they will demand the public to consent to new taxes as a sacrifice necessary for the Godvernment to grant them its divine benefits. When faced with the shortage and failure of government supplied goods and services, they will invoke the civic duty to reduce their consumption and expectations. They will invoke the reduction in work time, so as to diminish unemployment ^[78]. Though material sacrifices do not end human lives, they spend the human life that was necessary to build the sacrificed material. Just like zombifying people is enslavement — the partial murder of one's future, — material sacrifices are robbery — the partial murder of one's past ^[79].

Sacrifices have many effects that reinforce the power of Black Magic: they benefit the priests of Black Magic who levy their share of the loot; they thus create a class of powerful citizens interested in maintaining the belief. Properly directed, sacrifices will destroy the enemies of Black Magic, and deprive them of the resources through which they could grow. Sacrifices commit all those who participate in such abominations; these people, to preserve respect for themselves, will refuse to acknowledge their own foolishness, their own sins, their own crimes; to relieve their own guilt, they will happily reject the blame on the sacrificial lambs, the victims of ritual sacrifices, or some other symbolic enemies. Sacrifices divert the attention of the public away from the real causes of their sorrow, the real grieves, the real culprits, toward the accomplishment of the ritual. Sacrifices give hope to the believers, that since the sacrifice was made, now their lives will get better; with this hope, believers will continue to get the system going. Sacrifices give fear to the believers, that if the sacrifice were not made, their lives would get worse; with this fear, believers will prevent changes from toppling the system.

In Black Magic, the priests cast spells: they recite formulas, conduct rituals, make magic items. The goal of these spells is manifold: they divert the attention of followers from topics where reasoning could show the absurdity of Black Magic; they focus this attention on some activities that the Black Magicians control; they give an opportunity for the Black Magicians to get paid for these activities; they cultivate habits of dependency among the followers; they turn the intensity of cult worship into a means of social signalling among the followers, with followers competing to be more prominent worshippers, and excluding the lesser worshippers (or worse, non-worshippers) from high-profile social activities (or from society at all, when the power of Black Magicians is great enough).

Black Magicians brew magic potions and recite formulas that they promise will have various beneficial effects if followers drink the potions and follow the rituals. The modern Black Magic forms of these potions and formulas are legislative jaculations, political platforms, demonstrators' demands, strikers' requests. If you should back the projects of politicians, then things will improve for you, — or so they say. The laws being voted, the regulations being issued are as many magic formulas meant to dispel evil. People, those who enforce as well as those who endure, don't have to understand the mechanisms of these laws, the reasons why they are meant to bring prosperity; they have to be smitten by the magic of these laws, by their superficial appearance of goodness, by their official purpose full of good intentions, by the congruence of their rituals with other accepted rituals. Oftentimes, the people who participate in these rituals will recognize how absurd and destructive they are, but they will nevertheless abide by the prescriptions of Black Magic, and accept the belief that these obvious failures are but part of a beneficial big picture, and maybe even the consequence of a lack of respect for Black Magic principles, to be solved by appeals to more Black Magic.

Black Magicians use voodoo dolls as symbols of enemies and phenomena that they claim to master through symbolic intervention. They use these symbolic interventions to claim as their success any progress visible against enemies or in the phenomena, whereas any regress will be the fault of people not complying to their precepts, or otherwise of a lack of Black Magic power and intervention. Modern Black Magicians use statistical models for this very same purpose. Expert statisticians will build models tailored to justify any desired intervention by the government, and to explain how it is thanks to government intervention that the economy is going better.

Black Magicians regularly call for massive religious gatherings, so as to build up cosmic forces, so as to summon good spirits. These grand masses have none of their proclaimed magic effects on the external world; their real purpose is their effect upon the members of the cult themselves: they are the opportunity to demonstrate the strength of the movement in face of opposite odds; they serve to assess the loyalty of members to the movement, and to force people into committing to the movement; they rouse tribal feelings of belonging to the group, and other crowd reactions; they strengthen the members' view of the world as ``us against them´´; they confirm the Black Magicians as the leaders of the mob. Votes, polls, referendums, mass demonstrations, etc., are to a great extent such Black Magic masses: they don't have much effect on the outcome of events, but serve to give a mantle of legitimacy to those who rule in the name of the Common Cause.

Black Magic is a tool to confer power to a class of priests, higher and lower. The modern form of Black Magic serves its own class of politicians, big and small. They interpret the ``will of the people´´ or whatever the official ruling principle is. The religious class is organized in a hierarchy of actual rulers. Aside this hierarchy is also a large class of theologians who will invent intellectual justifications for the regime and its interventions, as well as provide a reserve of potential rulers. The modern form of this class of men is the intelligentsia, made of ``experts´´, statisticians, statist ``economists´´, etc. Most of them will be paid by government or otherwise receive various privileges as university professors, directors of various administrations, journalists, political consultants, etc. These alleged brainiacs will provide alibis to Black Magic; they give it the apparent authority of reason. The apparatus of State-controlled intellectual activities will offer to intellectuals the choice between two opportunities: they may live well as servants of the Minotaur ^[80], gaining in social status as they spread the official ways of thinking; or they may be officially discredited and be excluded from controlled means of communication should they prefer to be dissidents.

Black Magic, being based on wishful thinking rather than reason, always insists on intents rather than causal connections. In popular literature, a pure heart, — according to the Black Magicians' morality, — rather than patiently developed skills, — as adapted to mastering nature, — is the key to all blessings. In modern Black Magic, this focus on intents is still prominent. Political measures are backed not with an explanation of their effects, but as serving the just cause of the people, of the workers, etc. Leaders will display how touchy-feely they are, they will cultivate feelings and sentiments; anyone trying to analyze rationally and debunk their justifications will be dismissed as having dark intents, as being an ``enemy of class´´, a servant of Evil, of foreign enemy forces. As marxists used to explicitly say, to Black Magicians, it doesn't matter what you say, it only matters ``where you speak from´´.

Black Magic is based on a manichean view of the world, where the Black Magicians assume the role of Good, White, etc., whereas anything that stands up against their aims is considered as Evil, Black, etc. In this manichean cosmic struggle, everyone is forced to take one of two sides. This is the quintessence of political polarization. Of course, among Black Magicians themselves, factions that compete for power will each claim to be White, whereas the opposite faction is Black, or at least manipulated by evil forces, or allied to them, or at best ``objectively allied´´ to them. In democracies, this competition for the claim of being good against evil takes paradoxical form, as the political life is polarized in two poles (left and right), each identified by its radicals, but at the same time, each competing for the marginal voters around the median opinion, far from the professed radical ideals used for intellectual justification of the parties. People in democracies, are thus led to constantly choose between the ``Lesser of two evils´´, away from either of the two main branches of Black Magic ideals. Democrats are both aware of this limitation of democracy as the means to advance their Black Magic ideals ^[81], and at the same time, fanatically attached to democracy as part of the consensual doctrine accepted by the two main branches of democratic Black Magic.

Another paradox of Black Magicians is their relationship with money. They will institute a precise accounting of private and public activities in terms of money, so as to be able to tax the ones and fund the others; they will thus express everything in terms of money; they will see money everywhere. Money is a magic thing to them; when any emergency happens, all the government has to do is to ``unblock money´´ so as to fund a budget for whatever emergency measures have to be taken. Black Magicians worship, admire, envy, desire the power conferred by money. They love to generously spend other people's money, with laws, subventions, feasts, institutions, constructions, etc. However, doing so, they spend not just people's money, but also their lives: for the utility of money comes from its use as an intermediate for the adaptive cooperation of individuals who are free to choose how to cooperate or not. The power of money is ultimately tied to the freedom and creation of White Magic; people only accept government-controlled money as a compulsory legal tender because they expect that despite the inconvenience, they will be able to use it as a practical universal intermediate in free trade. So Black Magicians are ambivalent about this. They hate the Free Market and all it represents, because it is a negation of their basic premises. At the same time, they recognize that a Free Market economy is inevitable, and indispensable, if they have to have anything to prey upon. Black Magicians will thus learn to have a double hypocritical attitude regarding money: they will openly claim it as good when it is confiscated and spent by the Godvernment, and as an instrument of vice to be despised when it is in private hands; yet they will do whatever they can so that the money flows, sacrificing their ideals to the private lobbyists who promise prosperity; finally, they will personally indulge to the power of this great ``corrupter´´ that is money, although by identifying themselves with the Great Cause, they will easily pardon this vice in regard to the services that they render to the Nation (or whichever the Great Cause is).

Black Magic leads to many such paradoxes, and Black Magicians must thus train themselves and their followers into techniques of double-think, whereby they will be able to manipulate concepts from two or more logically contradictory points of view, depending on the context, while actively avoiding any situation where the contradictions become too obvious. The ultimate spell of Black Magic is thus to confer its followers some kind of schizophrenia allowing them to survive despite the contradictions upon which their beliefs are founded ^[82].

Black Magic is a cult that must be kept alive by constantly occupying the minds of people. And the best way to occupy their minds is to also occupy their bodies. The Godvernment will seek to intervene in any and every aspect of social life. It will even intervene in so very personal things as intimate relations between people in love, by regulating marriage, giving it an important place in fiscal and civil regulations, etc. Any domain that is not subject to heavy regulations is disconsidered as lawless savagery, a wild anarchy, a lack of legislation, to be promptly remedied by new legislation. At the same time, all this intervention must be accompanied by constant rhetorics, by appeal to the citizens' spirits, and ultimately by actual concern of anxious citizens, so that the Godvernment will appear positively rather than negatively. This is why Black Magicians will resort to a series of tricks so as to stage the public worship of Black Magic.

War is the grandest way in which the Godvernment is presented as the savior of the People. War may be an actual war against a foreign country, if possible led by an obvious tyrant. It may also be war against unofficial governments reigning over areas abandonned by official legal governments: the mafia, drug trafficking organizations, terrorists, guerillas, etc. In a more rhetorical way, it may be war against some official vice: drug consumption, smoking, prostitution, drinking, unofficial religions, etc. Politicians will resort to the vocabulary of war even as they claim to fight poverty, fight unemployment, fight any ``social disease´´ or misery. All these wars serve as a justification to the State impersonating the role of Good in a cosmic struggle between Good and Evil. Their ultimate goal is not external, it is internal: the important effect and strong incentive for Black Magicians to wage war is not to fight the claimed enemy, but to tighten the subjection of the allegedly protected citizens <sup>[83]</sup>. The ``exceptional´´ situation of war will serve as an excuse for whatever crimes and attempts to the rule of law that godvernmental forces may commit, as well as a diversion from whatever misachievements they may make on ``secondary´´ fronts. This situation of exception is so beneficial to Black Magicians that they will make it become permanent: indeed, once they have spread the idea that they are the solution rather than the problem, they will use the very failures of their policies as a pretense for ever increasing their interventions. An initially small temporary intervention will thus eventually turn into a permanent war to struggle against the permanent fiasco caused by the very intervention of the State.

Throughout all their staging of life as a cosmic struggle, Black Magicians will cultivate among their followers a feeling of righteousness. According to Black Magicians, the world is ``us´´ against ``them´´, it is friends versus foes — and you better be among friends. Friends are to be identified by their intents, their community of interests, their belonging to a nation or a race or a social class or any other category proposed by the Black Magicians' ideology. Black Magicians thus propose an easy, undemanding, relaxing, and false grid for understanding the universe ^[84]. This simple grid offers followers the immediate benefit of saving the need for sustained enquiry, indulging their intellectual sloth ^[85]. According to this grid, bad guys will be equated with people with bad intents, and the other way round, while similarly good guys will be equated both ways with people with officially good intents ^[86]. Enemies who claim to have good intents will be classified as hypocrits, or as deeply misguided pawns manipulated by a greater Evil. Friends who have bad intents are to be justified, pardonned, or excommunicated. This polarization of life in its extreme forms can lead to Conspiracy theory, where some people want to see a common intent, a common will, concerted interests, a central organization behind any Great Evil in the world. Anything wrong must have been meant as wrongdoing ^[87]. The dual form of Conspiracy Theory is much scarier: Totalitarianism. It is the belief that, at some scale, there can be any Good in the world only if behind it there is a common intent, a common will, concerted interests, a central organization. All in all, this Black Magic polarization of people's vision of the world is Animism: the want to see willful intent everywhere.

Our claim all throughout this essay is that Black Magic, the Authoritarian Principle, is an intellectual fraud; it is a mental illness; it is a parasite meme that makes people insane; it is a profoundly erroneous view of reality. There is a fundamental inadequacy between the discourse of Black Magic and the very actions of Black Magicians, that ultimately take place in the real world, the reality of which doesn't match the expectations provided by Black Magic. Black Magicians may choose to be ignorant of nature and to revolt against it, but by very definition, neither their whims nor their actions will ever change the laws of nature ^[88]. Furthermore, we affirm that White Magic, the Libertarian Principle, is a correct paradigm for apprehending Life; it is mental sanity, a valid way of understanding the universe as we may live in it.

Yet at the same time, we take note that Black Magic, though it may bring sorrow, distress, failure, suffering and death to its followers and their victims, is itself surviving and prospering: It is a Memetic success. It is another proof case where memetic fitness for a meme to survive is not the same as the fitness to survive for those who adopt it, or as the propensity of said meme to pass the test of rational criticism. Black Magic somehow ``works´´, but it doesn't work as advertised. This is why we must examine the real reasons for its success. We must ask ourselves, what makes Black Magic so successful? What are the memetic forces that lead to Black Magic? What are the memetic forces that may help to resist and dispel Black Magic? On the long run, is Black Magic going to grow or to dim away? And what can we do about it?

Black Magic spreads based on faith and fear and other basic emotions, on animal reflexes, on intellectual sloth, on a primitive way of thinking through emotional associations, symmetrical binary relations. It appeals to the primitive parts of man's mind and develops the pride of keeping one's mind in a primitive state. Indeed, Black Magic consists precisely of withholding rational thinking, and letting someone else — the Authority — decide on one's behalf. Th