I had an epiphany last night, reinforced now by this article on water shortage resulting in technological collapse.

I recently got a password for the Netflix account we have here for the Activities department.  So I now have this additional supply of mindless entertainment being cranked out by the corporate media.  Most of the titles are for movies and TV series that have been produced over the last 10-20 years, though they do have a good deal of "classic" older stuff as well.

For the new titles though, I was simply amazed at how many of them have Supernatural themes and characters with Magical Powers.  Witches and Sorcerers are very popular.  Vampires and Werewolves also.  Zombies are everywhere.  Kids always have Mutant powers.  This along with of course the whole Superhero genre, and Sci-fi that violates all the laws of physics.  Media and pop culture is consumed with Magical thinking, and I now believe this explains why even really smart people accept the hopium being pitched out by the REAL scientists in the renewable energy field.  They also are infected with Magical Thinking, or what I now think of as Harry Potter disease, because I trace back the beginning of when this stuff slammed into pop culture, which was with the first Harry Potter movies.  The first one was released in 2001, there were 8 all together.

Since real science has failed  to come up with new inventions as fast as they appeared in the first part of the 20th century, people have returned to the kind of Magical beliefs they had before the scientific revolution.  Go back to before 1700 or so, belief in Miracles and Witches was common.  Religion is full of claims like people living 100s of years or God speaking to them.  This sort of acceptance of unprovable ideas and events became less common as science demonstraated all the marvelous things that could occur.  Naturally, people expected this would continue.

But it hasn't.  Science ran up against the limits of natural law, and stuff like the speed of light became impassable barriers.  Gravity can't be escaped or turned off.  Stars are too far away to get to.  Humans don't want to accept that this is all there is, and at least while you are a living meat package there's nothing more to aspire to.

To resolve this problem, we create fantasy worlds which satisfy the desire for something more meaningful.  It's why Joe Rogan actually DOES believe Terence Howard's nonsense, which I discovered after reading an interview with him where he describes how "blown away" he was by his revelations and it took him days to process it all.

Harry Potter disease is what really dooms us.  It's the deep seated need Homo Saps have that there is something more to life and existence than we get with what is available in the physical world.  Now that science fails to provide more, we return to the supernatural and magical thinking.

RE