Chapter Four:

Belief as a Meta-Condition: Paradigm and Brand

A significant source of error in people's attempts to understand the world is the inappropriate application of metaphors. In some ways, scientific theory is much more mutable than magical theory. When people apply metaphors appropriate to the energy economic of Newtonian physics, metaphors appropriate for only the simplest of physical interactions, to systems of cybernetic complexity, they aren't being scientific. Instead, they're being superstitious by way of over-simplification. Belief is direct, subjective experience, and is described as a "knowing" or a "burning in the gut", although an intense imprinting moment as a result of a buildup of meaning, followed by a catalyst to trigger the new internal state, is the most common impetus towards belief.

Belief, then, is a subjective quality based on direct experience with the absolute idea in mental space, and this direct experience, which can never be said to be communicated, does in fact have some necessary interplay with the rest of the social mechanism and data exchange that occur. Manipulating belief to a desired end has been developed through chaos magic, a recent form of magic that is heavily affected by postmodernism, which we'll touch on later in this chapter.

You don't convince someone by pushing what you believe against what they believe. It is when their belief system is questioning itself that you can lean in and offer what you want them to do or believe as the answer to the instability. Point out contradictions inherent in their belief system and they themselves may throw it out of balance. Get them to question one end of their beliefs using another end and then offer your meme as the solution to the feelings of doubt.