Magic is something that, by definition, cannot exist. Yet, people yearn for it.
Why?
Magic is supposed to be a power that exists outside of the structure of ordinary reality, but which can be used to impact reality. Logically, that’s impossible. If the rules of reality could be warped by magic, it would have to be a part of reality, just part of a larger scope of reality that most people were unaware of. That would make magic mundane, subject to scientific study and management.
Of course, there are different kinds of reality. In addition to the objective reality of the physical world, each one of us lives within a subjective reality of our own perceptions and experiences. Subjective experiences are enabled and impacted by the physical structures of our bodies, but they are something more than just these physical structures. In some way that nobody really understands, consciousness emerges out of our physical selves, but transcends that mere physicality to become something else, operating in its own weird ways.
The transcendence of consciousness isn’t truly under our control. We can’t create consciousness at will through even the most elaborate mechanical designs, and though the physical world can impact consciousness experience, our conscious experience cannot directly shape the physical world. We require our bodies, and the machines we invent as extensions of our bodies, to manifest our conscious desires in physical form. Merely wishing for something does not make it happen.
Still we wish, and we wish for wishing to matter. We long for our emotions to acquire a physical force, as materially real as electricity or gravity. Our conscious minds strive to overcome the divide between subjective experience and objective external reality. Every now and then, something happens to temporarily stir up a hint of such a connection. This experience is the emotion of magic.
Magic isn’t real, but the feeling of magic is real, at least on its own terms. As an emotion, however, magic is tricky, because it seeks to assert itself beyond its true bounds. When we experience magical feelings, we begin to believe that our subjective feelings do somehow have the power to directly bend the structure of the physical world. It’s a seductive emotion that makes us vulnerable to manipulation by hucksters.
Magicians do this for us with our consent as a form of entertainment. Con artists do it for their own profit without care for the welfare of others. In between these two extremes, the marketers play their own versions of the same game.
During a recent conversation I had with David Kepron on his NXTLVL Experience Design podcast, he asked me about the way that the concept of a ritual threshold fits into my work as a researcher of commercial culture. I replied, “The reason I like to study rituals in commercial culture is because they get to all of the magic that we love to take for granted. It gets to the heart of the magic of life. If your life doesn’t have magic, what is it worth? The trouble is that we are living in this post-Enlightenment world in which things have been disenchanted. Max Weber said, over one hundred years ago, that our society has been disenchanted. For many reasons, that was a wonderful thing, because you can only do some engineering feats when you have that rational ability, but we can’t survive psychologically merely on function. We’ve discovered that over the last year. So, ritual is about establishing that feeling of magic, even if magic in the Harry Potter sense is not real, and a store is a magical place. It’s a place of ritual.”
Rituals are behavioral expressions of the desire for magic. They’re symbolic routines that carry representations of powerful meaning, even though ritual action in itself is powerless to create the external changes that we seek. What rituals can do is make changes within us, altering our identities both as we experience them and as they are accepted by the social networks that give relevance to our lives.
The most effective marketers are those who transcend the communication of merely rational product benefits in order to place the things they sell within systems of ritual significance. Commercial rituals give physical products symbolic value, elevating them to become external expressions of our inward desires. Ritualization sponsors the emotion of magic by appearing to bridge the subjective and objective realms of reality.
We long for the feeling of magic because we want to feel that our work in the physical world is connected to the feelings that give us a sense of purpose. Even as we seek it, though, we suspect that this connection is a sham. We fear manipulation, and with good reason. We have seen too many marketers attempt to exploit our feelings to accept their hocus locus at face value. Yet, we cannot live in a world devoid of meaningful objects. We need what the marketers have to sell us, even though we can be ruined by that need. We want to live in a magic world, but we don’t want to be taken in by selfish charlatans.
The key to finding a balance between our longing for magic and our fear of its siren song is the establishment of trust. In the short term, exploitative marketers can use sleight of hand to make a quick buck, but those who establish lasting relationships of reliable mutual profit will be the marketers who act as guides through the rituals of shopping and consumption, creating familiar entryways into liminal experiences of the emotion of magic, giving people the feelings of deeper significance that they crave while protecting them from the dangers that arise from a fantasy that is allowed to go on for too long.
It is possible to craft conscientious commercial experiences that provide the little doses of magic we need to sustain our subjective journeys through the mundane physical world. It is all too easy, however, for marketers to break the spell with acts of clumsy exploitation, reminding us that our purchases are unnecessary acts in a meaningless world.
We’re looking for Diagon Alley, but they offer us a cheap, automated imitation, selling little more than the gimmicks of behavioral economics.
