Because it IS silly to anyone with two brain cells to rub together.

Some years ago, back in the Eighties, I used to make a pilgrimage to San Diego. The New Age Movement was at its peak, The Aquarian Conspiracy promised GREAT CHANGE. From that massive hodge podge of crystal worshippers, fakirs and a banal boiling pot of people channeling Christ (as though all you had to do was twist a nipple in the right direction and you could turn the Almighty right in for $100 please, pass the hat), three types appear to have been vomited out: those of us who wholesale rejected all that shit for what it was, those who skidded sideways into today's sick evangelical backlash, and those who have simply morphed into today's version of the early Tony Robbins types of spiritual shyster, including QAnon.

Every generation has its new-and-depraved manifestation of folks selling easy answers to increasingly difficult questions, with the evil twin of blaming the non-converts for being the problem.

To that, if The Secret were accurate, there is something fundamentally wrong with me that I was unable to "manifest" the Perfect Man, white horse and shining castle in the background.

I'm very glad I got exposed to that movement, because at this age it's really easy to spot the same kind of idiocy. If there's a benefit of being older it may well be that we've been around long enough to recognize the same bullshit, just packaged differently.

I play on the outer periphery of the esoteric sciences but I hit a hard stop at manifesting in that sense that the Oz adherents present it. As if. For my part, and this is one reason I read your articles, folks who honestly believe this shit are nearly always the same folks who love to blame the victim and argue that your circumstances are your fault.

I do and truly well believe that part of the art of being human is learning how to see things differently in order to deal with them. That has little or nothing to do with denying their existence, but is more along the lines of Viktor Frankl's "tragic optimism." That doesn't deny the shit we're handed, nor does it blame those it's handed to. That path leads to finding ways to deal with those life circumstances in different ways. The circumstances remain. How we deal with them changes, and sometimes that allows us some measure of calm. Frankl, who survived the Nazi death camps, had a few things to say about what we actually can and cannot control.

Magical thinking is just plain stupid, superstitious, and ugly. I agree, Oz is likely to get elected. I do not hold out hope for our government. That ship sailed years ago. You can't legislate stupidity but you sure as shit can elect it. We already have, and more are coming.