Episode #1 | Positive Thinking vs. Social Change

You can listen to the promo on Spotify at this link.

Transcript of the episode

Hello, heathens and outcasts! Welcome to the very first episode of this podcast! I promise you, you’re going to have a Witch Riot! I made this podcast to be friendly with people with hearing impediments so this is a transcript of episode #1.

I’ve been wanting to do this podcast for a very long time. It’s been brewing in my mind for a while. I’ve been mixing materials, removing ingredients, and adding some spice. This concoction took a while, still, I never relinquished this idea, because the need for expression in outcasts can rarely be muted, or at least not for long, isn’t that right?

Let’s answer two essential questions before we move along, shall we? “Who the heck am I?” and “What is this podcast about?” Well, my sweet sweet who-the-fuck-wants-to-know (just kidding). I’m a witch, clearly, but I’m also a fed-up feminist; “fed up of what?” you might ask. Well, thank you for being so thoughtful. I’m fed up with misogyny being present in every framework of our range of possibilities, not only in the mundane but also in the esoteric realm, and so, as the rebel and instigator aquarian that I am, I decided to do a podcast about this intertwined mundane and esoteric world but from a gender perspective and I think that answers the second question about the podcast.

“But what is your academic background?” The same as any other effing millennial with an opinion: the freaking internet. “Then what entitles you to have an opinion?” The aforementioned mighty god: the internet. I’m not here to play the prophet, nor to convince squared-minded people to validate what I think. If you vibe with what I say then welcome to the podcast, and if you don’t then goodbye. It’s as simple as that, darling. “You sound very defensive!” Well, my delicate creatures, as I said before I’m very fed up and I have a feeling that if you have a vagina or you identify female, you might be too.

Okay, after this irreverent pleasantry soliloquy, I’m ready to begin with this episode and today I want to talk about positive thinking versus social change. It has come to my attention lately that many people in the witchcraft community have decided to mask their fear of negativity and non-conformity with a law-of-attraction and positive thinking kind of narrative. Through the exchange of ideas between many of these people and me, some serious political and feminist issues have been red-flagged and I felt I needed a space to share them, not only so beginning witches have access to a dissident voice but also to provide arguments and reasoning to a very pressing debate we’re having as feminist in our spiritual community.

So let’s quickly define what I mean by positive and law of attraction kind of thinking. In the philosophical line of these propositions, there is a popular idea that in everything that happens to you, you’ve attracted it to yourself because you have to match the energy you’re receiving for something to occur. In this beautiful and idyllic philosophy, the universe never makes mistakes and everything that happens, happens for a reason. Some people go as far as saying that everything that happens in your life has already been written in a soul contract before you were even born. And all of this is done to make you feel empowered because this way you’re not a victim of anything, you were just being a tough teacher to yourself.

At this point, I need to clarify that I don’t think that the people who adhere to this philosophy are bad. I don’t think they are consciously aware of the damage this philosophy is creating. I think they have a strong need to be attached to a sense of control and in a weird way, to think that everything painful that happened to them was unconsciously wanted, alienates them from life a little bit less. But at the same time, this perspective has immense political consequences, especially when it comes to social injustice and abuse.

So let’s debunk this philosophy. First of all, I believe the universe does make mistakes, and I can prove it to you. If the universe didn’t make mistakes, then any number would be a solution to any mathematical equation. Let that sink in for a moment. Now, you could argue that math is an abstract practice, and that is true, but it’s an abstract practice with real and tangible applications in science and technology. And so, if the universe couldn’t hold errors in its nature, science and chaos magic would be the same thing. Everything would be the answer to everything and there wouldn’t be any need for rational thinking since you could never get it wrong.

So in a universe where errors are possible, could injustice be an error? This brings me to my next point. Another argument I often hear is that the universe is dual, and “you can’t have the good without having the bad” and I will challenge that precept. I do agree with the first part though, I do believe the universe is dual, I’m a Wiccan, of course I do. I also believe in a unified universe as well, but that’s not the point, or maybe it’s exactly the point. For me, there are two kinds of dualities in this world. The first one is complimentary and the second is antagonistic. Now, the principle of complementarity is the one that allows us to see the universe as dual and unified at the same and not have a paradox there because complementarity can hold diversity in it. You can see examples of this duality in the existence of the female and male (I don’t discard the non-binary option, I’m merely referring to generative principles), active and passive, night and day, light and darkness, hot and cold. These are dualities that exist in a spectrum and they need each other. They can’t exist without one another. They complement each other. But most importantly, this kind of duality doesn’t interfere with the possibility of reaching a collective agreement. Why? Because nothing significant and relative to your well-being changes if for instance, some other person thinks a sunrise is closer to the day spectrum than the night spectrum and for you is the other way around. Nothing significantly changes for you if someone thinks 69 degrees Fahrenheit is too hot and for you is too cold. You can exist with that discrepancy, and that disagreement adds to the diversity of the world and enriches it.

Then we have the other kind of duality, the one that generates paradoxes because it directly affects the possibility of collective agreement, and that is the antagonistic duality. This duality is often perceived in moral dilemmas. A situation is either good or bad, fair or unfair. And if it’s not good or fair for all sides of a situation, then there is no collective agreement. For example, you can’t have a conservative government and a progressive government at the same time. You can’t hate immigrants and fight for their rights. Basically, the main difference between complementary and antagonistic dualities is that in complementary dualities, the many individual positionings in the spectrum of a dichotomy don’t annul all the other individualities present in the collective; while in antagonistic dualities, as long as there is a part that is subject to a wrong, there can never be a complete right. The first is an inclusive duality and the second is an exclusive one, and one is not better than the other, however, they have very different natures because in an inclusive duality hot wouldn’t be hot without cold and they need each other to exist, but an exclusive duality fair will always be fair, even if unfair doesn’t exist. So for example, even if no one ever makes a mathematical mistake, the right answer keeps being the right answer.

And before all the #notallmen movement guys use this same argument to justify how feminism offends them and makes them feel bad and so we can’t be right; I will clarify that goodness and fairness will always be on the side of equality and not on the side of privileges.

So if we think of these two types of dualities, in which one do you think the act of rape should be placed? I think that after this thorough philosophical exposition, it’s clear that rape is a moral dilemma and it belongs to the exclusive type of duality. So just to be clear if someone raped or abused you, it will never be your fault. You didn’t unconsciously want it. It wasn’t something your loving soul wanted you to experience to make you grow or appreciate consent. It was not part of your destiny. You were indeed victimized, and once you’re able to see the injustice in it is that you’re ready to start taking action towards a more just world for yourself, for the people who went through the same as you and for anyone who also suffers injustice.

Doesn’t it raise a red flag that the same philosophy that supports that your essence is the same as the unlimited all-powerful essence of the universe, also states that this unlimited source of everything, couldn’t find any better way to teach you a lesson than to rape you? Either that source is not that powerful, or it’s not very wise, or it’s not very loving. And if it’s too much for you to process, let’s remove ourselves from the equation so we can see the situation clearer. If these wouldn’t have happened to you but to your kid, is there any part of you that can consider this a loving teaching lesson? Would any part of you think this is a loving way of teaching something? I bet you can find at least five different ways you can teach the same lesson without this situation to someone you love.

But this positive thinking philosophy doesn’t have only this harmful implication. I often find that most people don’t trust their unconscious mind and usually think it is trying to sabotage them, and if your narrative is that unconsciously you want everything bad that happens to you, no wonder you don’t trust your unconscious. It’s important to understand there are others and there is you. You don’t control others, nor do your unconsciousness. We might be all connected on a collective unconsciousness, but you don’t control it. So, what other people do is their responsibility, not yours. Your unconscious is there to guide you through your emotions and intuition, to make you more aware of what you do with what happens to you and your reactions, and to unravel new layers of yourself and the universe, not to make you responsible for everything outside yourself. So in the aforementioned scenarios, your unconscious should guide you to react when something doesn’t feel right and to trust that you didn’t unconsciously want this if your emotions are pointing you against it.

Finally, one of the last arguments I hear when we talk about this subject is that; to recognize yourself as a victim might make you be stuck forever in a victim mentality. I personally believe we only get stuck in some type of mentalities if we find a benefit to them (in the case of the victim it could be how other people might feel empathetic towards us and want to help us through a harsh time) or we’re scared of it and we never allow the internal process to completely go through and heals what needs to be healed through it (in this case it could be an interruption of the mourning process because we don't want the sadness to prevail forever, or because we are scared that the sadness could turn into a violent or resentful attitude, but I’ll get to that in a sec). I completely agree with Carl Jung’s quote that says “What you deny submits you. What you accept transforms you”. I don’t believe that someone who accepts their victimhood will be eternally a victim. I believe that after you allow yourself to be as sad as you need to be, you will organically get over it and then something truly magical will start to happen: you will get angry and you’ll feel an authentic drive to change that reality for you and others, and you’ll realize that is not healthy not to be angry at injustice. “But anger is such a negative feeling, anger destroys”. I will never understand how the same witches that talk about dark Goddesses, fail to see anger as a positive feeling when it comes to social change. Some things need to be destroyed, rape is one of them.

Also, I don’t know if this is so needless to say so I’m going to say it anyway: to realize something wrong happened to you and to feel the urge or the commitment to make this world better doesn’t oblige you to take action against the person that victimized you if you’re not ready to face them. There are many ways you can help to change this reality, and if you’re a witch, there are even more.

At this point, I think there is one last question pending: Is positive thinking only harmful? I’m 100% convinced that positive thinking is not only harmful. Imagine this situation: imagine a young woman, who's been told her entire life she is worth nothing and due to that narrative she never pursued her dreams, or at the first attempt of pursuing them and encountering a negative, she saw that rejection as a confirmation of the already installed narrative in her life. Then in this scenario, of course, positive thinking is absolutely necessary for her not to give up on her dreams (as long as her dreams are not harmful), because that narrative that she’s worth nothing is for sure untrue. And even if she doesn’t feel she is valuable, positive thinking can help her start feeling that way.

But let’s go even further with my previous example. If that young girl becomes an adult who believes in herself through positive thinking and now she has the life that she always wanted, but one day going to work she gets delayed by a strike on the streets and she thinks that those workers don’t have the right to strike because if they are not treated rightfully is their fault for lack of positive thinking. Can you see now how this philosophy becomes a problem again? Positive thinking doesn’t make others’ reality disappear just because it’s convenient for us. If we try to convince ourselves with positive thinking that inequality doesn’t exist, then we better be ready to jump to a parallel reality because we can’t call ourselves aware and support that statement in this one.

So, after all this explanation, you could say that positive thinking only works as a numbing effect that impedes the collective to organize for the better. But that statement is also not true. When it comes to achieving the “impossible”, positive thinking is the leap of faith that we need to make to take ourselves beyond reality, and no social change can occur without it. No social mobilization or activism would happen if we thought no change could come out of it, so you could say that positive thinking can also help social change if it’s used correctly. And no witch can be a witch without positive thinking either, since without setting the intention that magic is real and a ritual will work, no magical ritual can come to fruition. But we know that a ritual works when it becomes real and we see tangible results otherwise, it’s a fantasy; and if we use positive thinking to override the reality of others, we are not doing magic, we are creating fantasies. Let's not forget that the best act of magic is the one that improves everyone's reality.

So I’m convinced that one of the most important uses that can be given to positive thinking is to help us believe social change is possible because, as Noam Chomsky said: “If you assume that there is no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, that there are opportunities to change things, then there is a possibility that you can contribute to making a better world.”

So, here you have it, witches and outcasts. You’ve entered the pungent caustic realm of my mind. You might have liked what you heard or you might not, but either way, if you’re wise, you’ll know to be respectful and if not, well, I’m a witch, do your own math.

I hope you enjoy this episode. This is my first podcast in English. Hopefully, I was able to get the message across with my non-native vocabulary and pronunciation.

Witch Riot! is created, edited and produced by Bruja Gualicha. No partial or total content of this post should be reproduced without my expressed written consent.

Thank you for spending this lovely time with me, witchynauts!

See you when I see you, my dears!

Best premonitions to you all.