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Notes -
Your 'Magic Wand Thinking' term is eerily familiar. I've internally termed it some variation of 'Tribal Brain' or 'Shaman Brain'. Just that acute sense that how the world must work is that there is Good Stuff and Bad Stuff. You either need to find the good stuff and it will all be better, or you need to excise the bad stuff and it will all be better. "The Dose Makes The Poison" makes no sense in this magic world. Good things are absolutely good and more is always good. Bad things are absolutely bad and the smallest dose will ruin everything.
But it's hard for me to be too harsh, even if it's despairing. Because whenever I read of one of those obscure African tribes that attribute all ills to witches or cargo cults in the Pacific it just feels like that's basement humanity. That's what we all instinctually revert to if we don't have constant social pressure from birth, or predisposition luck, to be otherwise.
I think there is also a gigantic intuition in the brain to go with whatever is the local social default. Human despise figuring thing out from first principles over and over again. Whatever others are having must be what's normal. Whatever others are having must be what you personally should want. Which makes sense in an amazonian, PNG, or savannah tribal context. But portion sizes have shifted to ridiculous extremes and now everyone is trapped is a default = poison context.
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