Corporate magic seen at first hand

Now you see, when I was just a li'l teenage wiccachyk calling the name of the Goddess under the light of the full moon etc., I thought that the magical (or self-programming) tools I was learning were subversive knowledge that might one day destroy war, capitalism and mainstream pop music altogether (cf. Starhawk, The Fifth Sacred Thing). Now I realise that our rulers already know all this stuff. It's part of how they control us.

Case in point: the "change management workshop" I attended yesterday (to get us used to the idea that our company is being merged and many of us are being, as I believe the Americans say, "downsized"). Among other fascinating information presented by the nicely-presented HR consultant:

If we want to change a situation, we first have to change ourselves. And to change ourselves effectively, we first have to change our perceptions.

Thoughts are creative - you are what you think. Positive thoughts attract positive outcomes, and the converse. Learning techniques to control negative mental images are valuable.

The antidote to boredom is to concentrate wholly on what you have to do in the present movement (no matter how dull or alienating).

All this was coupled with actually helpful practical/physical exercises for cutting stress and improving working habits. But what really gets me is that people are paid good money by corporates for teaching the above idealist/magical ideas to their employees. The woman actually told a story about someone who actually won the lottery by simply visualising it. I responded "what happens if 20,000 people visualise it?" and she replied "well, of course, some of them won't have achieved sufficient purity of intention..."

There are two choices: this woman actually believes in this extremely vulgar, idealist version of magic. (Chaos Marxism, by contrast, denies strongly that "you are what you think" - instead, we say as materialists, you are what you do.) Alternatively, she's realised she can make good money by inculcating it to drones as, as Karl Marx put it, an opiate - something to keep the proles quiet, docile, and convinced that if shit happens they must not have been thinking sufficiently pure thoughts.

In any case, now I know what to do with my life. I want to be an HR consultant, so I could get paid big bucks to teach people bastardised, watered-down magic.

(Also: a vegetarian diet apparently cuts stress levels, which is odd because the vegans I know are so hyper that only obeisance to the Tobacco Demons calms them down most of the time.)