#thoughts and prayers and bullshit evangelicals say in order to do nothing

[rabidhiss]

[siavahdainthemoon]

why I hate the concept of karma and/or the Law of Attraction

Because both of them only really ‘work’ when your starting point is white and cis and straight and healthy and middle-class-on-up. And both of them encourage people who are white and cis and straight and healthy and reasonably wealthy to look down on and blame other people for being in pain, and/or justify not helping those who are suffering.

‘You’re calling all this pain to yourself by the way you think!’ ‘You can make everything better just by thinking positive!’ ‘If bad things happen to you, it’s because of something you did or thought.’ Or, if we’re talking the original concept of karma, as opposed to how it’s been appropriated and mangled by white western New Age-ism, ‘You’re suffering because of something you did in your previous life!’

It’s such utter victim-blaming bullshit.

I mean, look. Karma is/was originally a concept from Hinduism, wherein - sorry-not-sorry, Hindu people, read your own history - it was used to justify the abuse and suffering of the lower castes, particularly the ‘untouchables’ who were - whoops, I’m sorry, I thought this bs was over with but apparently it’s still a thing in some places, allow me to correct myself - who are so super unclean that they are forbidden from allowing their shadows to fall upon anyone of a higher caste (and can be beaten, or even killed in older times, if they let that happen). Because according to the rule of karma, if you are suffering in this life, it’s because you were bad in a previous life. In much the same way that the concept of the Divine Plan and Divine Right of rulers/nobility in Medieval Christian Europe was used to enforce and justify a strict, abusive class system, Hindu karma said/says that the suffering of the lower social groups is not just justified, but a fundamental aspect of reality itself. It also works/worked in much the same way that the idea of Heaven and Hell did and do in Christianity; if you suffer with patient forbearance now, you will be rewarded for it later, whereas if you set yourself against the ‘natural order’, you will be punished for eternity/in your next life (if not in this one. Hindu karma also allows for your actions to be rewarded/punished in this lifetime, but the point I’m making here is that it explains away why some people are born into horrible situations, and why no one should help them if they are). 

(Which is obviously not to say that many Hindu people tried to do right by those beneath them, in the same way that ‘true’ Christians try to be compassionate and kind instead of overbearing evangelical fuckheads. But the fundamental concept is fucked up.) 

Now, I haven’t seen a whole lot of New Agers who talk about karma in relation to reincarnation; white New Agers mostly talk about karma in the same way they talk about the Wiccan threefold rule (whatever you do comes back to thee/three times three times three) or the Law of Attraction; i.e., if you do good things good things will happen to you, if you do bad things bad things will happen to you.

The Law of Attraction is actually a little less about what you do and more about how you think and behave. Simply put: if you cultivate a positive outlook, you will attract positivity to yourself, and if you think negatively, you will attract negativity to yourself.

Anyone else see the problem with that?

Now, I’m a witch. I accept without qualification that human thoughts and desires, focused in the correct way, can alter reality. That’s my definition of magic. But it takes a very particular focus to work magic. That’s why every culture has developed rituals and ceremonies to get their people into the right headspace for it - dancing, chanting, meditation, music, etc. It’s not something m/any of us can do without training and/or practice, deliberate intention, and faith - in yourself, in your spell/prayer/ritual, in your god or God, one or all of the above. 

Simply thinking bad or sad thoughts, simply being sad or angry or frustrated, does not call bad shit down upon you. I’ll grant that a lot of us with things like depression end up with messed up lives - but that’s because it’s a mental illness that a) makes it hard to function and b) doesn’t always get a whole lot of compassion and assistance from others. 

If you turn around and tell me that’s how the universe works - that bad things happen only to people who call bad things to them - that good things happen only to good people - not only have you regressed to a three year old’s understanding of reality, but I could literally kill myself by climbing to the top of your ego and jumping to your IQ. 

You smug, arrogant, oblivious, privileged piece of shit.

Karma doesn’t work as a theological concept even when you apply reincarnation to it, because punishment-based education doesn’t work if you don’t remember/know what you’re being punished for. It’s the reason you can’t punish a dog for misbehaving while you were out of the house, because they are incapable of connecting the punishment to the thing they did hours ago. If you can’t punish them right then, they don’t learn the lesson. You can explain to a human being what they’re being punished for, and they’ll understand what action or behavior resulted in the punishment. (What they do with it...well, I don’t think punishment-based education works at all, but that’s an argument for another post). But there is no fucking lesson to learn if one has no memory of what earned the punishment. 

Karma without reincarnation falls apart even faster. What does a child do to deserve abusive parents? What does an eleven year old boy do to deserve a disorder that means he’ll die if he sleeps? What do teenagers do to deserve conversion therapy? What do trans people do to deserve being born into the wrong body? What do perfectly ordinary people do to deserve being raped? Or developing cancer? Or chronic pain disorder? How does an unarmed black boy ‘earn’ a cop’s bullet, exactly? What did the approximately 280,000 people who died in the 2004 tsunami do to deserve that? What has any teen girl in the world done to deserve female circumcision? What did the African peoples do to deserve slavery? What did the Jews and Romanis and queers and everyone else do to deserve the fucking Holocaust? 

And the Law of Attraction? Are you really going to sit there and tell me that people born into poverty, born into abuse, born into bodies that are falling apart or wracked with pain, should smile and be cheerful like fucking flower fairies because otherwise they’re making it worse? Or again - tell me how my negative thinking, at twelve years old, made my mother beat me black and blue. Tell me how positive thinking is supposed to cure clinical depression, or banish away an abusive spouse, or put money in a bank account so far in the red it’s bleeding over your hands. Tell me how positive thinking puts food on the table, or fixes gender dysphoria, or cures a disease doctors will barely name. 

It’s so fucking easy and convenient to believe in karma and the Law of Attraction when you’re white and straight and healthy and have no real problems. It’s such an ego-stroker, isn’t it, if you can tell yourself that you deserve how easy your life is, if you can flick your eyes away from the homeless girl and her dog and tell yourself that it’s nothing to do with you, she earned it, or she could fix her life if she wanted to, if she just thought right. It means you don’t have to feel guilty about the less fortunate, it means you don’t have to make yourself uncomfortable by reaching out or giving to charity or protesting a law that won’t affect you. It means you get to feel like you earned all the things life pours into your lap, as if you worked for them, as if you won them. 

It means you can cheerfully, patronizingly burble your New Agey delusions at anyone who’s in real pain instead of offering real help, and you know what, I don’t give a flying fuck if you do it with good intentions. Intentions don’t mean anything in the real world; if you do harm it doesn’t matter that you didn’t mean to. The harm still objectively exists. If you say ‘oh, you just have to think more positive!’ when someone is in tears, when they’re bleeding, when their life is falling apart - then not only is your grammar atrocious, but you are utter scum, and I hate you, I hate that you exist, I hate everything that you stand for. How fucking dare you say, or imply, that all suffering is deserved, that all suffering is something we call down upon ourselves? Given the terrible, heart-breaking surfeit of pain in the world, the vast majority of which falls down on those who could not possibly deserve it?

Because that is what you’re saying. It is what you’re implying.

So either admit that you are privileged enough, and enough of an unintentional asshole, to ‘accidentally’ believe everyone but you and people like you deserve to suffer - or wake the fuck up and trade in your philosophy. Because the one you have right now sucks.