Frieren and the Politics of Deception | Christian Heiens 🏛
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This is something that evil has known for a long time. Words indeed are magic spells. They are how ideas are conveyed, how you can induce a thought, a neurological pattern, into another person's brain. If you can induce that stimulation frequently enough, and with the right words, you can shape the other brain's logical processes to your will. That is fundamentally what empathy is. Your neurons mirror what another person is feeling, and in doing so create that feeling in yourself.
They don't call you a fascist or a nazi because you are one, they are casting a spell to make people around you turn against you. They are casting a spell in the hope that you will bend to their will, because you think that nazis are evil.
Demons live all around us. They are not 20 foot tall horned Balrogs. They are the overzealous HR employee who terminates your employment for making a joke that wouldn't have gotten a second glance a decade ago. They are the mugger that robs you on your way home from work. They are the teacher that is ideologically poisoning your child and telling them to keep it a secret from you. They are the politician that campaigns on individual rights, and then stomps all over them once in office.
They are the judge that lets out felons 50 times in a row in violation of all common sense and their own oaths of office. They are the manipulative abusive ex girlfriend/wife who calls the police on you and files false domestic violence/rape charges on you in order to destroy your life. They are the CEO who lays off the native workers to outsource foreigners to save a few bucks. They can even be your own parents, when they trans their child or worst of all, murder their unborn child.
This is why bearing false witness is considered a sin. Whenever you do so, you allow a demon to gain control over you and commit evil. It is tempting to bear false witness. People frequently benefit from doing so, even if it damns their souls in the long run.
Remember, the serpent in the garden of Eden did not use force to get Eve to eat the apple. The serpent used words to plant an idea in her head. Now look at the mess we have to deal with because of that one act.
This video is actually the second piece of media to slap me in the face with 'words as spells' in as many days. Owen Benjamin's "How to Slay a Wizard" expands the on this idea much further than this video essay does, to much the same effect.
Once you stop listening to the magic words, and can step outside the 'box' the spell tries to trap you in, you appreciate that there is no power in the wizard at all. The wizard is a bit like a mime trying to keep you in a box he's frantically imagining around you-- the trick only works if you consent.
In terms of fiction Tolkein famously made one of Saruman's strongest things his use of his voice. This video goes over that well. Also "the voice" in Dune is a similar kind of magical spell explicitly which controls others. And the "Jedi mind trick" as well. Language control is also the central way that 1984 gets it point across.
Asha Logos explained it well as Language is the battlefield in one of his first videos. Language frames the bounds of people listening to it and who engage with it, and it can be very difficult to think outside of those invisible walls when you operate within certain ones your whole lives.
-> words = sword <- to these people
but knowing is half the battle