The Cock Rock and the Ballet Shoe
From rioting to online pile-ons, hate and anger borrow from sympathetic magic
Using ‘Cock Rock’ in the title of this article is a little bit clickbait-y, although the very nature of clickbait plays into my argument. How lazy we are? Why are headlines so essential to our reading habits that Medium’s Partner Program only incentivises a read that lasts longer than 30 seconds? At the primal level, it is in our nature to look for shortcuts, life algorithms or ‘hacks’ that save time and reserve energy for when we really need it. Efficient tricks that stand in for ideas are intriguing because the effort that is being shorted out is the effort of thinking, or more precisely critical thinking. Hence, clickbait and headlines are part of an armoury of concept shortcut tools that include stereotypes and prejudices; prepackaged information already identified and abbreviated by other people. A good headline or title is part marketing and part navigation, but cock is a monosyllabic rhyme with rock, which is intrinsically pleasing to the ear, and the juxtaposition with the ballet shoe is provocative. I’ve used tricksy shortcuts to appeal for your attention in a sea of information — your 30 seconds are up.
There is a place where the cock rock and the ballet shoe sit side by side in a logical context. The English seaside village of Boscastle in North Cornwall is the home of The Museum of Witchcraft, a small private museum that was disastrously caught up in the 2004 flash flood that brought Boscastle to national attention. In some ways, it’s a little jewel of a museum: comprehensive, detailed and disposed to weave the history of the Museum itself into its deftly curated narrative. Much as it fascinates me, the Museum’s collection often leaves me with feelings of existential angst: the sort of ontological questioning that ends up in articles like this. As a window into the human condition, it can’t help but be dispiriting. It’s not simply a question of the history of witch persecution, which is well represented in the items on display, but something more fundamental.
When I visited last year, there was a reconstruction of a rustic cottage from around the 17th Century, containing a waxwork of a ‘wise woman’, various stuffed animals, and associated paraphernalia. The exhibit exemplified a major aspect of witchcraft culture. It’s the craft bit; the way in which ‘witches’ and wise folk were consulted by their neighbours about everyday concerns, ailments, desires and fears and the modes in which they supplied relief. A significant part of the latter is what is broadly termed sympathetic magic, the idea that a magical effect can be transmitted through a symbol with an iconic resemblance or indexical connection to an original target. Semiotically, an iconic symbol looks like the target while an indexical symbol points at the target, usually because it’s an article that belongs to the target or is closely associated in some way. The use of paper talismans in East Asian sympathetic magic is an example of a purely symbolic representation of the target. The appeal of this form of casting is the ready to hand nature of the symbol or avatar, and more importantly the displacement between target and symbol. Sympathetic magic is, by its nature, surreptitious. You don’t have to engage face-to-face with the object of the spell or curse in any way.
Moving on through the Museum, there are cases displaying various symbols and avatars of more recent use and these brought me back to considering life algorithms and shortcuts that stand in the place of something else. The cock rock is a found stone that coincidently looks like an erect penis and was donated to the museum along with anecdotal evidence as to its use. A woman wanting to get pregnant would sleep with the rock placed under her pillow. It’s impossible to know definitively, but it’s implied that the cock rock is a tool, so to speak, for a frustrated women to use. Although historically in the patriarchy, women were often blamed for infertility, it feels like a positive charm rather than a treatment coerced by a man. The rock is a last desperate magic remedy sought from a woman by a woman when, for whatever reason, the actual cock is not getting the job done. The very hardness of the symbol suggests this is the sympathetic quality required.
The ballet shoe is in a cabinet labelled ‘curses’ and represents a more generally recognisable form of sympathetic magic, best exemplified by a doll or ‘poppet’ made up to crudely represent the primary target. The magic is activated by the application of a destructive force, usually in the form of a pin or other sharp object, to the symbol or avatar. The Museum contains several examples of such dolls, including commercial products made up to look like Saddam Hussein and Donald Trump for the purpose of ‘tongue -in-cheek’ sympathetic magic. The ballet shoe is an indexical symbol and is perhaps more poignant because it sidesteps some of the pop culture ‘fun’ of the doll as iconic avatar. It represents simple pure malevolent jealousy; a shoe stolen, hexed and pricked for the purpose of bringing misfortune on a rival in the dance. In this example, the surreptitious nature of the magic is key. It’s a shameful desperate hack that avoids the difficulties and potential fallout of a direct assault on the rival. No doubt, ice skater Nancy Kerrigan would have preferred rival Tonya Harding’s ex-husband to have gone the magic route.
Sympathetic magic derives its psychological power by acknowledging the strength of emotion generated by hopes and desires and providing a receptacle for them. The result is perhaps less important than the validation. The cock rock and the ballet shoe are physical symbols, real objects that provide the conduit for strong feelings when direct access to a hard target is unavailable. Getting pregnant or getting a dance role ahead of a rival is a tangible outcome and so the prosaic simplicity of the links grounds the whole process. These are one-off, closed loop connections and, successful or not, when they’re done, they’re done. If the object of your wants tends to the abstract rather than the tangible, then hacking it is potentially more complex. Ideas like freedom and happiness are nebulous and subjective, and, therefore, potentially without limit. We tend to become aware of our wants for these concepts only when we perceive their absence. At that point our emotions become strong and focussed: ‘I want the misery to stop’; I want people to stop telling me what to do’.
It’s easier to motivate action against an obstacle than towards a goal. Drama on stage and screen is built from this fundamental understanding. Characters have objectives but unless you introduce impediments then you don’t have any drama. Most abstract obstacles and problems in life are complex. ‘Why am I struggling for money’, is a good example. There are many interconnected factors, from where you live and who your parents are, to the influences of corporate shareholder value and government macroeconomic policy. I can do little about the intricate web that creates the environment in which I operate, much less understand the complicated economics involved. Although I have agency in how I respond to the environment, it’s difficult to objectify yourself and your agency in such a field. After all, there clearly is an issue with socio-economic inequality that very effectively modulates agency, but to get a reasonable understanding of how requires an applied effort of thinking and study. Meanwhile, the situation is generating strong feelings of anger and desperation, and I want it to stop. This is prime territory for a hack and provides an opportunity for some sympathetic magic, if only to validate our feelings with the sense that something is being done. The ballet shoe tells us that prosaic symbols work best. At one time, ‘fat-cat’ bosses were the ballet shoe, at other times corrupt union ‘barons’ and now, in the UK and the US, it’s immigrants and especially those of the lowest status, asylum seekers. Projecting hate onto these targets feels justified because, in the hack logic, if the obstacle is gone then my situation will improve.
There are bad actors midwifing this process, just as the witch or wise person who mediated the sympathetic magic for the ballet shoe must also be considered a bad actor. One of the strengths of the Museum of Witchcraft is how it objectifies the widespread belief in magic separately from the actions of actors, good and bad. The appeal of the sympathetic link is easy to understand. Unfortunately, just as the cock rock does not address the actual problem, which requires a difficult process beginning with diagnosis and then remedies such as counselling, medication or infertility treatment with no guarantee of success, asylum seekers have little to do with socio-economic inequality and deprivation. In fact, migration in general is a driver of economic growth. Projecting negative feelings onto asylum seekers plays to another life algorithm that humans and other animals have relied on for aeons, xenophobia. In group living survival situations, it was an effective hack to be suspicious of strangers.
It’s easy to think social media has created or at least exacerbated the destructive aspects of life hacks and sympathetic magic. Social media has been implicated in the recent riots in the UK and media handwringing about digital remedies has followed. In fact, the UK has a centuries long history of rioting driven by social economic inequality, sometimes intersecting with race and xenophobia and sometimes not. Disorderly mobs are a British habit, from the original poll tax riot, the peasants’ revolt of 1381, through the food riots of the 18th Century to more recent racially inflected unrest in several British cities in the 1980s, well before the invention of the smartphone, and again in 2011, in which social media had a propagating role. Rioting has been so popular in the UK that the common phrase ‘reading the riot act’, meaning to forewarn people of the consequences of their actions, derives from a 1714 act of British Parliament passed at the apex of a period of regular rioting.
Clearly, social media did not invent life algorithms and shortcuts, much less rioting. However, the very congruity between the computer algorithms that power the speed of social media’s awesome virality and longstanding human behavioural algorithms cannot be dismissed. Speed of transmission and virality rates are an issue in the spread of disorder and the lack of digital platform accountability is exasperating. Once again, bad actors are a factor and should be called out. Nevertheless, the idea that social media has created the problem, a suggestion with which many commentators flirt, is disingenuous and is itself a form of critical thinking short circuiting, a wishful sympathetic magic hack.
It is, perhaps, harder to clearly perceive these distinctions in a situation where the boundaries between the virtual and the actual are blurred such as in an event where media, both social and journalistic, are an intrinsic part of the story. The HBO Documentary The Truth vs. Alex Jones considers the fall-out of one of the most egregious examples of a divisive media pile-on based on manifestly false premises since The Dreyfus Affair reverberated through ‘Fin de Siècle’ France. The documentary puts the bad actors in the story in plain sight; hint, they’re not the citizens of Sandy Hook. However, the more disquieting aspects are highlighted by Mark Bankston, the Plaintiffs’ lawyer in the first defamation trial in Texas, when he questions,
“why are people willing to believe invented, manufactured lies that can be shut down in a second … Why are they so thirsty for it? That question goes far beyond what happened in this case, because I can guarantee you, we can solve the Alex Jones problem, but we will not solve the greater problem”.
An observation sharpened by the survey statistic presented in court that 24% of Americans believe the Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax.
The Dreyfus affair, in which a Jewish army captain was tried and convicted of another man’s crime of espionage and treason, is remembered as a ’cause célèbre’ of antisemitism that significantly stained the ‘old order’ Catholic wing of the 19th Century French political establishment. Despite his assimilation into French society, Dreyfus remained to some the quintessential outsider and hence pre-judged more liable to betray his country. The xenophobic algorithm and its misplaced discrimination poured oil on the fires of society wide division, fanned on both sides by the print media of the time.
In the Sandy Hook case, the accelerant used by the instigators was more specific; the outright fantasy of a false flag accusation, presented as an attack by unidentified ‘liberal forces’ on the US Constitution Second Amendment right to bear arms. In other words, ‘they’ are coming for ‘our’ guns. Through the utterly disgusting make-believe idea of a hoax, the bad actors of the quasi-media sought to bind the Sandy Hook community and its bereaved parents into an avatar of the nebulous anti-gun ‘forces’ at large in the country. It’s not necessary for the bad actors to believe in the validity of the link. Just as witches past received remuneration for their ‘magic’ so the bad actors benefit from providing a sympathetic symbol for pro-gun rage.
I acknowledge that the heat around the gun debate is specifically encultured in the US and leaves me, and most of the rest of the world, scratching our heads. At this point, it’s necessary only to understand that the US cultural context makes the issue of guns an extremely powerful generator of emotions. The various State specific nuances of owning and carrying guns has become a generally right-wing anti-government shibboleth that encapsulates the quintessential clash between conservative populist fantasy in a US context and the reality of the human condition. The collision between this ‘unfortunate’ rock and a hard place is represented by an ideal based on the individual’s right to bear lethal force, up to and including a semi-automatic assault rifle, and the statistical reality that a portion of those individuals will end up using guns for the purposes they were intended; to kill other people. Moreover, it is sadly inevitable that a healthy percentage of the bewilderingly high number of firearm ‘incidents’ in the US will be made up of statistical inevitabilities like intoxication, mental illness or the utterly predictable ‘balance of the mind was temporarily disturbed’. People get fits of uncontrollable rage, who knew? A tragedy like Sandy Hook throws that conundrum into a brutally sharp focus: elementary kids — WHY? This presents the Second Amendment purist with a serious cognitive dissonance. Some will choose to embrace the most hurtful, absurd and unhinged conspiracy theory rather than reassess the fault line at the heart of the ideal. If an ‘individual’ can do so much damage for no meaningful reason, then the status of individualism, as a political movement that posits rights and responsibilities at the individual level, is brought into urgent question and one that can’t be satisfied by ‘thoughts and prayers’.
The conspiracy response is almost an instinctual and unpleasant merging of the cock rock and the ballet shoe as totems that embody wish fulfilment both positive and negative. Once conjured into a ballet shoe type of symbol, Sandy Hook, as a ‘hoax’, enables the mass venting of anger at the notion of government taking away ‘our’ freedom. Those in the grip of this delusion cease to see the victims for what they are, humans like them experiencing unimaginable loss on an overwhelming scale, but rather a form of object, easily accessible through social media to the projection of hateful feelings. The belief in magic and the related belief in the divine are questions of faith and faith is the ultimate human life algorithm. As a behavioural shortcut, faith is immensely powerful and therefore potentially highly productive. It also explains why faith is so often open to abuse. The active Sandy Hook conspiracy theorists are also victims of a sort. They remain in a horrible trap of required cruelty: they must either ceaselessly and relentlessly persecute the bereaved parents or discard their faith in guns and freedom. History is littered with examples of people who’d rather die than give up their faith.
All analogies have their limitations. Alex Jones is not a witch and he has not been burned at the stake, merely held to account for his actions. The active conspiracy theorists are not martyrs and advocacy of the second amendment does not require the persecution of bereaved parents, just an uncomfortable sense of confusion in the face of a never-ending tide of school shootings. Some chose to persecute the parents because it made them feel better by reducing that uncomfortable feeling. Only this week, a well-known personality in the US issued a forthright apology for reposting a tweet endorsing the Sandy Hook hoax, explaining how that emotional mechanism had led her astray.
This is where a good article normally concludes with a summary of the argument and a reiteration of the primary finding. Instead, I find myself back in The Museum of Witchcraft in Boscastle looking at the cock rock and the ballet shoe and wondering uneasily about the human condition. I agree with Mark Bankston that the greater questions about human behaviour are resistant to answers. In the wake of the recent riots in the UK, a process of swift justice has had a considerable sobering effect. Some criminologists have wondered if this haste, while expedient, might hinder understanding and lesson learning. The comment of one legal academic particularly struck me, although I quote her somewhat out of context: ‘people just like rioting’. Yes, but people also like ballet. Perhaps the only reasonable response is to acknowledge our life hacks are suitable only for certain limited situations and recognise that hard questions require the hard work of critical thinking, without any promise of an answer.
The Truth vs Alex Jones is available to stream on Now TV in the UK. Subscription required.
The Museum of Witchcraft and Magic, The Harbour, Boscastle, Cornwall, PL35 0HD https://museumofwitchcraftandmagic.co.uk/
