Deal With It. Мagical Thinking and Social Consciousness

The graduation project contains a two-part book. The first one is about the study of magical thinking as a phenomenon. The second part is devoted to the evolution of magical thinking into such forms of social consciousness as art, science, culture and politics. The work on the graduation project is based on the idea that the magical beliefs and rituals are adaptive mechanisms in their core and are deeply involved in our nature. Some of them based on the peculiarities of our perception, some on cognitive distortions and others participate in communication in a group, including in the regulation of people relations. And although humanity has come a long way in its cultural evolution, one can’t tell that the magical thinking has remained far behind. Rather, it can be concluded that it has evolved into other forms of social consciousness (although, everywhere it also occurs in its pure form). Other part of the graduation project was a Visual Research (“Images of Magic”). During the study, the author revealed the following facts: at present, almost any society is under influence of many cultures and worldview systems at once. It makes our consciousness mosaic-like. The images analyzed by the author arising from archaic magic are found everywhere in pop culture and art both as a conscious reference and as an unconscious borrowing.