In some tribal societies, the village witch-doctor claims to have remedies to protect others against maladies and witchcraft. Neither such claims of healing nor witchcraft itself are actually … real. But the villagers believe in witchcraft and in the remedies. That belief is not reliant on proof.

Still, they believe. Still, the witch-doctor plies his ‘magic remedies’.

No verifiable evidence is required. No cure is forthcoming. It’s a mystical thing. Sound familiar? Australia is truly the lucky country; it has its own village witch-doctor, Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen.

I quote the Scottish journalist Charles Mackay, via Wikipedia (forgive me), from an early study of crowd psychology:

Charles Mackay’s book, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, first published in 1841, attests to the practice of belief in witch doctors in England at the time.

In the north of England, the superstition lingers to an almost inconceivable extent. Lancashire abounds with witch-doctors, a set of quacks (aka Chris Bowen, Al Gore, John Kerry, Antonio Guterres, et al), who pretend to cure diseases inflicted by the devil (aka fossil fuels). The practices of these worthies may be judged of by the following case, reported in the ‘Hertford Reformer’, of the 23rd of June, 1838. The witch-doctor alluded to is better known by the name of the cunning man, and has a large practice in the counties of Lincoln and Nottingham (as well as Australia, the US, etc). According to the writer in ‘The Reformer’, the dupe, whose name is not mentioned, had been for about two years afflicted with a painful abscess and had been prescribed for without relief by more than one medical gentleman. He was urged by some of his friends, not only in his own village but in neighbouring ones (eg the EU), to consult the witch-doctor, as they were convinced he was under some evil influence (CO2). He agreed and sent his wife to the cunning man, who lived in New Saint Swithin’s, in Lincoln. She was informed by this ignorant impostor that her husband’s disorder was an infliction of the devil (coal), occasioned by his next-door neighbours (miners), who had made use of certain charms for that purpose. From the description he gave of the process, it appears to be the same as that employed by Dr Fian and Gellie Duncan, to work woe upon King James (the Opposition). He stated that the neighbours (aka the Greens), instigated by a witch, whom he pointed out, took some wax, and moulded it before the fire into the form of her husband (Peter Dutton), as near as they could represent him; they then pierced the image with pins on all sides – repeated the Lord’s Prayer backwards, and offered prayers to the devil that he would fix his stings into the person whom that figure represented, in like manner as they pierced it with pins. To counteract the effects of this diabolical process, the witch-doctor prescribed a certain medicine (renewables), and a charm to be worn next to the body (an EV charger), on that part where the disease principally lay. The patient was to repeat the 109th and 119th Psalms every day (close coal mines), or the cure would not be effectual. The fee which he claimed for this advice was a guinea (aka $ billions).

Mystical tribal societies are not all in the past. Many such tribes are among us in global institutional forms such as the United Nations and the World Economic Forum, and at the local level, such as political parties (the Greens, Labor). Some people confuse the village witch-doctor with the village idiot. No harm done…