Jonathan Carroll — Presentations
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Chaos Magic: For and Against the Federal Government
Presentation — 2026
Magic · Sigil Practice · Political Economy · Research · Methodology
This presentation asks whether chaos magic — sigil work, belief as technology, the manipulation of attention and probability — can be understood as both a tool of institutional power and a practice of resistance. It is a presentation with a double thesis: a case for the federal government using chaos magic, and a case against.
The presentation draws on chaos magic research conducted as part of the MFA thesis, including reading in sigil theory, the history of propaganda as magical practice, and the specific context of Cape Breton resource extraction as an exercise in managed belief. It emerged from a sigil workshop conducted as part of the Place-Based AR Lab and from ongoing research into the role of magical thinking in artistic methodology.
For
Part 1 — For the Federal Government
The federal government already practices chaos magic. The sigil is a compressed symbol designed to bypass critical consciousness and act directly on desire. Political logos, national mythology, brand management, and the strategic use of imagery in public communication are all applications of this principle.
The manipulation of attention at scale — through propaganda, public ceremony, and media management — is chaos magic with a budget. “Lust for result” (the sigil-worker’s cardinal error) describes austerity policy exactly: the government that wants its magic to work keeps checking whether it’s working, and in doing so, prevents it from working.
“The sigil is cast, forgotten, and then it acts. The policy is announced, monitored, reported on, and thereby dissolved.”
A competent federal government would benefit from applying chaos magic principles more rigorously: set the intention clearly, compress it into a symbol, forget the symbol, and allow probability to reorganize around the desire.
Against
Part 2 — Against the Federal Government
Chaos magic is, at its root, a practice of individual will. It works by collapsing the distance between belief and reality through concentrated personal attention. The federal government is not an individual. It is a bureaucratic structure with multiple competing intentions, none of which can be sincerely held by the structure as a whole.
Peter Carroll, who codified chaos magic, emphasized that the practitioner must genuinely not care about the outcome after casting — otherwise the desire reasserts itself and blocks the working. A government that is structurally required to care about outcomes (through elections, accountability, public reporting) cannot sustain the conditions of non-attachment that effective magical practice requires.
More fundamentally: chaos magic works by manipulating the practitioner’s own belief, not by acting on external reality. A government that uses the language of magical thinking to manage its own belief in its policies is not governing — it is performing governance for itself. This is not magic. This is branding.
“The federal government cannot be a chaos magician. It can only be haunted by one.”
Synthesis
The productive tension between these positions is the presentation’s actual argument. If chaos magic is unavailable to institutions but is available to individuals and small groups, it becomes a description of where political agency actually lives — not in policy but in organized, focused, sincere collective belief. A sigil workshop. A ritual at Point Pleasant Park. A strike.
The presentation concludes with a live sigil workshop: participants write a desire, reduce it to its component letters, draw a composite symbol, and forget it.