Life & Wisdom Quote by William S. Burroughs

Burroughs treats “black magic” less like cauldrons and pentagrams and more like a technology of suggestion: language that slips under the bouncer of rational thought. His key move is to relocate the occult from the grand, theatrical ritual to the “preconscious, marginal areas” where habit, shame, and reflex live. That’s where people are most programmable, and Burroughs - always the anatomist of control systems - is pointing at an ugly truth: the smallest, half-remembered phrases can colonize you faster than any explicit ideology.

“Casual curses” is the poison pill. A curse delivered offhand, with social permission (“I’m just kidding,” “whatever”), has deniability built in. It doesn’t trigger defenses because it doesn’t announce itself as an attack. It lingers as tone, as a tiny script you replay: you’re stupid, you’ll fail, you’re cursed. Burroughs understood that modern power often works this way, not by commanding but by insinuating - advertising slogans, bureaucratic euphemisms, racist jokes, addict talk, the soft coercion of “common sense.” He’s also implicating the speaker: the casualness is a moral dodge, a way to wound without taking responsibility for wanting to wound.

Context matters: Burroughs came out of mid-century America, addiction, and paranoia about social conditioning; his cut-up experiments treated words as viral material. Here, “black magic” is a grim metaphor for memetics before the term existed - the everyday hexes we toss around that end up living in other people’s heads.