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It was the ceremonial magician, drug fiend and poet, Aleister Crowley, who said: "Every intentional act is a Magickal act." When Conor McGregor returned to the Octagon, at UFC 178, he came with the intention of dominating Dustin Poirier, knocking out in the first round a fighter who had never been knocked out before. If Aleister Crowley is correct and "Magick is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will" then Conor McGregor did nothing less than something magical, garnering the attention of fan and foe alike.

According to Aleister Crowley, "every man and every woman has a course, depending partly on the self, and partly on the environment which is natural and necessary for each." This course or purpose in life is called the True Will and "A Man who is doing his True Will has the inertia of the Universe to assist him." Conor McGregor is a man who believes he knows exactly what he is supposed to do on this planet, he cites his Celtic warrior ancestors as foreshadowing the warrior path he is meant to follow. He invokes the popular "law of attraction" in creating reality from his imagination, the way a ceremonial magician would conjure a date with an angel.

Regardless if whether the Hermetic tradition, the melding of Neo-Platonism with Egyptian religion in late antiquity, and it's modern repackaging, The Secret, is factual or pure nonsense, there is a certain intangible ingredient for exceptional success in combat sports. This ingredient is the foundation for all other requirements of technique, diet, marketing and conditioning; that ingredient is confidence.

The common assumption when one hears a fighter talk big is that he is delusional or a clever self-marketer; and, yes, incredibly arrogant. The conclusion that such extreme confidence is a character defect rests on the assumption that these fighters talk big because they are successful. What if this assumption is wrong? What if these fighters are extremely successful because they are extremely confident? What if extraordinary results require, among a host of other things, extraordinary belief that borders on insanity?



Aleister Crowley

According to James Wasserman, "the magician swims in the same waters in which the psychotic drowns." I propose that these fighters have done extraordinary things because they have an extraordinary belief in themselves, that their beliefs become "true" through successfully acting on them, and that this intense belief that impels them to go the extra mile is required to become a champion. Ronda Rousey, Floyd Mayweather and Muhammad Ali all have these three things in common: the achievement of great success in combat sports, an extreme and vocal belief in self, and a reputation for being cocky and arrogant. They are what Conor McGregor is fighting to become.

It was only last year that Ronda Rousey was a somewhat vilified figure in MMA. What generated the ire of the fans, were not her skills but her words. Ronda Rousey has said that under the right circumstances she can beat Cain Velasquez, that she will be the highest grossing actor in Hollywood, that she was the best in the world, from the day she began training MMA, that she knocked out Alexis Davis with the first overhand right that she has ever thrown and that she could beat any female jujitsu competitor under jujitsu rules. Rousey’s intense belief has been rewarded with ten wins, zero losses. She has even landed acting roles in Expendables 3, the upcoming Entourage movie and Fast and Furious 7.

Most fight fans are familiar with the bravado of Floyd Mayweather, his self-confidence has been evident in the tongue lashings he gave Guerrero, Ortiz, De La Hoya and Hatton. With a record of 47-0, Floyd Mayweather is the highest paid athlete in sports. Then there's Muhammed Ali, who when he upset Sonny Liston, at age 22, declared: "I'm the King of the world!!" He was 20-0 then and has since ended his career at 56-5. It is true that correlation is not causation. Thus, it begs the question, is there any scientific basis to the idea that belief affects athletic performance? Can a fighter believe in belief, without an appeal to the occult? To answer that question we must look to science.

To further explain the power of belief, one need only look at the many studies done regarding the power of the placebo effect in the world of medicine. Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center is home to the once informal think tank, now Harvard-wide program, in Placebo Studies. It is there that Dr. Irving Kirsche, of Harvard Medical School, tries to discover the secrets behind the real effects of fake medicine. In one of his placebo studies on performance, test subjects were given tests that challenged their coordination skills. They were then asked what caffeine would do to their performance if they did the tasks again. After affirming that caffeine would make them more effective, the subjects were then given decaffeinated coffee, told it was caffeinated coffee, and made to retake the tasks. The test subjects on placebos showed improvements in cognitive ability and motor skills, the same as a different group of test subjects that were actually drinking caffeinated coffee. The existence of the placebo effect is so beyond the possibility of doubt, that it has become a standard practice to test drugs against a placebo control group.

The placebo effect even seems to work in sports, particularly in the aspect of pain killing. Researchers in the University of Turin found that athletes who used morphine to treat pain during a camp, can, unbeknownst to them, be given fake morphine, just before competition, and receive the same effects of real morphine during competition thus there is some type of causation between belief and athletic performance. Conor McGregor has cited his intense belief as a source of his success in the Octagon, but are his belief's true? To this we turn to a man who influenced Aleister Crowley, William James.

As one of the main exponents of the American philosophy of Pragmatism, William James believed that "the truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it. Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its veri-fication. Its validity is the process of its valid-ation." This main doctrine of pragmatism can be explained with the following parable.

Two men are on a deserted island; one immediately gives up hope and gives himself up to melancholia and death, the other believes they will be rescued. Which statement is true? What makes it so? The hopeful man, because of his belief in his eventual salvation makes tools, fishes, builds shelter, finds fresh water and is able to survive until he is rescued. The hopeless man curls into a ball, weeps and finally succumbs to dehydration. As William James said, each man made his belief true. Granted, the surviving man lucked out in that people didn't stop searching for him and that he lived on the perfect island, nor was there any need to "become one with the universe", if such a thing is possible. Nevertheless, the survivor’s hard work was all predicated on his belief that survival was certain. That belief did not cause his survival but it was a necessary ingredient in his survival.

The same might be true for Conor McGregor. Granted, no matter how much Ronda Rousey, Floyd Mayweather and Muhammed Ali believe, no one wins by sheer confidence alone. A good example of this is Anderson Silva. Bones break and getting punched in the head will put you to sleep. Nevertheless, to have extraordinary results, one must do extraordinary things in the gym and in the mind. Fighters must believe that they can run the extra lap, do the extra sparring, avoid the ice cream Sunday and win the last two minutes of a five round fight in which they have lost every round. Conor McGregor insists that no one "out sweats " him in the gym; to be the champion he claims he already is doesn’t require him to prove it true but to make it true.

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