The power of belief and how to counter it

How much do the sorcerers believe in themselves? In Harry Potter, the belief is that you NEED a wand to do magic, and those wands need unicorn, phoenix, or dragon parts in it to be the "source" of the magic. So, if you drive those species to extinction, then there's no way for wizards to do magic anymore. Or you can kill/imprison all the wand makers. If your sorcerers need special components or things about the planet to do their magic, change those things. Drop EMPs to disrupt the leylines, napalm the sacred forests etc.

You could also do some sort of mass mind-control program on the populace. This could be "fluroide in the water" or "5G towers" or "microchips in vaccines" or whatever.

 

Fight magic with magic, of course

Hard to imagine a world where there were magic users, and people continue to believe it not possible. I think more likely, the world would become filled with sorcerers.

 

Reflecting about it, I find that this belief-based magic could pose a few problems to work properly:

• Humans and animals don't have a hive-mind shared experience of reality. Every individual has it's own skewed perception of it, which implies that any sorcery could end being quite unpredictable for any viable use.
• Animals don't believe in anything, as far as we know. I could just hide behind a horse to take cover from a sorcerer attack.
• How you can become a sorcerer if no one around you believes in such thing?
• Would two different sorcerers agree on how the magic is manifested in reality? Probably not. They would be forced to lengthy explanations to make the other believe in their own magic. I don't see this very practical.
  • This also applies to the potential disciples or believers supporting any sorcerer. First they should undergo training just to be able to believe in their sorcerer's magic. And worse, they should believe in the exact same way the sorcerer and the others do for all the spells. This would imply quite an astounding level of mental coordination; it could work among telepaths, but surely not with normal people.
• A one-on-one sorcerers battle would be pretty boring, since by just not believing in the rival's magic they could cancel each other out in a very harmless and effortless way. I mean, you can throw me a fireball, but if I don't believe in it I won't see it at all, even if you're screaming the spell.

Now, I think you could use the belief, or will, as a tuner. Your sorcerers can tap into some sort of energy, but to achieve greater effects, they require that nearby people project their will on it, by believing in it. It would like being able to connect with other energy sources tuned to the right frequency so they fit the spell in use. This way, the nearby believers become channels of tuned energy for a concrete spell that they can see already in action. Remember, seein' is believin'!

 

I think there's two ways to fight.

Either you start believing in yourself, giving you access to what you need.

Or, the other option is to make your opponent start to doubt himself.

 

Valena ! Don't you dare to understimate the power of cows' sheer indiference! Worse, animals see in a different (and usually reduced) spectrum of light, so they won't even perceive a spell the same way humans could. An extra complication is the language barrier itself: what good is to try to reinforce the belief in your magic if the potential believers cannot understand you? Just imagine a sorcerer trying to use their magic in a foreing country! They would be forced not only to learn their spells in different languages, the spells should be interpreted in ways that make sense within the potential believers' culture.

Overall, I think it will be easier for you to use beliefs as what I hinted you in my previous reply: just as some sort or tuner or enhacer (like a filter or dial applied by the brain to the magical energy), so magic itself can manifest in reality without depending on something as abstract as beliefs are. This way you can play with the idea of mass manipulation in order to enhance certain magical spells, while keeping open in a believable way the possibility of resistance by other sorcerers who, while strong in magic, they must work to convince people to enhance their own sorcery. This I think could give you very interesting dramatic possibilities, playing with characters loyalties and such.

 

I would say disbelief could be just as powerful a force as belief... naysayers would be unaffected by spells because according to their own "beliefs" magic is impossible, doesn't exist... that renders spells directed at them worthless.

 

Might be kind of late to the discussion but I’m doing a similar thing in my book: belief-based magic in a more modern setting with a borderline dystopian totalitarian state (though magic is common in my setting) so maybe I can give some insight.

The entirety of my book’s main plot is two wizards trying to outdo each other. My hero draws his power from his ego (more or less) so my villain counters it by hitting him financially and disrupting his career. With the hero’s financial security and social status threatened, his ego takes a hit which weakens his magic. So the hero counters by sowing some distrust in the villain’s social circle, even bringing the villain’s family into the mix. That’s a blow to the villain’s belief in himself.
They both also get the other to believe that there’s a conspiracy against them with the mob being after the hero and the police being after the villain.
So, it’s less about altering the magic fight itself (in fact, the two characters never directly battle one another in the story) but instead about setting the stage for the other’s failure through their own faults (hero’s ego and recklessness, villain’s distrust and paranoia). It makes the battle more of a psychological cat-and-mouse game. The big tension in the story is that the hero doesn’t know the villain’s ultimate scheme though he knows where he is/lives and has some idea as to his resources while the villain knows the hero’s ultimate goal but he doesn’t know where he is or what resources he has.

I guess another point to make is that the totalitarian government controls things on a macro level but the characters have plenty of room to move around on a micro level with both of them being involved in subcultures, outcasts and the criminal underbelly of the setting. So another dimension of the story is the two of them operating under the government’s radar.