The epic failure of modern culture to combat the scourge of archaic magical thinking
The year was 1994, and somewhere in the deep corners of Florida, Diane Duyser was making herself a grilled cheese sandwich. She took one bite and immediately noticed the Virgin Mary looking back at her. She did what any rational person would do. She put it in a plastic ziplock bag and saved it for a decade until she sold it to an online casino for $28,000.
You can’t make this shit up. Well, you can actually. But one thing at a time. We didn’t know it back in 2004, but that was the beginning of the end, and a sign of the times that we would eventually find ourselves in, two decades later. The manifestation of magical thinking into mainstream consciousness and the rise of anti-intellectualism to combat technology fatigue. A return to medieval thinking and a primitive fear of the unknown.
If you can suspend disbelief for one absurd thing, you can ostensibly suspend disbelief for anything. A world of possibilities is open to you if you’re not critical of your closely held beliefs. One day, you’re seeing God in your toast, and the next, you’ve bought into the idea that a former game show host is the second coming of Christ. Manna from Heaven and trickle-down economics. Noah’s Ark and the inerrant supremacy of white European culture. Heavenly mansions on streets paved with gold and the farcical nature of climate change. Destiny, manifest solely for you. Land that God promised to you, and you alone.
As it turns out, the leap really wasn’t so great. They only needed a little shove. They were already most of the way there. They were already out of their minds. They just needed something fantastical to believe in.
An Act Of Faith
Conspiratorial thinking, at its core, is an act of faith combined with a zealot’s pride in being chosen to be part of an exclusive club. Cults. Religions. Militant groups. It’s all the same pattern. Convince people that there is deep knowledge to be had, but it’s only available to a select few, and most will reject it because they are too far gone.
Red and Blue pills. Deep state Matrix shit. Celebrity-laden Illuminati. Satan and his minions. Pedophiles and pizza joints. It’s all so much easier to believe than the truth, which is often too complex and indecipherable to the average schmuck. Put your trust in the anonymous online troll, the televangelist ginning up donations for a private jet, or the Representative from Ohio who simply wants to dismantle democracy.
Pareidolia is the human tendency to perceive a specific and often meaningful image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern, such as the image of Jesus Christ as perceived in the variants of a piece of toast, a cloud that looks like Daffy Duck, or the perfect silhouette of Newt Gingrich’s head on a cow’s ass. It must mean something.
As humans, we seek patterns in life as a way of both explaining the world and also as a defense mechanism designed to protect us from danger. If you eat that particular berry, you die. Bears will kill and eat you. The seasons follow the movement of the Earth around the Sun. The moon affects the tides. Picking up on patterns is one of the ways that we’ve progressed as quickly as we have.
Artificial Idiocracy
I have elderly family members who claim they do not watch Fox News and yet will give me perfectly formed nonsensical arguments taken directly from right-wing talking points. You have no idea the impact that a constant flow of low-grade disinformation has on everything from Facebook to Instagram and YouTube. Even Google is trying to lead you down a rabbit hole of propaganda and deceit. Even if you don’t think you’re particularly partisan, it’s impossible to detect obvious disinformation from facts if you don’t know the difference.
Your friend or family member reposts some seemingly harmless meme, and your opinion of this or that shifts imperceptibly. Before long, the truth, when presented to you, sounds out of whack with everything you think you know. Suddenly, all information is untrustworthy, and you begin to suspect that everyone is lying. Who can you turn to for answers?
So what happens when it’s not even some uninformed cousin spouting nonsense, but a news story written by a bot to draw clicks, but that is factually dubious, based on innuendo, and designed to sow distrust? Nothing. You just assume that’s the world you live in now. Trying to untangle my family members from their preposterous beliefs is enough to keep me busy for the rest of my life, and I don’t have a lot of faith in my chances at changing their minds.
Infinite Stupidity
Albert Einstein once said, “Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not entirely sure about the former.”
Throughout human history, men have been so confident in their understanding of the universe, and yet, time and again, we have been gloriously wrong. There are absolutes in this life, but they are few and far between. We aren’t even all that sure about time and space, so what makes us think we have a lock on far less substantial things?
We have a few measly thousand years of recorded human history under our belts, and yet we assume we know what will happen next based on what happened before. The truth is, we have no idea. The sample size is too small.
All life exists in some form of ebb and flow until it doesn’t. Everything is in a natural cycle until it stops. How long were the dinosaurs around until, suddenly, they weren’t? Our lives are so small and insignificant that how we measure time is irrelevant to the course of time.
The only thing we really know for sure is how little we know. That should strike us with a profound sense of humility and grace, but it doesn’t. It drives the Dunning-Kruger idiots among us to new heights of idiocracy as they oversimplify an unbelievably complex world so they can sleep at night.
God will save us. If not God, maybe Ronald Reagan or capitalism, or technological innovation. If I can’t wrap my head around climate change, it probably doesn’t exist. The world might as well be flat since I am unable to see the end of it. They’re all just trying to scare us.
That last part is true. We are trying to scare them, but it’s clearly not working. They’ve become frightened of all the wrong things and confident in a delusion. They will have to be saved against their will, like children, if we are to survive.
But then, maybe we aren’t supposed to survive. Whoever promised we were?