Apophenia
conspiratorial thinking, an unreasonable propensity to seek connections between unrelated things
I received my September print copy of Tablet Magazine, and in the first article I read I learned a new word! A wordsmith at heart, I’m always excited to learn new words and expand my vocabulary.
Word of the week? Apophenia.
Adam Lehrer begins his piece in this month’s Tablet with a mention of The Crying of Lot 49, a story about a woman named Oedipa Mass, who’s the executor of her late lover’s estate and uncovers a mysterious conspiracy called the Tristero. It’s a story about the human mind’s drive to find meaning and certitude in the chaos and noise of life. It’s a story about the divide between paranoia and reality.
Lehrer quickly segues into the conspiratorial culture of the political cult of Donald Trump. Lehrer muses about the way that the saga of Jeffrey Epstein, with its incomplete facts and dead ends, invites apopheniacs to pour over it, and lose themselves in an attempt to make certainty out of a mass of incomplete facts and a poorly handled investigation. Generally speaking the “MAGA cult” of Trumpianism and American-flavoured Christian nationalist sectarianism invites the mythical thinking that lights up an apopheniac’s brain circuitry.
I’ve noticed that, even in Canada, a sect of the conservative community has a strong streak of apopheniac thinking. For example, we have the pedo cabal which runs the country, and also the external power locus (pick your foreign interference boogeyman) which controls the spend-thrifty and nefarious progressives. We affectionately refer to the progressive left as woke, and sometimes I call them the wokerati. The name wokerati alone—a hybrid of Illuminati and Woke—smacks of an apopheniac projection, if I’m honest with my readers.
Where do we see apophenia in our sociopolitical discourse?
Well, just take Justin Trudeau’s irresponsible immigration policy and the great replacement theory that’s evolved to explain it. Take the gender identity movement and it’s negative impact on women, and the way drag has suddenly become evil SWF woman-face stuff. Reader it can get exhausting after a while when we read a conspiratorial thread into it all, and build a case on our minds for intentionality, ie the progressives did that on purpose. A man with gender dysphoria who has undergone sex reassignment treatment obviously has it out for women and wants to invade women’s spaces. SWF much? Immigrants obviously come to Canada to replace old stock Canadians. Any type of attempt to educate kids in school or popular culture about gay and lesbian people obviously masks an intent to hijack the kids into some nefarious sexual perversion cult and turn them away from their parents and family attachments. C’mon reader, can’t you see?
I’m employing sarcasm here, of course. Because the issues I raise have far more complexity to them than these crude explanations I’ve applied here.
To be fair, there’s also a fair bit of apophenia on the progressive left. Conservatives obviously belong to the camp of the MAGA cult. It’s racist, hateful, and white supremacist to question reckless immigration policy, post nationalist rhetoric, or the way radical genderists have usurped the LGB movement and devolved into a tyrannical fascist cult attempting to stifle all areas of society. Pushing back and asking reasonable questions has become a dangerous thought crime. Progressives sometimes behave as though they consider thoughts and ideas more dangerous than physical violence. Also, disparity obviously happens because of racism and gender inequality. Merit is a racist concept. Everything enlightenment has a racist and colonial association. Obviously Islamophobia causes anyone to point out the problem of extremism in the Muslim. Only Islamophobes question Muslim antisemitism and hatred or misogyny. Anything I don’t like is racist, reader. Surely you can see that, right?
Again, I’ve administered a heavy dose of sarcasm here.
Clowns to the left and jokers to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle with you! Reader, reasonable centrists find ourselves exasperated and exhausted, don’t we? As Lehrer writes, apophenia has a close association to narcissism. Do digital echo chambers fuel narcissism? How has technological innovation reconfigured our brain wiring? McLuhan wrote about the ways that television and the printing press did this. Have we considered the impact of digital media on our brains?
Lehrer writes about the chaos of post WW2 and the cultural shift of the 1960s giving way to a rise in apophenia. He mentions the cult of conspiracy around the assassination of JKF and also around the moon landing. Does the uncomfortable malaise of cultural shifts in society drive us to embrace apophenia in our engagement with and consumption of information media? It certainly does lie at the root of a great deal of cultural rot. Technological advances in media certainly play a part in fuelling this phenomenon—television in the 50s and 60s, and the internet, smart phone, and social media today.
Reader, when does our apophenia become delusion?
How did cults like QAnon take hold and gain legitimacy in society? Lehrer writes about the Pedo Elite in a mocking tone. While I think an apopheniac strain underlies the Pedo Elite discourse, I also know a kernel of truth exists in all this Pedo Elite talk. Maybe Lehrer has never heard about Jimmy Savile and the 50 years of horrific abuse that he carried on under the noses of the elite. Maggie Thatcher pushed for him to get a knighthood! Then Prince Charles relied on Savile as a close advisor! BBC banned Johnny Rotten for mentioning Savile’s abuses in an interview! Maybe Lehrer didn’t know about LouLou Mountbatten and his penchant for young boys and his connection to Kincora Boys School. Or LouLou’s reputation in India, when he served as Governor prior to India’s independence. These two celebrity Pedo Elites cause me to wonder about a Pedo Elite element in society, though not in any organised and systematic form, rather, as a function of classism.
Bottom line? The problem of evil has plagued humanity since the beginning of time. Culture provides us with a vehicle through which we can come to terms with evil. Culture, religion, literature, and myth all provide a means through which humans can find sense and meaning in the senseless absurdity and chaotic meaninglessness that bewilder and demoralise us. The human condition continues to challenge and fascinate.
“Leftists calling their opponents racists and rightists labelling theirs pedophiles … are just two flavours of the same tired cultural sickness: the brain’s desperate attempt to slap order onto a chaotic, angst-inducing world.” —Adam Lehrer