Magical thinking

[Tom 1]

Prior to the Trump era, I'd never personally come across the kind of thinking that creates conclusions out of random strings of ideas as anything other than a rare anomaly. Growing up, or later in life, in a few different countries occasionally i've come across people very set on dubious notions about the world, from UFOs to political conspiracies etc., but there were very few of these people, as a percentage of people I met anyway. Maybe the magical thinkers have always been there, but fantasy thinking needed the internet to really take hold?

I've had a recent experience of seeing how this kind of thinking manifests. A former ambulance driver in his 50s who lived near to me died recently. According to several of my neighbours he had had his first vaccine shot shortly before his death. I don't know if this is the case or not, but that is what people believe. His family didn't want there to be an autopsy, and of course that is their choice. What has happened however is everyone who has spoken to me about this in the community I live in is now 100% certain that he died as a direct result of being vaccinated. Of course this might be true - or not - the point is it is entirely unknowable. It is not possible to know what caused this person's death. This does not however prevent people from declaring with absolute certainty that the vaccine killed him.

So, my point/open questions are firstly what defines this kind of thinking? To me it seems to begin with an idea the person concerned simply accepts as true, for example Trump's stolen election shtick, without question. From that point on that belief is quite simply immune to any kind of rational questioning. Any information or opinion is either accepted or rejected not on the basis of anything real but on the basis of whether or not it confirms the initial belief. In the US in particular this kind of thing has metastasised into a self-reinforcing web - a person can watch some nonsense on newsmax (etc) and then find the same nonsense echoed on dozens of other 'news' sites and forums, which appears to act as a kind of reinforcing feedback loop. This leads to a second question, which is how much of this has to do with community - ? I get the general impression that a sense of community is probably stronger in small town/rural America, where ideas like flat-earthism etc seem to thrive, than in other parts of the western world. While there are a lot of obviously good things about close community, the effects of group-think seem to play a role in reinforcing this kind of magical thinking. With the internet, there are now international online communities where people can bury themselves in what gets referred to as 'research', aka reading more and more random gibberish that feeds some need to prove that initial belief about whatever it might be. People become more and more certain of this or that idea (again like the 'massive election fraud' meme) until it effectively becomes accepted fact, despite being unsupportable through any reference to real world events.

Anyway this is getting too long. I'm just interested in what people think about what the causes/roots of this kind of imaginary world-construction are, what things drive and feed it, and how it might be countered.

 

[Matt5]

Anyway this is getting too long. I'm just interested in what people think about what the causes/roots of this kind of imaginary world-construction are, what things drive and feed it, and how it might be countered.

Vaccines cause autism. The COVID-19 vaccine gets a bonus - the mark of the beast, 666. A friend down the street believes in the COVID-19/666 thing. I don't argue.

But the science says ... .

Ever notice how facts, science and logic rarely seem to work in an argument? In fact, they seem to have the opposite effect. I think the best way to counter people is to plant seeds - questions. Hopefully some of them will stew on the questions later.

When I was 13 I got into the UFO thing. I read every book at the library on UFOs. After about a year one day I decided that it was all crap. However, now I'm left scratching my head decades later when I view Navy aerial footage of UFOs.

It's likely that the internet is exacerbating the weirdness you see. People feed on wacky ideas from others.

 

[Tom 1]

When I was 13 I got into the UFO thing. I read every book at the library on UFOs. After about a year one day I decided that it was all crap. However, now I'm left scratching my head decades later when I view Navy aerial footage of UFOs.

That's a great example. I remember reading about the committee put together in Chile a few years back to try and determine what it was a few pilots had seen and recorded when flying somewhere out off the coast. The conclusion was that nobody could make any determination - there was something up there and nobody knew what it was. The world is full of things like that though, right? There are all kinds of things we don't know. What I think is harder to understand though is the process by which someone takes something like that, makes a decision that they do in fact know what 'the truth' is and from that point on is only open to anything that confirms this, rejecting anything else as 'fake' etc. As in the OP I think confirmation via both likeminded individuals and those who are adept at manipulation are a big part of what takes a random idea and develops it into a deeply rooted belief that essentially prevents that person from being able to think rationally about whatever it is. I suppose I'm interested in understanding how and why that happens.