My strength has always been pattern recognition but I often wonder if my ability has bled into Apophenia. Thankfully, even though I’m merely just an amateur in the difficult art of extracting truth/reality from a firehose of propaganda, so far events have largely confirmed my reasoning.

Apophenia is how humans tend to perceive connections, messages or patterns in meaningless data or unrelated events. It’s our brains evolutionary shortcut, a pattern recognition ability run wild. It becomes an issue when someone suffering from Apophenia shows tendencies toward wild conspiracy theories.

I’m sure that you, dear. reader, are familiar with this demographic.

The problem for most Americans is that there’s too much noise to signal. How is the average person supposed to filter out all of the bullshit between the 24/7 corporate media falsehoods and the social media sludge? And now there’s AI’s growing role in information abstraction and summarization, where it’s being used to determine what facts and theories are deemed to be valid. After being immersed in such a controlling narrative, thinking independent thoughts let alone completely breaking free becomes a very difficult undertaking. Most individuals find it extremely difficult to admit that their understanding of our country and its history might be very different from the actual reality.

What’s ironic is that our world has grown so complicated, and frankly crazy, that a bit of Apophenia can be comforting. Indeed, Apophenic explanations can be very attractive. Witness how conservative Americans are drawn to Fox News with its ongoing parade of nefarious villains, such as George Soros, plotting to feminize their youth and herd them into UN reeducation camps with “black helicopters”. On the flip-side, liberals are convinced that Trump is a modern-day Hitler bent on cancelling elections and creating a fascist dystopia, with ICE acting as his MAGA “brown-shirts”. Although, to be fair, the second scenario appears much more plausible.

Political analyst, Aurelien, elaborates—“…Apophenia is the tendency to see patterns in data that aren’t really there. This doesn’t seem to be an illness as such (though schizophrenics tend to demonstrate it to a high degree) but rather an exaggeration to pathological extremes of the natural need to identify patterns in the world that help us survive. For many people, it’s more comforting to have any pattern to events, even a threatening one, than no pattern at all, as a classic Defence Mechanism against a world that is too complex to deal with. And of course the need to find the pattern (or avoid chaos) comes first: the actual “proof” is secondary, which is why apophenics very rarely give up in the face of negative or non-existent evidence. The proof is being hidden. If the files on alien contacts aren’t there, it’s obviously because they have been destroyed.“

I think that Aurelien is on to something. Apophenia is comforting to Americans in a country adrift, buffeted by nihilism, precarity and hopelessness, where it’s better to believe in a hero or monster rather than a flawed humans simply making it up shit as they go along.

It’s become apparent that much of what Americans take for conventional wisdom is utter bullshit. Luckily over the last couple decades the growing power of the Internet and select social media networks began offering entirely different channels of information. Heterodox intellect, Ron Unz has produced an American Pravda series that challenges many of the falsehoods promulgated by official sources. I highly recommend it.