The search for meaning: QAnon & COVID-19
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Over on Twitter I will every now and then see some transmissions from those who follow the QAnon lunacy (so we don’t have to) and I marvel at how delusional some human brains can be.
If you’re unaware of QAnon, I apologize for bringing it into your world. Here’s the rundown from Wikipedia.
tl;dr: It’s people who believe, based on some anonymous postings by the perhaps-nonexistent Q, that “there is a worldwide cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles who rule the world,” that they are able to cover their activities with impunity, and that the election of Donald Trump is a signal that their reign is about to end in what the Q-crowd calls “The Storm,” i.e., the arrest, imprisonment, and trial of thousands of politicians and celebrities.
After The Storm, they believe, we will be freed of this cabal and the sun will shine and bluebirds will sit on our shoulders.
Here’s a recent sampling of QAnon squirreliness about the COVID-19 pandemic:
So, why am I writing about political delusions here at Lichtenbergianism.com instead of my personal platform? It occurs to me that, give or take some actual mental illness, the QAnon people are basically looking for two things: 1) community, the sense of “belonging”; and 2) tidy explanations of the chaotic universe.
If I may quote from my Arts Speech:
Human beings are pattern makers: we require that life have a rhythm; we need for the universe, which truly is random, to make sense.
And so we make it make sense. We create patterns out of the things we observe. We find objects in inkblots, camels and whales in clouds, and Elvis’s face in a plate of linguine. We organize what we perceive about us into patterns that make sense to us.
If we meet with something that does not fit into the way we think things ought to work, we make it fit… or we alter the pattern so that it will fit. We make the universe make sense.
This urge to organize chaos into order is one of the most basic of human needs. Think of the constellations. Every single culture on the planet has looked up into what surely must be the most amazing and obviously random display in our lives, the night sky, and turned it into pictures. With stories to go with them.
It seems to me that this is what the QAnon crowd are doing: arranging random chunks of data into a patchwork of crazy that — despite all evidence — makes sense to them. The problem is, though, that unlike those of us who Make the Thing That Is Not, they don’t step back from their ABORTIVE ATTEMPTS. They don’t move through GESTALT to see if their creation makes sense, and then on into SUCCESSIVE APPROXIMATION, i.e., changing it so that it makes more sense.
Instead, they cling to their grotesque framework, adding to it as circumstances require. No event is too random, no data too irrelevant, but that they will sift through it for ALL THE CLUES to confirm their hypotheses.
I’d like to think that if only they could be enticed into actually Making the Thing That Is Not, they’d find a more appropriate outlet for their very human urge to make sense of the world. Because here’s the thing: QAnoners are trying to nail down the actual true nature of the universe — it is this way and no other — and that’s not the way the universe is.
On the contrary, we have to make the meaning we find in the universe through our art. Otherwise, it is random and meaningless. I’m not hopeful, but if QAnon could wrap their heads around this basic idea, we could be more sure that, as we say at Backstreet Arts, Art Saves Lives.
