The self delusion that believes a lie
Although it was entirely predictable, it’s been fascinating to see how millions of Americans have willfully chosen to delude themselves in the aftermath of the US election. It’s been a series of contortions and distortions, aided and abetted by grossly irresponsible journalism from broadcasters like Fox News. Before I try to offer a rationale for how this mass self-delusion happens (I think we all know why it’s happening) please watch this, from Jesse Watters, and then we’ll examine stochasticity:
The people watching this, thinking, “Yeah, that all makes sense” are not stupid — though it’s worth remembering that their deluder-in-chief once famously proclaimed, “I LOVE uneducated people!”. Self-delusion alone isn’t enough, so there has to be an underlying theory.
Stochasticity is a great word, though it’s probably unfamiliar to most Trump fanatics. Let me explain it through the strange story of Laura Buxton. In 2001, 10 year-old Laura, while visiting her grandparents in Staffordshire, England, tied a note to a helium balloon. The note said ‘please write to Laura Buxton’ and supplied her address. Seven days later the balloon came to ground, 140 miles away, in the garden of another 10 year-old girl who, weirdly, was also called Laura Buxton.
When the second Laura wrote to the former, they triggered a barely believable set of coincidences: both were the same height, had the same eye colour, both had pet black labrador dogs, guinea pigs and rabbits. When they decided to meet in person, both wore pink sweaters and jeans. Amazing, yes?
Actually, no. The newspapers reporting the story omitted the fact that the balloon didn’t actually land in latter Laura’s garden — it was caught up in a hedge belonging to a local farmer. He knew a girl called Laura Buxton, so took it to her, thinking it was her balloon. And one Laura wasn’t ten, but a few days short of her tenth birthday when they met. And there were lots of differences between them, overlooked by reporters looking for a good story of bizarre coincidence.
It is a good story, but it highlights our human tendency to ascribe meaning to random (or stochastic) events. We want to believe there are patterns, so we find them.
And that’s exactly what seems to be happening with those who, without a shred of credible evidence, deperately knit together a stream of stochastic events, in order to ‘prove’ that their man, through an orchestrated campaign, saw power stolen from his tiny little fingers.
Conspiracy theorists owe a great deal to stochasticity. But it doesn’t make them any more credible.
(Some of this piece was originally intended for my book, ‘The Power Of Us’ — if you enjoyed it, you might want to read the entire book — I have a Romanian Rescue Dog to feed.)
