Minds Spinning like a Kite in a Hurricane

Some thoughts on how the pandemic messed up people’s minds… 

There are a few common cognitive biases that I believe are preventing Christians from thinking critically about the world around them, especially in this age of propaganda.

I’ve mentioned the normalcy bias in the past. This bias makes it difficult for people to consider worst-case scenarios and prepare for serious failures or disasters. 

As one researcher put it: 

“A normalcy bias causes us to assume that, although a catastrophic event may happen to others, it won’t happen to us. If it does, we are shocked and unable to cope with it effectively, often underestimating its full effects.”

Next is the optimism bias, which leads to an overestimation of favorable outcomes.  

There is also the valence effect, where people expect that good things are more likely to happen than bad things.  

Lastly, there’s the ostrich effect, where people avoid disagreeable information.  

These biases, working together to varying degrees, have contributed to downplaying the levels of corruption and conspiracy over the past several years.

But that’s one extreme. There’s another.

This group recognizes that we are in a precarious time, but they respond in imprudent ways.  

Here, too, cognitive biases are at play.

One is the clustering illusion, where people wrongly overestimate the importance of small clusters or patterns in a large dataset.  

Another is apophenia, the tendency to perceive connections or meaningful patterns between unrelated or random things.  

These often pair with confirmation bias, where people focus only on information that confirms their preconceptions.  

Finally, there's belief bias, where conclusions are based on the plausibility of the outcome rather than the strength of the evidence.

In many ways, the institutional failures and cover-ups of the last decade have broken people as much as they have woken them up.

People discovered that large-scale, unprecedented events like “the pandemic” could happen to them. They realized that individuals they once trusted—whether pastors, employers, or doctors—knowingly went along with a lie and gaslighted anyone who questioned the veracity of their claims. In retrospect, they realized they had buried their heads in the sand, but not anymore.  

Now, they know better than to trust power brokers and institutions, and they've developed an eye for patterns they once ignored. To a large extent, this is a positive development. There are wicked people with malicious intentions in high places, and they often collude and conspire with others like them. This has been true throughout history and remains true today. We need to have our eyes open and keep watch so that these sorts of people don’t succeed. 

That being said, not everything is directly connected, and we mustn’t attribute god-like sovereign power to our governments. For example, it’s quite a jump from we’ve been able to manipulate aspects of the weather to “they” are creating and aiming hurricanes at political targets. Also, not everyone who questions your questioning is trying to gaslight you or uninformed. 

Many of us remember the false claims made around Y2K and, more recently, QAnon. I haven’t forgotten how many normally sober-minded people believed Trump was still president and would execute an evil cabal through a secret military tribunal. That never happened. I also remember how many times we were told we’d run out of fuel or food within a week, and yet it didn’t happen. Those are just two examples off the top of my head, but there are countless other predictions and prophecies that never materialized, and we simply moved on to the next one.

We’ve allowed the propaganda machine to break us to the extent that we treat numerous outlandish claims as plausible and scoff at anyone who pushes back as a head-in-the-sand normie. We must take the advice found in the first line of Kipling’s poem If. He wrote, “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you.” That’s exactly where we are right now. We need cool, calm thinkers. We need people who won’t let the false media, from wherever it comes, manipulate and distract them from the work right in front of them.