Apophenia

Apophenia is a word I recently learned. It means “the tendency to perceive a connection or meaningful pattern between unrelated or random things (such as objects or ideas)."

In contrast to an epiphany (a moment of sudden revelation or insight), instances of apophenia do not provide insight into the nature of reality. They also do not create a factual interconnectedness, but instead creates an abnormal meaning that is then considered to be factual or real, even though it is not. 

Instead, what comes from an apophenia is self-referential, solipsistic (the view or theory that the self is all that can be known to exist, i.e., "this is my opinion and therefore it must be correct"), and paranoid, which would or could include thinking all the news media is out to create harm, that all government officials are evil (unless they're on your side or speaking your language), that people are following you, etc.

In today's world, it would be things like 5G is more than another advancement in technology, it's something sinister (so wear the tinfoil hat), we couldn't possibly have a pandemic without it being some covert operation (even though history is littered with instances of pandemics, the 1918 flu and the Black Plague being but two examples), there can't be a vaccine created so quickly (even though they've been working on vaccines for SARS and related coronaviruses for over a decade now), etc.

The falsehoods spread on social media are great examples of apophenia. It's how people are creating these alternate realities, where up is actually down, where fascism is "democracy," where wearing a mask is taking away rights, where someone can believe that people who went spent four to eight years in college and then went into the media are out to get them by telling untruths, where they really believe that Democrats suck the blood from babies and eat the hearts of their enemies, or whatever that idiotic stuff is that I see float across my Facebook pages from time to time because I haven't managed to unfollow the latest person to swallow the bait.

This word explains a lot about what is going on today. We have a large group of people - less than half of the nation, I suppose, but close enough, who believe certain things. These things are based on opinion, unrationalized suppositions, and information pieces that people are trying to put into a space that fits into their world view.

However, the information doesn't fit into their world view, so they create a way to try to make it fit. 

There's a very good article that explains these delusions in video game terms here. It is where I learned the word.

I have experienced this apophenia myself, mostly visually in patterns. I have always seen things in random designs on bathroom floors, in tile, or in curtains. As a child, I had a dinosaur I saw on the bus ride everyday. It was a patchwork of brush that looked to me like a dinosaur. (This is actually called pareidolia, but it falls under apophenia.)

It's the same way we see things in clouds as they float by. Who hasn't looked up at the sky and thought, oh, that cloud looks like an elephant, or whatever.

This is all well and good and harmless. When these kinds of interpretations move into the real world because one cannot accept reality, truth, or facts, then we begin to have a problem.

Addressing why people cannot accept reality, truth, or facts then becomes the question.

I do not have the answer.