Tiddiest of tidbits: Coincidence and conspiracy

 

https://nyti.ms/3oLLm0U#permid=115599235

A recent New York Times opinion piece did an unnecessary job of normalizing delu­sional individ­uals who believe in conspiracy theories and do not believe in “coin­cidences.” My com­ment offered a simple clarifier that some people, I suspect, don’t notice in the course of their typical day:

We need a “thought police” to abort the writing of an article about an “utterly human process” that doesn’t mention psycho­pathology; in this case, delusionality. Those who believe there are “no coincidences” are delusional, meaning mentally ill. They also miss an important ingredient of their fuzzy thinking: It’s a coincidence if I’m on the computer in the bedroom and my wife is open­ing a box of French pastries in the kitchen. That’s because they are happen­ing at the same time. Delusional people choose which items they want NOT to be coincidences, and make hay out of them.

Please consider this, those of you, typically, of the Republican Trumpian persuasion: If you are going to believe there are “no coincidences,” you must learn to differentiate two or more common events that happen simultaneously (that is, coincidentally), and two or more intriguing events that happen simultaneously, from circumstances that you want to be fraught with sinister meaning. Doing this will help you see your agency in your invalid belief. Such agency will not be true of people plagued by original disorders: schizophre­nia, delu­sional dis­order, borderline and paranoid person­ality, manic psychosis. But it will be true of you, who are (let’s assume) generally sane but want and allow your anger and fear to direct your mental commitments.

If people were to cultivate the practice of emotional introspection, therapy would be relatively short. It is that practice that allows you to dive to the deep source of your atti­tudinal anger, which is always childhood. In touch with your injury, and what and who caused it, you won’t need to project your inner helplessness into worldly emasculation, victimization by the conspiratorial never-known.