Apophenia, QAnon and Nostradamus
June 28, 2022
by Ignatius Vincent Trochlear
When I was in college I took a fantastic freshman level poetry class. We would discuss all aspects of a poem, guided by a professor brimming with enthusiasm for the beauty of poetry. It infused us with creativity. We loved writing our own after reading the 20th century greats, including my favorite: Elizabeth Bishop. Because we become more comfortable with the professor as the semester dragged along, one of the students asked him something that we had all considered at that time, but were afraid to ask. I think we were on the beat generation, and had just finished deciphering Alan Ginsberg or Gregory Corso or Gary Snyder, when out of the blue the student asked if the professor thought Nostradamus was able to predict the future. There it was, we had all heard of Nostradamus, but didn't know any authority to ask, and even though it wasn't about the craft of poetry itself, we didn't begrudge him from throwing that stone out there. This was the 90s, and everyone was under the spell of Nostradamus, and the prospect of someone with visions of the future, and after we had first heard about him, we at least read it a little. Or more likely, at one point or another we had an early email chain up on a computer while in a circle in a dorm room, with altered minds, reflecting: 'wow, no way!'
We waited intently for his answer, the silence draped the room as he looked at all of our faces, perplexed, and stunned. Here was a man who devoted his life to the art of poetry, who loved the rhythms and the feel and the beauty of the order of words more than anyone. Initially, we took his silence as a sign that maybe he was with us, and maybe he would enlighten or reveal the secrets of Nostradamus's predictions. Maybe in his research and studies, he had come across the secret of seers and prognosticators. Maybe he was an Indiana Jones of poetic history, and knew of Nostradamus visiting the future in a time machine - or he was part of a group of academics searching for long lost texts in the deepest corners of Europe that predicted the fall of the Soviet Union or Napoleon's exile, kept under close guard by the Vatican or some European aristocrat to keep control and power with dominion over future predictions not yet realized.
I mean, we had all read the passages that predicted Hitler, Hiroshima and the Kennedy assassinations - here is the Kennedy one, I know you will be a believer after reading one of the quatrains --
The great man will be struck down in the day by a thunderbolt,
An evil deed foretold by the bearer of a petition.
According to the prediction, another falls at night time.
Conflict at Reims, London and a pestilence in Tuscany.
But we misread the professor, as he put down the Ginsberg or Corso or Snyder he had been reading, and took a deep breath. He scoffed at us, it was his worse nightmare - the degradation of the poetic art was already at the mercy of modern culture, and now this shit. These bright young minds he had enjoyed teaching all semester come at him with tripe. 'Listen,' he said, 'people see signs and visions in the most garbled trash. It happens all the time. It's obtuse terrible poetry, and as far as predicting the future, I could say deviled egg sandwich pine tree tunafish and some asshole in 2568 could claim I predicted teleporting. In fact, you can't read it unless you think it predicts the future, otherwise your eyes would bleed. I will give Nostradums this, I think he pretended to be able to predict the future because he knew his limitations as a poet, but he also knew human nature's way of seeing signs and what they want in things, and he so.... he was a bit of an instigator.'
Well, we were certainly disappointed, but we all came to our senses that day.
As QAnon has risen to prominence, I think about that quite a bit. I don't have a lot of credibility to be writing about QAnon, and am not an expert, other than I saw the incredible HBO documentary Q: Into the Storm and read about it on Wikipedia. What a minute, that definitely makes me an expert on something nowadays!... And although my friends and family consider me liberal, I try not to be a political person, especially 'in these unprecedented times,' as people have lost their minds. Donald Trump looms over everything, like he tends to do, but this isn't a comment on him insidiously using this misguided movement, as well as terrible beliefs such as racism, as tools to empower himself. Or how great leaders with reason and sense do the opposite of him, and promote what's good for humanity instead of themselves. It's a comment on a movement spurred by a disingenuous internet maven masquerading as a high level government military official for fun to see what he can make people do.
Whoops, got a little off track. Like I said, I'm not a political person.
As these insurrection hearings are going on, to prove Trump was complicit in inciting the insurrection and should be locked up, it seems worth mentioning that 100% of the country believes he was complicit in inciting the insurrection - no one doesn't believe it - it's already been proven. Even today, no one is shocked he relaxed security because 'they're not here to hurt me.' The entire country knows he wanted them to storm the capitol and hang Mike Pence and burn the place down. Everyone knows he did everything he could to incite it and nothing to stop it once it had started. The issue is that more than half of the conservatives in this country think he was justified in doing so. How they can believe this, despite everything, and how they could support people trying to destroy the capitol and inflict bodily harm on elected officials and police is what's interesting. They're a group desperately scouring the internet for some truth to validate that Trump, and by association for them, America was under attack. They were seduced by online postings originating from people overseas, who saw it as a window to cause strife and unrest in the United States - by ironically preying on the blindly patriotic. And further propagated by American youtube political commentators who stood to gain from promoting deep state anti-Trump conspiracy theories. We all know friends and family seduced by it. Trump and his acolytes realized it, and I'm sure he received several DMs from people making him aware of it. And he saw an opportunity and aggressively mobilized this movement that was happening online once he knew he lost. They succeeded in turning 'patriotic' people against their own country. And that's not even the most fascinating thing - that they capitalized on QAnon, and used the believers as an army to try and stay in power. It's the human capacity for apophenia that caused the movement.
Apophenia is a human blessing and a curse. It's our ability to see patterns in things, and create something from nothing, like the fact we see a man in the moon, or that we see animals in constellations or clouds. Like how we see predictions of the future in Nostradamus's jibberish. It's our brain's way of being able to imagine as well, to make sense of the randomness of the world, to create beauty, and sadly sometimes, to create the opposite out of fear or paranoia. People can be driven to obsession by apophenia, thinking they have found answers in nothing, which is probably best exemplified by Darren Aronofsky's incredible masterpiece - the film Pi. Nostradamus called his writings 'prophecies' and people were primed to see if he predicted the future, to see something out of nothing to validate his writings as if they were predictions. It was all predicated on a false belief that Nostradamus planted in everyone's minds: that he could see the future. Similarly, when someone says, do you see a crocodile belly in those clouds, your mind can then see it immediately, once the suggestion has happened.
QAnon is under the guise that the posts are from a high ranking military official (never-verified and almost certainly untrue), and further boosted by right wing you tubers, whose opinions on the meaning of the Q drops (posts by Q) are rabidly consumed by believers. The fact the original postings occur on 8kun, formerly 8chan, on the 'dark web', give it a strange rebellious credibility, as if it's the only way for them to give people the truth. This swirling cestpool of vague postings, propped up by clickbait claiming the deep state is driving the truth away from the light, where it can only thrive on the dark web, is the perfect concoction to create the epitome of groupthink out of apophenia. 48.2% of the Q drops claim some hidden knowledge or prediction to come. It sprouted a quick religious-like movement, or a type of cult, spurred by our modern interconnectedness via the web. They see the anti-Trump deep state in everything, bleeding from the walls in their living room, the woman at the counter at the pharmacy, the mailman, the patterns of the wrinkles in someone's skin, 5G infecting our brains, etc. As I understand it, when a Q drop happens, or a cryptic comment on 8kun, several people begin to speculate on what it could mean, and Q moderators on youtube will speculate on what it could signify - and then something will happen that will kind of somewhat verify one of the hundreds of speculative ideas. Which will then be a considered a 'Q proof,' despite the fact that hundreds of other explanations proved false. And because everyone is able to communicate in real time over the internet, this type of thing happens rapidly, and is exactly like Nostradamus's predictions happening over centuries being 'verified' except on a much more accelerated time scale. Nostradamus's predictions were published 467 years ago, whereas Q was most intensely active in the 4 years of the Trump presidency - we are talking a scaled up apophenia accelerated 127 times by human interconnectivity.
And now Q is back after the decision to repeal Roe vs. Wade. It doesn't take Nostradamus to know that the decision will be a disaster. But you can't stoke the flames if there's no fire.
After not posting for 563 days, since December 8th, 2020, when Q was still actively proposing the storm on January 6th, which his minions followed through on at the beckoning of Trump, Q posted the following last Friday.
Shall we play the game once more?
And when someone asks where he'd been, he responds:
It had to be done this way.
Are you ready to serve your country again? Remember your oath.
Clearly this person does not have the interest of anyone at heart except their own amusement at getting to watch shit burn, much less the United States. What did 'it had to be done this way' mean!! What does it mean?? Tell us Oh great Q moderators. By all accounts, because of the tripcode used in the post, which should have been erased over time - Q is most likely Ron Watkins - someone who is definitely not a high level government military official. So congratulations Q, you have been the puppet master at the highest levels of the modern sociopolitical area by preying on people's apophenia. Even Nostradamus was still being used as propaganda by both sides in WWII, and during his life was invited by the Queen of France Catherine de' Medici and Henry II after they believed one of his predictions came true, so he could give horoscopes to their children. So I hope you get your just desserts.
Once Q stokes it, pro-Trump clickbait puts gasoline on the fire. Right or left though, it's becoming more difficult for someone not to hole up online only viewing content that validates their beliefs and opinions, instead of using reason to try and put out fires, and working together in person despite shared differences.
What does this mean? Are we doomed? Is human nature fated to destroy ourselves as interconnectivity accelerates and we draw lines in the sand. Will some bad actors like Q and Trump in the future harness the power of apophenia in even quicker real time to grab power and eliminate anyone who doesn't obey? I personally have faith in human nature, and think we'll recognize these pitfalls and act more responsibly with interconnectivity in the future. But what will happen to those deep in the apophinternet? And how do we avoid being sucked in? One thing leads to another, then another, then another, and down the Q rabbit hole you go - follow the white rabbit, as pro-Trump white nationalists like to say. Have they found what they are looking for yet? Have they found out that Trump has the same level of reason, personality and temperament as the Queen of Hearts?
