For years, @remixeverything's "Everything is a Remix" video series has traced the links between beloved contemporary art and largely forgotten historical roots, making the case that culture is accretive, and originality is just hiding your influences.

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In a new video, "Trump, QAnon and The Return of Magic," Ferguson makes a compelling case that Qanon is a remix of the age old trap of magical thinking: "the belief that one's ideas, thoughts or wishes can influence the world's course of events."



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Moreover, it's a specific, conservative form of magical thinking, grounded in obsessions with purity and protecting innocents: hence the centrality of child-trafficking rings to Q's mythology.

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This is a recurring motif in paranoid, right-wing fantasies: Ferguson makes the connection between Q and the 1980s' "satanic panic" and the widespread delusion that satanic cults were kidnapping, raping and murdering babies.

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But while the satanic panic merely ruined the lives of the falsely accused, Q is part of a growing conspiratorial belief pattern that elected a president who is on a path to slaughter hundreds of thousands of Americans due to epidemiological ineptitude and racism.

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Ferguson poses the current political struggle as a fight between "magical thinkers" and "evidence seekers", with the former being more concerned with feeling better than with discovering the truth.

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Magical thinking is a kind of metastasis of pattern-matching, the apopheniac's curse of seeing connections in coincidences, or manufacturing connections in unrelated phenomena that feel right ("I listen to my gut").

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In a world of great crisis - pandemic, climate inequality - it's not crazy to want to feel better. For all that magical thinkers cloak themselves in "skepticism" their beliefs are grounded in feelings. Evidence is tedious and ambiguous, emotions are quick and satisfying.

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Ferguson identifies six hallmarks of magical thinking:

I. Symbols and codes: Choose a simple enough symbol (a triangle!) and it'll show up everywhere. And wherever you can't find a symbol, you can asset that you're being confounded by a code.

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ANYTHING can be a code (think of Pizzagate). It's impossible to prove to a motivated reasoner that you're NOT speaking in code.

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II. Dot connecting: Instead of spotting patterns in individual items, you assert that things that repeat, or happen near each other, or at the same time, must be related. Of course, you get to ignore anything that doesn't fit the pattern.

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This is the origin of superstitions: the ballplayer who gets two hits in a row while wearing the same underwear "connects the dots" and now they're his lucky underwear.

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III. Everything is a person: Personifying inanimate objects is a natural impulse, the basis for all religion, and may explain the overlap of conspiracism and religious faith. The conspiracist personifies all phenomena by asking "who benefits?"

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Eg: "Canada benefited from WWII when the EU's industrial capacity was destroyed, thus Canada started WWII."

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IV: Purity: a long obsession of the right, the need to defend innocence from "contamination and contagion" (think of how often Trump uses "sick" as a pejorative).

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Magical thinkers assert that any kind of dark, imaginative art - horror novels, heavy metal - is motivated by a love of evil, not a desire to rehearse crisis as a way to prepare yourself to live through it (though they give the super-dark Bible a pass).

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V. Apocalypse: a belief in a coming final battle - a way to feel like you are alive in a moment of historical significance.

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VI. Good and Evil: The belief that you are motivated by beneficial motives, and your enemies are motivated by wickedness - so everything your side does is good, and everything your adversaries do is bad.

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Thus the obsession with abortion and "saving babies" but the indifference to kids in cages; the obsession with fighting tyranny and the indifference to police violence.

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Ferguson ends by suggesting that the rise of magical thinking is the confluence of a rise in trauma and fear, a decline in education and thus the ability to understand the world, and the normal baseline proclivity of some people to prefer neat answers to messy ones.

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He suggests that "evidence seekers" dispense with rational arguments in discussions with their magical thinking loved ones, and focus instead on speaking their language: symbols, connected dots, personalizing, highlighting the sacred, and the significance of this moment.

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And he says that the systemic answers to this are an emphasis on scientific education and on the provision of services that make people less frightened by making them more secure.

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Ferguson has a feature-length documentary on the subject, "This is Not a Conspiracy":

https://vimeo.com/ondemand/tinactsd

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I like Ferguson's analysis here, though I'm not fond of explanations that lean on the imagined social conditions of our prehistorical ancestors, whose lives are almost entirely unknown and unknowable to us.

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I also think this could benefit from exploring the business model of conspiracism:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/15/out-here-everything-hurts/#q

and the extent to which it provides both fun and community to the people who practice it:

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1291066613685317633

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