Gematria in its role as conspiracy theory light is perfectly designed for psychological priming. No, that’s not about the annoying habit of changing a prime number too large to be useful into its position on the sequential list of prime numbers. Although certainly the repetition of that trick is a form of psychological priming.
Training a dog is loads of fun when priming goes wrong. The dog scratches on the door, goes out and pees, cokes back in and gets rewarded for being a good not peeing in the house dog. Do that often enough and doggie will learn that they can scam a treat by insisting they need to go pee when they don’t need to. Sorry Dad, I just want the cookie and I don’t have opposable thumbs to comment on YouTube videos and get a cult leader Attaboy!
Repetition is the cause and source of the problem, as minor as it might be. Repetition is an important and effective method of psychological nudging to get the desired result. But, as our brains do a good job of tricking ourselves, there are some further issues with priming to think about.
Your average gematria newcomer who likes what they are seeing is already primed to not give credit to their own biases. Likely they will settle on one of the many cliques and get primed further by that leader’s messaging. In a not gematria setting, imagine a person has saved money for that first car. A life altering experience that has an immediate impact. They may have never paid attention to the numerous shitty Ford Escorts on the road before. Now, all of a sudden their brain has latched onto the idea of shitty Ford Escorts and they start noticing every single one that crosses their path. In a gematria setting, those first satisfying self done decodes about your recently cancelled beloved TV show have a certain set of numbers that stuck out. You’re on the road to being primed to think every time you see those numbers it’s synchronous and symbolic with that TV show. Your first love takes a special place in your heart and brain.
Insidiously, the priming doesn’t end with associating numbers with the main message of the clique. The sports decoders are talking about Monday Night Football and the double narrative for the Commanders and the Saints. Your favorite team is Detroit, because they make shitty Ford Escorts, too. And the game is triple coded because 52 also means something about all three teams. (You can build a narrative for every team given any two digit number if you try hard enough.) You’ve been told you have some good points, so you stick around for more videos that have basically the same format.
And you’re stuck on your confirmation bias, and not learning that it’s time to stop faking that you need to pee for a cookie and start saving up for a better car than a shitty Ford Escort.
You’re adding other sports decoders to your playlist and subscribing to all their channels. Maybe some of them don’t even mention the Jesuits rigging the games at all. Maybe they do and that’s what attracted you to that other account. You lose psychologically either way. You’re stuck on your confirmation bias of already hating the Jesuits or getting primed on some newer equally invalid concepts through association with the new leader’s content.
There’s a lot of different things out there in the priming of the conspiracy rabbit hole. Arbitrary scapegoats based on race, religion, gender identity. Some of these guys are super gung ho guns are the best thing ever. Maybe that spiritual guru loves to light up a blunt at the start of every video. Maybe you came for the gambling and got caught up in the get rich quick cryptocurrency messages.
This is why I say that it doesn’t matter if it’s accidental or design that gematria operates as a starter drug - conspiracy theory light. It’s easy to do. Whether they got scammed or bored by the repetition they move on. And boy is it repetitious. Hey teacher, I already fucking know 2 + 2 = 4. Do I really need you to start today with that again? Do we really need daily gematria videos stating the obvious of A=1, B=2, C=3…? Do we really need to know that the same number that means Obama is the Antichrist appeared again? Of course it did. It happens every day, bunches of times. You’ve just been primed so much on the other not gematria stuff you don’t care.
The reward system for conspiracy content, once somebody is beyond the stage of regularly getting an attaboy cookie for sucking up, is self contained. And fatigue becomes an issue, resulting for some in the cognitive dissonance of not understanding why the overt results are the same, the repetition of the statistically insignificant tiny numbers, but the message doesn’t bring the rush it did when it was fresh and new. Your real life circle of family and acquaintances still think you’re weird and at times just dead wrong about important stuff like getting a real job. Your dog still needs to pee. And you still have that shitty Ford Escort that you spend more money repairing than if you had bought a better car the first time.
Yes, I rely on repetition, too. For the same reasons. People are far less likely to go to the bottom of a list of blog posts than they are to look at the most recent content. Some people out there are now primed to associate the word shitty with Ford Escort, an unfair negative association that my legal team tells me I’ll regret. Repetition is that powerful. The key is to recognize that overly repeated misinformation is still bad information. You’ll never find the right way to do the wrong thing, it’s always wrong. You’ll never find the right way to present misinformation, it’s still bad information.
No comments:
Post a Comment