The God of Supply Chain Management
Part of being human is hallucinating patterns where there aren't any.
For millennia, humans would encounter events and we’d demand explanations, but since we hadn’t invented science yet, there was no way to come to a conclusive answer, so we imagined answers. Tornado destroyed the crops? The sky god was mad at you. Tsunami destroys the village? Sea god was displeased with your offering. Sabertooth Marmots dragged off the young? The Rodent God was upset. We created explanations out of thin air because our brains evolved to CRAVE answers and if there aren’t easy answers available, we hallucinate answers.
The easier to understand and digest, the more we believe it, no matter how ludicrous it is. The world is awash in animist gods or spirits or demons or fairies or witches or whatever explanation made sense in a time without answers. Why, dear reader, would you assume that we lived a certain way for 300,000 years and then, one day, poof, we all just drop the evolved mental processes just because we have Bing and Mapquest and AOL? Of COURSE we still do what we’ve always done, and that is hallucinate answers for complex questions when we don’t have access to easy to understand information. Gas prices went up? The guy in the White House is scheming again. I can’t get the fridge I want because of global supply chain management issues stemming from a pandemic? Biden did it. There’s a slow, steady, seemingly unstoppable slide into authoritiarian nationalism? Trump musta done that. We STILL do the thing where we blame the river god for the build up in toxic chemicals in the water, but ever since we anthropomorphized gods, gods are human-shaped now, so we pin something on a single man or woman. Of course, it’s just as ridiculous as blaming the sky god for a tornado, but we do it.
We humans are very good at coming up with clever ways to achieve what we want, but we are very bad at deductive reasoning. If we allow ourselves, we ALWAYS hallucinate reasons for complex things. We think “Daddy hits me because I’m a bad person” instead of an alcoholic with anger issues stemming from repressed emotions from his own stunted childhood mixed with PTSD leads a father to slip into violence easily and justify it by saying he turned out okay even though his own dad beat him just the same. No, we hallucinate the wrong answer because it’s easier than working hard to understand the complex answer. Always have, always will. That’s just how our brains are wired. They’re magnificent and very, very lazy.
Just because we have TikTok and Roombas now doesn’t make us any different neurologically than we were 10,000 years ago. So why would you assume we’d act differently? Your crazy aunt on Facebook believes the vaccine will make her magnetic and broadcast her thoughts over 5G because possession and magic are easier for her to believe than basic germ theory. Couple that with profit-motivated information sources that traffic in crazy conspiracies and social sites that guide you to the most extreme content to maximize profits, and poof, you have this mess we’re in. Magical thinking will always be our default mode because it’s always easier to imagine that supernatural outside forces cause complex situations. The same human brain structure that thought up Special Relativity and Macbeth is the same that burned witches and cut beating hearts out on top of stepped pyramids to appease the gods. Magical thinking is our default setting, not a glitch.