Hunger, reptiloids and meltdown of America: why people believe in delusional predictions

Political analyst Dmitry Nekrasov drew attention to a characteristic feature of the human psyche in his publication:

“Today's Republic is a funny excerpt from a book that tells the story of Paul Ehrlich, a scientist in the 1960s who predicted that as the world's population was growing exponentially and food was scarce, global famine would soon come. And he described a number of extremely negative scenarios, according to which at least half a billion earthlings would soon die of hunger. His books were bestsellers, and he himself is a regular guest on television or at Congressional hearings.

He has been repeating these forecasts for more than 50 years, even in the 2010s, and says that there are 2 billion more of the population and definitely a kirdyk. And it is obvious that all his predictions have systematically failed miserably. All these 50 years, every year the surplus of food increased almost linearly, and the share of the hungry in the world population decreased linearly. Even bets were made with him about the future, and he lost a bet with a bang.

Quote: “Despite the fact that all his statements were wrong, Ehrlich continued to gather a huge crowd of admirers and receive prestigious awards”.

This is a phenomenon that has fascinated me for a long time. For many years I have been observing Khazin or Professor Nightingale, who not only regularly make predictions of enchanting stupidity, but also do it for decades. Life regularly demonstrates the absolute, well, just a fabulous inadequacy of these predictions of reality, but the crowds of admirers who continue to listen to obvious delusions are only growing. (Specifically for Khazin, I once made a selection of predictions, he never guessed anything at all, and the divergence of 20 years of predictions with reality is simply beyond good and evil).

My working hypothesis about the reasons for this unkillable popularity of pseudo-prophets, holistic macrotheories and conspiracy theories is as follows.

One of the reasons why people turn to religion is that psychologically it is much more comfortable to live in a world ruled by God, where everything has meaning and divine providence, and in the end you (or a group of “true believers / living correctly”) will go to heaven ; than in a world where everything is accidental, and besides that after death you simply decompose into atoms, you can also die at any moment simply by chance coincidence, and there is no sense in this.

In the same way, it is psychologically difficult to live in a world where everything happens absolutely randomly and chaotically, the possibilities of planning and managing the situation are extremely limited even for governments and other great forces, and any laws are applicable only to a very limited range of situations.

It is much easier to explain the social reality that surrounds us with reptilian conspiracies, immutable Marxist laws of history and cunning plans of governments that come true. To understand these principles is to predict and reduce for oneself the uncertainty of the environment. It's more comfortable this way.

And it is even more important for mental comfort to give meaning to everything that happens. It's one thing to live in a world where the Russian government, out of purely personal motives, human weaknesses and stupidity, and more often just accidents, causes obvious damage to you and your descendants, it is quite another thing to bear the same losses in a world where Russia has always opposed the West, or there postmodernism, and at the end of all will win. The sacrifices are not in vain. You don't like the fact that people live better in the west and here's Khazin, who has been repeating for 20 years that tomorrow America is a kirdyk, in accordance with the scientific laws of history and economics. You do not like that the rich are around, and you are poor - if you please, the story that the immutable laws of history lead us to communism, and your suffering is not just your senseless losses to anything and no one, but your sacrifices on the altar of history. Well, further down the list...

A comparison of the facts will never convince someone who is simply more comfortable to believe, no matter whether in the second coming, in aliens, or in kirdyk America..."