Coincidence – Coincidence – Coincidence. I don’t think so.

Statistics have many uses. Not least allowing us pertinent insight into what, at first, may appear complex, therefore revealing truths otherwise obscured. An excellent example of this benign number crunching is the Mandelbrot Set; the extraordinary patterns created by clever equations producing the vivid never-ending patterns that we are all familiar with and which have fascinated scientist and layman alike and adorned a million trippy T-shirts. In turn, the same line of research has elucidated the idea of infinite complexity within finite parameters (why all snowflakes are different) and redefined our understanding of Catastrophe Theory to wit; sensitive dependence on initial conditions or, to you and me, ‘The Butterfly Effect.’ However, without the computer or genius mathematician to process the data, we might still be non-the-wiser about these incredible and very telling patterns hidden within seemingly chaotic systems.

And this is the rub. There is a human trait which undermines our own primordial ability to naturally interpret statistics, much like Mandelbrot’s brain crunching the numbers, which, in turn, prevents us from seeing ‘patterns’ in our realities. And, as a truly safe interpretation of reality can be only achieved through logical analysis: i.e. the last two times I stubbed my toe it hurt. Ergo – I shouldn’t do it again – this trait poses a very real threat to the anthropological trajectory of the human race. The trait of which I speak is coincidentialism.

Coincidences are, for the most part, rare and, being so statistically unlikely certainly do not come in pairs, if at all. So when more than three turn up together basic instinct tell’s us something’s: either wrong (you’ve banged your toe again), or, if you’re a scientist, you’ve discovered something; a pattern – think Newton’s Law of Gravity when he noticed everything was falling at the same speed – or, and this is the evolutionary clincher, you know someone’s lying. As such, the habit of explaining everything that happens in our respective worlds as a coincidence is so contradictory to the very core of our intuitive beings that it can lead us into great peril: ‘Two people have just died after going in a cave with that strange caveman but it’s probably just a coincidence.’!?! When applied to the political world the modern coincidentialist is therefore a great potential threat to public safety especially when large groups of them get together – think world opinion when watching Germany’s rearmament in the late 1930’s and his subsequent annexation of Austria then Czechoslovakia then…. It will be OK. It’s probably just a coincidence. Oh dear – WWII.

There can be no doubt that there exists a conspicuous fashion for conicidentialism as it is the only explanation of world events given to us by our established media and its fawning intelligentsia. When coupled with its evil brother the pernicious ‘group-think,’ a specious re-branding of’ herd-mentality,’ this mass negation of national intuition can sweep a society on an unrelenting blind march whereupon any malevolent government simply target this coincidentialist clique to explain, on their behalf, their dystopian strategies as merely another ‘accident.’ No one would bet a large sum of money on an outcome at odds of 1000:1. Even less at 100,000:1, so when odds get to trillions to one and other enormous figures transcending all statistical anomaly, and therefore technically cannot be coincidences, anyone who still explains them as such has literally lost their sense of intuition and therefore their mind.

One man who was in an excellent position to understand the difference between coincidence and something else (which I dare not call conspiracy because of the hysteria this induces) was President Roosevelt who ‘coincidentally’ observed, ‘In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.’ With this in mind I strongly advise the more intuitive of those amongst us to beware the coincidentialist and their explanations of geopolitical events. For they know not what they do and will lead us into, not only further bouts of unforeseeable ‘accidents,’ but to other futures so dark they are almost too frightening to imagine.

Ethan Harrison @ The International Times – February 10th 2016.