Spontaneous reasoning about the phenomenon of self-fulfilling prophecies. Part II

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

In the previous part, it was about self-fulfilling prophecies in relation to a group of people, and then the thought smoothly flowed to how and why people are unable to resist the control exercised in relation to them. Here I will repeat the experience of spontaneous reasoning in the spirit of "thinking out loud", but now in relation to one person.

Imagine a plaque hanging on a house, yes, one that usually says that a certain outstanding figure lived in this house … only our plaque has a different inscription, it says: “This house is interesting because there is a plaque on it that speaks about what exactly this house is interesting for”. Actually, everything is correct, the sign honestly says what the house is interesting for, but without this sign itself there is no interest. A self-fulfilling prophecy in the head of one person works in much the same way. Nothing will happen to him until he knows what will happen to him.

Imagine that a person was conjured: “to get you in an accident today” … He gets worried, begins to drive the car with exaggerated accuracy, then suddenly decides to go altogether by a different road, less known to him … and ends up in a large, but barely discernible hole, which is all the more it's hard to notice when you twist your head strenuously in search of the predicted danger - and so, bent two discs, broke a tire on one wheel … When you drive along a known road, all the pits are like family - you know everything, but here, of course, they know about the pit everyone except you.

Similar examples can be seen in culture. One of the most striking for me personally is the "Song of the Prophetic Oleg". Oleg took a number of actions, as a result of which he died precisely because of his horse. If he did not know this in advance, it is unlikely that something would have happened to him.

Trying to avoid an unpleasant fate, people very often launch a chain of cause-and-effect relationships that directly leads them to this fate. So, for example, a criminal can return to the scene of the crime to make sure that he is not suspected and check everything, thereby betraying himself (this happened to Rodion Raskolnikov, although this is not the only reason for the "split"); a person who was predicted to die in a certain place, out of curiosity, can go there and see what the actual danger is; a person who was predicted to die on a certain day will want to do something out of the ordinary, unusual for himself in the end … which will become the cause of death. These examples can be continued indefinitely. They are not the point.

The bottom line is that such prophecies come true precisely due to the fact of their sounding. Arising as if from emptiness, they become the cause of actions that predict, and therefore turn out to be true precisely by the fact of their existence. As soon as the prophecy is voiced, it immediately becomes fatal, that is, true in any scenario … But in any case?

If I only wanted to say this, there would be no point in starting the recording. Self-fulfilling prophecies also have a more complex manifestation. Very often, a person himself predicts his death in the form of fear. Of the last known cases, one can cite Boris Nemtsov, who a couple of days before the murder publicly expressed fear for his life. Everyone can rummage in their memory and find a dozen more similar cases. Why is this happening? In fact, there can be at least two rational reasons.

The first is coincidence plus psychological distortion of statistics. A person in his reasoning is prone to the so-called “survivor's mistake”. This is a well-known cognitive distortion, in which a person draws conclusions about something only from the words of the survivors in some incident, but cannot look at the event from the perspective of the deceased. Because they don't say anything. For example, a man who was rescued by a dolphin on the high seas, helping to swim to the coast, returned home and wrote a book about how dolphins save people. However, a man, whom the dolphin did not save, but took away, on the contrary, farther from the coast, will not write such a book. Therefore, there is a false impression that dolphins always save people. There is also a joke on the topic of this cognitive distortion, they say, "an Internet survey showed that 100% of respondents have access to the Internet." People simply take and count only those killed famous people who publicly feared for their lives. They do not count those who were not afraid and those who feared, but who were not killed. Therefore, there is nothing surprising in the fact that the coincidence is complete.

The second reason is a pre-planned political game. If a person publicly declares that his life is being threatened, then he immediately gives some third forces the idea that he is ready to be a “sacrificial animal” for some purpose. They take note of him and use his sacrifice to achieve political goals. After all, he warned that his life was threatened - so someone brings his fears to reality, and then simply says "he warned that this would happen." It is very convenient when, in addition to fears, the victim speaks about who he suspects, then a political game with this victim can have a much greater effect.

Note that a self-fulfilling prophecy is at work here, but here the sacrifice of the prophecy itself also acts as a prophet.

By winding up certain fantasies for certain life circumstances, a person is often inclined to believe in them and begins to perform actions that embody this belief in reality. So, for example, people often see the same numbers or the same things, something that obsessively reminds them of the same thing. Believing in this, they begin to pay even more attention to similar objects in their lives, which further increases their faith.

This whole situation resembles the well-known parable in which the traveler sat down to rest by the tree of desires, in which any of his thoughts immediately materialized. So, he wanted to eat, drink wine - all this immediately appeared right in front of him. Then he got scared that evil spirits were making fun of him - and then evil spirits appeared. He thought they were going to kill him - and they killed him.

The white monkey effect works pretty well. The essence of the effect is that the subject is forced NOT to think about the white monkey, and having set this goal, he just thinks about not accidentally thinking about the white monkey, that is, in fact, he thinks about it. You can also ask the person “forget the number 13” and then ask “what number did I ask you to forget?”. So, this effect, intertwined with cognitive distortions such as survivor error and a number of other selective features of human psychology, supports the mechanisms of self-fulfilling prophecies for one person. Having learned something, a person becomes a prisoner of this information and inevitably follows the algorithm hidden in this information. But, I ask again: is such management always fatal?

Not always. Such a "magical" effect in relation to the sacrifice of the prophecy can be completely eliminated. And the most experienced people in this matter even know how to reverse everything or squeeze the maximum benefit out of the situation.

How do they do it?:)

No, of course, I cannot tell it, because I don’t know. But the continuation of the thought will follow.

PS. There is a family film on a similar theme called the Earth of the Future. The topic is poorly disclosed, the plot is naive and simple in a philistine way, but nevertheless the thought correlates with what I am trying to present. Maybe someone will find this film more interesting than my “thoughts out loud”.