QAnon, Faces on Mars, and Joe Biden's Inauguration

Despite the disappearance of the shadowy "Q," and the failure of the long-promised "Storm" to occur, followers of "QAnon" still hold out hope. Some believe that President Trump will return to power on March 4, 2021, in the reversal of an 1871 that turned the US into a "corporation" (spoiler alert--it didn't). Another view is that "NESARA," a secret package of economic reforms, will kick into gear in the summer of 2021, bringing about the return of President Trump and at last triggering the "Storm." 

These beliefs are fanciful, but they are spun from underlying facts that many times are correct--so far as they go. Why do we do this to ourselves? This episode examines the psychological concepts of "pareidolia" and "apophenia"--our tendency to create order from unrelated sensory information, as was famously illustrated by NASA's "Face on Mars" picture in the 1970s. Those psychological tendencies, while useful in another time when our ancestors needed to instantly distinguish friend from foe, now poses dangers to the proper operation of our democracy--which assumes that voters are operating with reliable and fundamentally factual information and worldviews.