As a relatively simple species living in a complex world we are often tempted to cut corners to fill in gaps. The need to at least attempt to make sense of our surroundings is, I suspect, hard-wired into our brains and however miserably we fail the overall frequency of success is always rising. Hence we are constantly getting better at interpreting our world in more meaningful ways. Truth and untruth make up the whole and as truth increases there is less room for untruth; the stuff we invent in order to fill in the gaps.
It always amazes me the extent to which some will go to find meaning where there may not necessarily be any. Why are we so ready to make “sense” of Rorschach Inkblots whenever we encounter them?
Forty years ago western middle class youth had more free time on its hands than perhaps at any other time in history. Living off accumulated parental wealth came easily to those who could afford it and for the resulting hippy movement, just being became a worthwhile and “respectable” pursuit. Of course these post-beatnik beatniks were relatively few. The real working class youth, as opposed to the middle class pseudo working class, was too preoccupied with survival to break their shackles.
In 1969 an extreme example of misdirected energy being used to find meaning was the so-called “conspiracy” of Paul McCartney’s death, a subject given extensive coverage in the Mail today. How was it possible for so many to have believed that the four Beatles on the now-famous Abbey Road crossing represented Paul’s funeral and where did the seed for such a theory originate?
I suppose that all it took was for one stoned hippy to latch onto the idea of John Lennon in a white suit at the front of “the procession”. From that germ of a false idea the creator and/or others might easily have extrapolated the rest. In a small hippy community an originator might not have been taken seriously at first but who was it who said “If you tell a big enough lie and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it”.
That so much “sense” can be made of nonsense is a truly amazing thing. Paul, a left-handed person, is holding his cigarette (a coffin nail) in his right hand and is out of step with the rest of the band. A line drawn through the right tyres of the parked cars passes directly through his head (thus signifying that he had died from a head injury in a car crash).
There are even some small indentations on the wall to the left of the Beatles back-cover street sign which some suggest, when joined together, make up the number three. This supposedly signified that there were only three Beatles left.
This is nonsense of course. It took my humble brain only a few minutes to find the “real” solution. The letter “B” is the second letter of the alphabet and Paul McCartney appears on the cover second from the left. The dots on the wall represent the numbers one to six which are the numbers on a “die”, clearly signifying that the real McCartney had died and that there was a conspiracy between the authorities, police and the remaining members of the band to keep this fact from the public.
Why is the human species so ready to join the dots and create meaning from thin air? Why have thousands of people made pilgrimages to see images of Jesus and the Virgin Mary on every imaginable object from bathroom doors to a piece of grilled cheese toast.
The phenomenon of the human mind creating meaningful images from nothing is called “pareidolia” and although fairly harmless when used by Beatles fans to “prove” that the real Paul McCartney is pushing up the daisies it is a phenomenon that has helped to perpetuate that evil of all evils, religion.
Why can’t we be content to know that we don’t know everything but that we are learning more and more about how our world works with each new day. Why do we so often feel compelled to have an answer even when sense dictates that that answer is the wrong one. How can any old answer be better than none?
Filed under: Conspiracy, False Idols, Beatles Conspiracy, Hippies, Pareidolia, Paul McCartney, Rorschach Inkblot
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