A Fun Experiment To Disprove Claims of Sinister Symbology
By now, you're probably familiar with the subculture of conspiracy theorists who believe that the world's strings are being pulled by a secret society who, for whatever reason, throw their symbols into everything from architecture to Hollywood movies. Story goes that they do it so they can sit back and snicker at how ignorant the masses are for not recognizing their crap all over the place, sort of like those fangirls who make constant references to some anime or other and act all smug and superior when nobody else knows what they're on about.
Some of you might be wondering whether there's anything to what these people are claiming. Were those stars and triangles and eyes really planted by some secret society bent on world-domination? Well... here's an experiment that will demonstrate that the truth is probably much simpler and far less sinister. All you need is a little creativity.
- Assign some profound-sounding symbolism to things like common geometric shapes, well-known plants and animals, relatively common objects, numbers, and colors. For example, things like "falling snowflakes symbolize the grace of God coming down from Heaven," or "the color purple symbolizes willpower."
- You can even get really fantastic about it and make up entire fictional belief systems to go along with it, eg, "the number four corresponds with the Four Great Snoofaloos, the celestial keepers of wisdom," or "the colors green and gold are associated with Herleva, the goddess of unexpected surprises and brewed beverages."
- Next, try to find your symbols in books, movies, music videos, videogames, consumer products, etc. OMIGOSH, was that unexpected woman wearing a GREEN AND GOLD NECKLANCE? It's HERLEVA!
- You can also work backwards, shoehorning everything you see into the mythos you've developed. It might seem like cheating, but conspiranoids do this all the time. For example, one popular conspiranoid site claimed that the telephone on Lady Gaga's telephone hat in Telephone was supposed to symbolize that Lady Gaga was a mind-controlled slave. Their logic? Lady Gaga was a major figure in music, therefore she had to be mind-controlled, and therefore the telephone on her head had to symbolize mind-control.
I guarantee, if you create yourself a good pool of symbols and a strong mythos, you will start seeing it - not because it's actually there, but because the human brain is hardwired to find meaning and pattern everywhere.
