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Conspiracy Theories

Belief in conspiracy theories comes from a desire to make sense of complex or troubling events. They try to reduce the anxiety and confusion generated by things that are hard to understand and/or don’t fit with one’s world view.

The Jews of Medieval Europe were often believed to have committed a variety of nefarious plots. From being responsible for the death of Jesus, to poisoning water wells during the Black Death, to a sinister association with money (which serves as a foundation for later conspiracy theories) … the Jews have been victims of conspiracy theories for thousands of years.

Scapegoating marginalized peoples is common in conspiratorial thinking. Solving why conspiracy theories are so attractive to so many people is complicated.

Out of Control

Conspiracy theories are a way of making sense of events that are hard to understand. Humans dislike uncertainty, so having an explanation (however flawed) is more attractive than doubt. Uncertainty generates anxiety and stressful times only serve to increase the number of people turning to conspiracy theories as a way to alleviate their anxiety.

For example, there are numerous conspiracy theories surrounding coronavirus – it was engineered by the Chinese government, or it was engineered by Bill Gates, or it’s being spread by 5G cell phone towers. The 1889 global influenza pandemic (the “Russian flu”) was blamed on electric lights, telegraph poles, and even just electricity in general. What’s old is new again. People are afraid of a deadly virus that isn’t fully understood and so they blame a new technology that they also don’t fully understand.

Fighting the 1889 influenza pandemic, or fighting the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, for years medical professionals have also had to fight conspiracy theories.

The world is largely out of our control and major world events can remind us of how little control we have. Conspiracy theories give a feeling of control to people who feel anxious about a situation they can’t control. Many events are the complex result of a confluence of factors, and sometimes things just happen at random. Neither of these make people feel good. Complexity is not the soundbite people want. Instead it is much more attractive to believe in a simplistic fictional narrative where there are clearly defined good guys and bad guys and you can blame the bad guys for what’s happening. People like easy to understand stories rather than complicated chaos. In having a target to blame, a conspiracy theory believer can take action and have some degree of control rather than being powerless to a complicated abstract concept.

Humans are also pattern recognition machines. Unfortunately we also imagine patterns where there are none. Gamblers and sports fans see streaks and patterns where mathematically there is nothing more than normal chance. People who see non-existent patterns in normal life are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories. In conspiracy theories people construct connections and see patterns where there are none in an attempt to create a story that feels better than uncertainty.

Humans are pattern recognizing machines, but sometimes we find patterns that don’t exist.

All Kinds

While people who believe in conspiracy theories come from all economic levels, genders, political affiliations, and racial backgrounds, there are a few patterns that exist. For one, people who believe in one conspiracy theory are statistically more likely to believe in additional unrelated theories. Also, belief in conspiracy theories is fueled by the anxiety of not understanding why things happen, and the people who are most likely to not understand things are the less educated.

While conspiracy theories range from the small to large, major world events are more likely to be the focus of conspiracy theories because the effects of such events are so impactful. People want big meaningful events to have equally big and meaningful explanations. This is proportionality bias. The JFK assassination is the focus of numerous conspiracy theories, but the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan is not. Even though both events are similar in nature, for most people nothing really resulted in the failed assassination of Reagan and so a simple explanation was sufficient. For the JFK assassination however, the idea that one deranged person could cause so much chaos wasn’t a big enough answer for such a big event.

On the Inside

Ultimately believing in conspiracy theories is about belief – it is not about facts. People who believe in conspiracy theories have an insular and circular logic that shields them from the real world. Facts that contradict a conspiracy theory are met with suspicion and are thought of as part of the conspiracy. People like information that feels right, not necessarily is right. Further, the absence of proof to support a conspiracy theory can be seen as proof of the conspiracy theory. It’s an echo chamber shielded from reality.

In 2016 Dr. David Grimes created a formula for how long a conspiracy could realistically stay a secret before being exposed to the public. The more people involved, and the more time that passes, the more likely that someone will say something. For example, the moon landing involved around 411,000 NASA employees. As of today it is extremely unlikely that the moon landing was a hoax because it would have meant that almost half a million people were sworn to secrecy and not a single one of them ever let anything slip for decades. Grimes’s formula demonstrates just how unlikely it is for most conspiracy theories to be true. Information wants to be free. But belief in conspiracy theories continues.

The QAnon conspiracy theory started around 2017. It has since grown into a wide-reaching network of beliefs including a pedophile ring run by celebrities & liberals who are controlling the media, secret deep-state government operations, aliens, human sacrifice, and (wouldn’t you know it) the only person who can stop it all is Donald Trump.

Unraveling

Conspiracy theories are contradictorily both known and unknown. The believer has secret knowledge but also lacks any real evidence. That a conspiracy could have been partially leaked but no real evidence is revealed is very unlikely. But believers are not deterred because conspiracy theories aren’t about facts.

In an age of unprecedented access to information some people have sought emotional refuge in baseless fictional narratives. Conspiracy theories are a symptom, but not the cause, of ignorance. It is easier to prevent a conspiracy theory from taking hold than to change someone’s mind once they believe. It is much harder to unlearn something than learn something new. One way to prevent the adoption of conspiracy theories is an idea called “Pre-bunking” or more formally as attitudinal inoculation. In Pre-bunking people learn some of the techniques used to manipulate them into believing things that aren’t true, arming them to be ready when they encounter misinformation. For those who already believe, psychologists say it is better to treat the root cause of a believer’s ignorance than to try and dissuade them from a particular conspiracy theory.

So whether it’s the suspicion of witches, the Knights Templar, the Freemasons, the Communist red scare, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Illuminati, crop circles, water fluoridation, Area 51, the Royal Family assassinated Princess Diana, 9/11 was an inside job, chemtrails, Obama wasn’t born in America, QAnon, flat earth theory, the deep state, anti-vaxxers, or that coronavirus is being spread by cell phone towers … knowledge from reliable sources and improving critical thinking skills are the best ways to reduce belief in conspiracy theories.

That Mitchell and Webb Look satirize conspiratorial thinking.

Eye Color

Humans originally had brown eyes until genetic mutations started making variations. No two eyes are identical, not even your own.

The color & patterns of your eyes is as unique as your fingerprints. Several gene variations all contribute to giving each of your eyes a particular design and shade of color (or colors if you’re heterochromatic). No two eyes are identical.

Originally all humans had dark brown eyes (along with dark brown skin) which helped to reflect some of the harsh rays from the sun. As humans migrated out of Africa and up into Europe, where winter sees less sunlight and the land is further away from the direct sunlight of the equator, there was no longer a need for so much protection from the sun’s harmful UV light. This is where the first mutation in human eye color took place. Sometime between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago the first blue-eyed person was born, from which all other blue-eyed people are descendant.

Eye Colors

Our skin and hair is colored using the brown pigmentation called melanin. The back of our irises also contains melanin which gives our eyes color. Melanin is brown, and so brown eyes using brown pigmentation is easy to understand. Light enters the iris, the melanin absorbs some wavelengths of light while reflecting back out the necessary waves to make the color brown, making brown eyes brown.

You would think then that blue eyes use blue pigmentation, but they don’t. Blue eyes use the same brown pigmentation as brown eyes but in lesser quantities. The other trick is that, since eyes are three dimensional, blue eyes absorb and scatter waves of light differently than brown eyes. The longer light wavelengths (reds & oranges) get broken up inside the eye and only the shorter wavelengths (blues) get reflected back out making blue eyes look blue. This scattering effect of allowing/blocking certain wavelengths is also what gives the sky different colors.

Even though all colors of eyes use brown melanin, variations in the construction of the eye and how it absorbs & scatters various light waves makes an iris a certain color.

Brown, blue, gray, hazel, green – all eye colors use some amount of brown melanin combined with various ways of scattering & absorbing light to make whatever color the eyes are. People with albinism can lack the necessary pigmentation to make their irises as opaque as other people’s. Irises that fail to block excessive light from entering the retina can cause a variety of vision problems including extreme sensitivity to bright light.

What does eye color “do”?

As for any potential purpose, eye color doesn’t “do” much. Unlike other genetic traits which evolution embraced because they helped our chances of survival, eye color variations seems to be largely perpetuated through romantic desirability. People find certain eye colors more attractive and so the genes for those colors live on. Your eyesight isn’t any better or worse because of a certain color eyes. Light travels through the pupil to the retina and so the color of the iris doesn’t change what you see. This is why cosmetic contact lenses can change your eye color without changing what you are seeing – they are only covering the iris.

There are some minor effects of having different eye colors. Because of how light is scattered and absorbed inside the eye, lighter colored eyes are sometimes more sensitive to bright light leaving some to squint more as well as needing to wear sunglasses more frequently. Driving at night can also be difficult because the glare from oncoming traffic can be more harsh. People with light colored eyes are more likely to develop macular degeneration, but people with brown eyes are more likely to develop cataracts. Finally in sports, people with lighter colored eyes tend to be better at hand-eye coordinated activities such as throwing, bowling, golfing, pitching, etc. Brown-eyed people tend to be better at the actions where they react such as hitting a ball, boxing, playing defense, etc.

Added info: Getting reliable statistics on eye colors is difficult. That said brown eyes are the most common color type in the world at somewhere between 55-79%. Gray eyes seem to be the rarest at less than 1%. The eyes of some babies start out as blue but eventually become green or brown as their eyes develop more melanin. Few blue-eyed babies will have blue eyes as adults.

Liz Taylor was said to have violet eyes, but in reality she had blue eyes but with a genetic mutation to have double eyelashes which made her eyes look more purple. David Bowie was known for having two different colored eyes, but this was also an illusion. When he was 15 he got in a fight over a girl and his left eye was damaged leaving the pupil permanently dilated. This gave the impression that he had one black eye and one blue eye, but in reality both of his eyes were blue.

Liz Taylor and David Bowie both had remarkable eyes.

Autumn Colors

Leaves change colors in autumn because the temperature drops and the hours of sunlight diminish.

The leaves of deciduous plants change color as summer ends and autumn begins. Cooler temperatures and fewer hours of sunlight trigger chain reactions in how plants operate. When leaves are green it’s because of an abundance of chlorophyll which absorbs sunlight and produces simple sugars to feed the plant. Autumn’s seasonal changes tell plants to produce less chlorophyll. Autumn also tells plants to start producing special corking cells at the base of each leaf stem. These cells reduce the flow of nutrients (including chlorophyll) into or out of the leaves and eventually completely seals off the leaves from the branches allowing them to fall off.

So as chlorophyll production decreases, and leaves become sealed off from the rest of the plant, leaves can no longer stay as green as they were. What color they become depends on the plant.

Yellows and Oranges

Chlorophyll is the big green machine, it outweighs all other chemicals present in a leaf. As there is less and less chlorophyll present, the carotenoids that have been present the whole time begin to be visible. These chemicals give leaves different shades of yellow and orange depending on the plant. Carotenoids are also what make carrots orange.

Reds

Unlike carotenoids which are present in leaves all year, anthocyanins are pigments specially produced just for autumn. The end of summer triggers the production of anthocyanins which give leaves the deeper colors of reds, purples, and even blacks. Anthocyanins also are what give cranberries, cherries, and blueberries their colors.

Top Down

Much like a corporation, change takes place from the top down. Higher elevations see leaves change colors earlier than lower elevations. This is because higher elevations reach the cooler temperatures necessary to trigger the change before the same plants in lower elevations which have warmer temperatures.

Change also takes place top down in another way. The top leaves of a plant will typically begin changing color before the bottom leaves. This is because the top leaves are furthest from the roots and, since it takes more effort to send chlorophyll to the top of a plant, the top leaves will start losing their green color first.

“Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.” ― Albert Camus

Jack-o’-Lanterns

The Jack-o’-Lantern is an iconic part of modern Halloween but its origins are in much older traditions.

Humans have been hollowing out vegetables to use as lanterns for at least 10,000 years. The Māori of New Zealand use the word “‘ue” for both “gourd” as well as “lampshade.” While the jack-o’-lantern is Irish in origin, the pumpkin is a New World vegetable. So before 1492 the Irish used other vegetables to create makeshift lanterns, and one Irishman in particular used a turnip.

Jack of the lantern

Stingy Jack, Drunk Jack, Jack of the Lantern – his name varies about as much as his story does. The common thread among the variations of this folk tale is that Jack was a jerk. A bad drunk, or a liar, or both, Jack generally made trouble for the people of Ireland. Eventually the devil came for Jack but, clever as Jack was, he talked the devil into going for a drink before taking him to Hell. Jack convinced the devil to turn into a silver coin that he could use to pay for the drinks (again, Stingy Jack). Once in coin form Jack put the devil in his pocket beside a crucifix, torturing the devil. He released the devil on the condition that the devil go away for some period of time – some versions say 1 year, others say 10.

Eventually the devil came back for Jack but … and you’re not going to believe this … he was tricked again. This time Jack asked for one final taste of this life and tricked the devil into climbing up an apple tree to fetch an apple. Once in the tree Jack either carved a cross in the trunk, or he placed a cross at the foot of the tree, but either way he trapped the devil up in the tree. This time the devil agreed to go away forever and to never take Jack’s soul.

Eventually Jack died and was obviously refused entry into Heaven, but as per their agreement the devil refused him entry to Hell. So Jack was forced to forever wander between worlds. To light his way in this shadow world of existence, the devil gave Jack a burning coal which he placed inside a turnip as a lantern. This was the first jack-o’-lantern.

From turnips to pumpkins, jack-o’-lanterns are a fun (and scary) part of the Halloween season.

Samhain lanterns

The Halloween we know has its roots in the ancient Irish pagan festival of Samhain. A Gaelic harvest festival marking the end of the pagan year and the start of the new year, Samhain is the beginning of the dark half of the year. Festivities begin at sunset on October 31st and go through the night to November 1st. This one evening is believed to be especially supernatural where the boundary between this world and the spirit world is blurred. The ghosts of the deceased as well as the supernatural fairy folk (the aos sí) are said to temporarily cross over into our world.

To appease these spirits, and for protection from any tricks they may play, the ancient Irish would light bonfires, prepare special meals, and perform sacred rituals. Making lanterns from hollowed out vegetables was also believed to help ward off evil spirits.

They’re Coming to America

Eventually the Samhain lanterns and Jack’s lantern came together into one tradition. Jack-o’-lanterns supersized to pumpkins as early as 1834 when Irish immigrants brought the custom to America. Today most pumpkins grown in the United States and the United Kingdom are grown solely for decorations in the Halloween season. Despite being high in fiber as well as vitamin A, most pumpkins are never eaten. Billions of pounds of pumpkins are thrown in the trash each year after serving as seasonal decorations.

So after your jack-o’-lantern wards off the evil aos sí during Samhain, find a second use for that pumpkin as food.

Added info: every Halloween season the town of Kenova, West Virginia comes together to celebrate Halloween in a spectacular way. Ric Griffith’s home, ie. “the pumpkin house”, is decorated with over 3,000 jack-o’-lanterns.

Tide for Cash

Tide laundry detergent is a popular product to steal in exchange for cash and/or drugs.

During economic recessions the products that continue to have strong sales numbers are the products with desirable powerful brand names. Cheerios, McDonalds, Kleenex, Huggies, Coca-Cola, Tylenol – these are all strong “recession-proof” brands. Tide, which is the best selling laundry detergent in the world, is also a strong recession-proof brand, but it has an additional ignominious distinction. Tide is a popular product to steal as a de facto street currency to exchange for cash and/or drugs.

a case of detergent locked up — As a deterrent to theft, the detergent and in particular Tide, has been locked up.

Beginning around 2011 thieves started stealing Tide from stores around the USA. Some would grab a few bottles and run, others would load entire shopping carts and stroll right out the door. Over several visits, Patrick Costanzo of St. Paul, Minnesota stole almost $6,000 of Tide from a Walmart. Some stores were losing $10,000 to $15,000 a month from people stealing Tide. The stolen bottles of Tide are exchanged for $5 in cash or $10 worth of weed or crack. Dealers then sell the bottles through various middlemen at normal retail prices, or even discounted prices, but still making a substantial profit. Finally the stolen Tide appears on shelves at corner stores, flea markets, and sometimes even back at the store it was originally stolen from via shady local wholesalers.

Part of what makes Tide popular is also what makes it a great product for the black market. It doesn’t spoil, it’s a desirable brand name, and everyone needs to wash their clothes. It’s also very difficult to trace its origins, so once it’s stolen it’s hard to tell where it came from. As long as Tide remains popular people will find reasons to steal it.

“Haunted” Houses

The feelings associated with haunted houses can be explained with science.

Chemical Spirits

Fear, the chills, seeing visions that disappear, hearing things without a source – some people also have headaches, nausea, temporary paralysis, a feeling of weakness and or dizziness. These are all classic signs of a haunted house … and carbon monoxide poisoning.

As far back as 1921 there has been a connection between “haunted” houses and carbon monoxide. Dr. William Wilmer published an account of a “haunting” regarding his patient, “Mrs. H.”, in the American Journal of Ophthalmology. Mrs. H., her family, and her servants moved into a large mansion and over time suffered a whole host of paranormal fear-inducing experiences. After months it was discovered that the furnace in the basement was pouring fumes containing carbon monoxide into the house instead of up the chimney. Upon fixing the furnace all symptoms of the “haunting” ended. This is not an isolated incident. As recently as 2005 a woman reported seeing a ghost in her shower, but it turned out that her visions were caused by a newly installed water heater that was leaking carbon monoxide.

When carbon monoxide enters your body it attaches itself to your red blood cells preventing oxygen from attaching to the cells and being delivered to your organs. This lack of oxygen is what affects your brain into seeing & hearing things that aren’t happening (among other effects).

The Fear Frequency

Another feeling in a “haunted” house is an overall sense of dread – a fear with no known source. People say they can feel a presence, that there is something in the room with them but they can’t see it. This too can be explained but instead of an invisible gas it’s invisible sound waves.

Infrasound are sound waves just below the range of human hearing. Even though we can’t hear infrasound we can feel it. The low wave vibrations of infrasound can cause panic, fear, disorientation, and it can even vibrate your eyeballs into seeing something that isn’t there. In 1998 British engineer Vic Tandy was the first to connect infrasound and “hauntings” in his paper Ghosts in the Machine published in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research. The Warwick lab he was working in at the time was said to be haunted — people would feel uncomfortable, scared, and occasionally see a shape move in the room. It turns out this was all the result of a 19 Hz infrasound wave coming from the lab’s newly installed extractor fan. They fixed the fan and the “haunting” stopped.

So before you call 555-2368 to bust your ghosts, turn to science for a more logical explanation.

Thai Restaurants & Culinary Diplomacy

The dramatic increase in the number of Thai restaurants is driven by a culinary diplomacy program of the Thai government

Between 2001 and 2019 the number of Thai restaurants worldwide tripled. In the United States the number of Thai restaurants went from around 2,000 to over 5,000. Meanwhile at around 300,000 people Thai Americans only make up around 0.09% of the 330 million Americans. By comparison there are around 37 million Mexican Americans and around 54,000 Mexican restaurants around the US. That’s one Mexican restaurant for every 650 Mexican Americans but one Thai restaurant for every 55 Thai Americans. That’s a lot of Thai restaurants compared to so few Thai Americans. So other than tasting great, what has driven this explosion in Thai restaurants?

Culinary Diplomacy

In 2001 the Thai government formed the Global Thai Restaurant Company, Ltd. whose goal has been to spread Thai food and Thai culture around the world. This government-supported program offers generous loans to Thai nationals living abroad to open restaurants. They offer training in the cooking of standardized Thai dishes, they award “Thai Select” certificates for restaurants that are of high quality, and they have created A Manual for Thai Chefs Going Abroad to help train new Thai restaurateurs. They also offer predesigned restaurant packages to create Thai restaurants at different price points.

Thai predesigned restaurant packages include:

• Elephant Jump: the lower-priced experience aimed at $5 to $15 per customer
• Cool Basil: the mid-tier offering at $15 to $25 per person
• Golden Leaf: the higher-end culinary experience at $25 to $30 per person

Some Thai restaurants are even named after these packages – they didn’t even bother to come up with their own names. These Thai restaurant packages are like a government sponsored version of the “Irish pub in a box”.

thai basil — Thai Basil restaurant in Manchester, Vermont didn’t even come up with an original name, keeping instead one of the predesigned restaurant package names.

The Thai government’s efforts fall under what is known as culinary diplomacy, or gastrodiplomacy – it’s soft diplomacy. Through food you can introduce your culture to other countries, winning hearts and minds through stomachs. As a result of Thailand’s success other countries are creating similar programs including Peru, South Korea, and Taiwan among others. Culinary diplomacy can generate revenue through increases in exports and tourism. Indirectly, these programs can create favorable impressions of a country, its culture, and its people.

Culinary diplomacy can also improve the relations of people within a country. Mustafa Nuur is a Somali refugee living in Lancaster, PA who runs the Bridge program. Bridge is a cross-cultural experience which allows you to book a meal with a local immigrant family to share stories and eat the food from their home country. This helps create bonds between new immigrants and their neighbors, all through sharing a meal.

The Headless Horseman

A legend of a headless horseman and the need to cross a body of water for safety isn’t unique to Washington Irving.

Washington Irving’s 1820 story The Legend of Sleepy Hollow centers around an encounter with the headless horseman (the restless ghost of a Hessian soldier of the Revolutionary War whose head was shot off by a cannon). After attending a harvest festival at the Van Tassel house our protagonist, Ichabod Crane, is pursued in the night by the headless horseman. Crane’s one chance of safety is to cross the Pocantico River because the headless horseman’s power ends at the boundary of the river. As Crane and his horse Gunpowder cross the bridge the horseman gives one last attack by throwing his own head at Crane (or so the story goes).

Headless Riders

Irving’s story is an American classic but it’s also part of a larger tradition of supernatural headless horsemen. The British Isles and Northern Europe have a variety of spectral headless riders but one of the most famous are the dullahans of Ireland. The dullahans are a kind of sinister magical creature. They’re dress in black, riding black horses (who are also headless in some versions), and when they stop riding it’s only to announce the name of someone who is about to die. Their decapitated head, which they carry in their hand, is said to have magical sight and speaks the name of the person to die. In their other hand they crack a whip made of a human spinal cord.

In some parts of Ireland a dullahan doesn’t ride a solitary horse but instead is the headless coachman of the Cóiste Bodhar, the death coach. The death coach rides to pick up someone who is about to die and carry them to the afterlife.

A dullahan as imagined by Ryan Van Dongen

Take Me To The River

In The Legend of Sleep Hollow Ichabod Crane’s one chance of safety is to cross the bridge and reach the other side. This supernatural nighttime chase, and trying to reach the other side of the river, is similar to Robert Burns’s 1790 poem Tam o’ Shanter. In the poem, the titular Tam o’ Shanter has ended an evening of drinking at the pub and sets out into the night on his horse Meg. As he is riding along he sees an old abandoned church with light coming from inside, so he stops to take a closer look. Inside is a satanic witches’ sabbath complete with the Devil playing bagpipes.

Upon seeing a witch in a nightshirt that is just a bit too small, an intoxicated Shanter comments aloud, which is heard by the supernatural creatures. The lights go out and what follows is a daring chase where Shanter has to reach the other side of the River Doon. Like the headless horseman of Sleepy Hollow, the witches won’t cross the river and so Shanter’s only chance of survival is to make it to the other side. As he gallops across the Bridge of Doon a witch pulls off Meg’s tail.

A detail from *Tam o’ Shanter and the Witches*, with Tam looking in from the window

The Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in New York celebrates *The Legend of the Sleepy Hollow* and the Headless Horseman.

The Sleepy Hollow Cemetery is also the final resting place of Washington Irving as well as many other notable individuals.

Added info: Beyond being an inspiration for Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Tam o’Shanter is also the naming inspiration for the Scottish hat of the same name. The Bridge of Doon which Tam crosses, aka the Brig o’ Doon, is the inspiration for the name of the 1947 Broadway musical Brigadoon and its fictional town that appears once a century.

Tam o'Shanter inspired the name of the Scottish hat as well as the name of the 1947 Broadway musical Brigadoon. In this image is the Tam o'Shanter hat and the Brigadoon record cover.

Calvin and Hobbes (the real ones)

The characters of Calvin and Hobbes are named after a theologian and a philosopher.

The comic strip Calvin and Hobbes features a six year old boy named Calvin and his sometimes anthropomorphic stuffed tiger Hobbes. The two are named after 16th century protestant theologian John Calvin and 17th century political philosopher Thomas Hobbes. The characters of Calvin and Hobbes are decidedly a lot more fun than their namesakes.

John Calvin

Born in France in 1509, John Calvin trained to be a lawyer but moved to Geneva, Switzerland and became a major figure in the protestant reformation that was spreading across Europe at the time. Unlike Martin Luther, who looked to work with Catholic doctrine but make some changes, Calvin threw it all out and started from scratch creating an entirely new school of Christian thought. Among other things his new theology taught that we can’t know anything about God except what God chooses to reveal to us, that because of Original Sin we are driven to sin unless God steps in to help us, that you only partially have free will because God has predetermined your fate to end up in Heaven or Hell so you’re going to end up doing what it takes to merit the one you are destined for, and that there is nothing you can do about any of this.

The Catholic Church used to name heretical movements after the founder (such as Lutheranism). Similarly, this is how Calvinism was born. Calvin’s ideas for reformation became influential with a host of protestant groups including the Presbyterians, the Puritans, and the Huguenots. Calvin also believed that “… the human heart is a perpetual idol factory”, and that religious art was a distraction. This is why Calvinist churches are so plain and without statues or other ornamentation. Until this time the Catholic Church had been a lucrative source of work for artists, but because of the reformation movement’s austere aesthetic, to earn a living artists were forced to either produce more secular art or move to other cities or countries where the reformation hadn’t taken hold as strongly. This simple aesthetic applied to Calvinist clothing as well (such as the simple styles and Sunday black clothes of the Puritans).

In politics Calvin believed in the separation of church and state, but he also believed that politicians & royalty were in positions of power because God willed it. As such authority figures should be submissively obeyed even when said figures are unworthy of such deference (except if they are leading you astray from God). Which is kind of like Thomas Hobbes …

Thomas Hobbes

Born in 1588, 24 years after Calvin’s death, Thomas Hobbes’s world view was strongly influenced by the destruction brought about by the English Civil War. From this he produced Leviathan, which is his 1651 treatise of social contract political theory. In short, he believed that, when left on our own and without government, humans are violent and selfish. He believed we need government to help us rise above our base instincts. Without a political community he said that the life would be “… solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Similar to Calvin’s view that humans are compelled to selfishness & sin, Hobbes’s political philosophy was that without a government, the default “state of nature” for humans is chaotic and violent.

This is the basis for his argument that we not only need government but that we also must obey authority figures even when said figures leave a lot to be desired. In his mind, an abusive dictatorial government was still better than no government at all. There was almost no place for political revolution in Hobbes’s version of the social contract.

It’s worth noting that the foundation for Hobbes’s argument, the belief that without government “uncivilized” humans would engage in constant bickering & violence and would always be looking over their shoulder for attacks from others, isn’t necessarily true. The philosophical novel Ishmael by Daniel Quinn partially explores this assumption and how the competition for greater wealth is what incites violence. Many early tribal groups living within their means were able to live in relative stability. It has also been argued that, as humans became more sedentary in civilizations, warfare increased because humans couldn’t move away from one another to avoid conflict.

Even keeping to 17th century social contract philosophy there are arguments against Hobbes’s ideas. John Locke also believed in the benefits of having a strong government, but he believed that if that government was jeopardizing your natural rights to “life, liberty, and property” you had the right of revolution to overthrow the government. Thomas Jefferson later copy & pasted Locke’s ideas for the Declaration of Independence.

Calvin & Hobbes

Ultimately both Calvin and Hobbes had fairly dim views of humanity. They believed that without an authority figure (be it God or be it a political leader) humans were by default mean and unable to make better lives for themselves. Fortunately the fictional Calvin and Hobbes are a lot more positive than their namesakes.

Calvin and Hobbes crossing a log bridge appeared in the *The Calvin and Hobbes Lazy Sunday Book*. It was later parodied by Nina Matsumoto showing the actual Calvin and Hobbes as Calvin and Hobbes crossing the log, and has since become a much parodied meme.

Double, Double, Toil and Trouble

The witches’ ingredients for the cauldron in Macbeth are mostly coded names for medicinal plants.

Macbeth’s Act 4 opening scene is probably one of the most well known scenes in Shakespeare. The Three Witches (aka the Weird Sisters) are in a dark cave with a boiling cauldron at the center. The witches gather and begin an incantation of dark magic, adding ingredients as they go. “Double, double, toil and trouble; Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.” Each witch then lists a series of ingredients that, at face-value, sound disgusting and macabre. But the ingredients are not what they seem.

Witches, like early alchemists, kept their knowledge a closely guarded secret. After putting all of that effort into R&D you didn’t want the competition getting a hold of your findings. But witches had other reasons for secrecy. Unlike the fictional witches in Macbeth, most “witches” were in reality female medical workers using herbs & botanicals to create medicines. In Medieval Europe medicine was a male-dominated profession and women caught practicing medicine were sometimes branded as witches. As such they had to keep their activity, and their recipes, secret. By using alternate names for their ingredients, the contents of one’s “spell book” were kept secret. Also, using alternate names worked as a safe-guard to keep their proprietary medical knowledge out of the hands of the general public who might mistakenly try to prepare these treatments themselves.

Some believe that almost all of the 23 ingredients in the witches’ brew are actually coded plant names, even the problematically named “liver of blaspheming Jew”. How much of this Shakespeare knew is unclear. All the ingredients together would make an unrealistic ridiculous concoction, so they were probably chosen for theatrical shock value. He may have found a list of real “witches” ingredients and used them without knowing they were coded names. Still, if you want improved blood circulation some eye of newt (aka mustard seed) might help.