Sean

“Hunger is the best sauce in the world.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

“QAnon has been described as “an unusually absorbing alternate-reality game” where online users play their imaginary roles as bakers, hungrily anticipating the puzzle of each new crumb. According to UCLA psychiatrist Dr. Joseph M. Pierre, this sort of virtual treasure hunt creates a form of conditioning called a variable-ratio schedule, where rewards are dispensed at unpredictable intervals. Like online gaming or gambling or even the erratic intoxication of when you’ll get your next social media “like”—that feeling that keeps you refreshing your feed—QAnon’s immersive experience generates a kind of compulsive behavior similar to addiction. In a cognitive analysis of QAnon for Psychology Today, Pierre noted that with QAnon, “the conflation of fantasy and reality isn’t so much a risk as a built-in feature.”
― Amanda Montell, Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism

“They certainly were fine new clothes. While clothes do not, as the saying would sometimes have it, make the man, and fine feathers do not make fine birds, sometimes they can add a certain spice to a recipe”
― Neil Gaiman, Stardust

“Some say people who join cults are “lost.” But all human beings are lost to some degree. Life is disorderly and confusing for absolutely everyone. A more thoughtful way to think about how people find themselves in precariously cultish scenarios is that these folks are actively searching to be found, and—because of variations in genes and life experiences and all the complicated factors that make up human personalities—they’re more open than the average person to finding themselves in unusual places.”
― Amanda Montell, Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism