I grew up in an entire family who had fallen down this slippery pipeline of magical thinking. For some of them, it cost them everything.
It’s almost entirely bullshit designed to prey on people who are desperate for something better in their lives, desperate to feel less alone, desperate to feel hope that the universe is bigger than it seems and that they won’t die or have to say goodbye to everyone someday.
That’s where it does the most harm, along with religious beliefs like the rapture or Armageddon fantasies, it’s just magical thinking that makes you feel like nothing on Earth here and now matters. No need to worry about the climate, Jesus/Aliens are coming. No need to get educated and invest in your future, Jesus/Aliens are coming. No need to value your every moment like it may be your last, because Jesus/Aliens are coming, you have all the time in the world to ignore the people and precious memories around you.
The most fucked-up part of it all is I think there may be something weird going on, but it’s not aliens or jesus, it’s not an escape, it may not even be an “objective” thing, but maybe some natural phenomenon that our brains are recontextualizing. But this kind of “maybe there’s something real” event seems to be exceedingly rare and without a way to study or replicate it, without valid, unambiguous evidence, it’s like any of our own subjective experiences, it takes place inside you and can’t impact the world around you. If you think it will, you will end up alone and disappointed.
I know this is a PEMDAS joke, one of many for the PEMDAS throne.
But yeah, we need to really, really worry about the coming day when “math becomes a democracy” and that is already happening for a wide array of other facts and knowledge about the world.
Whatever “civility politics” liberals infested our collective minds with have to be abandoned. We have to get a lot harder and a lot less tolerant of other people’s “beliefs” even if you think “Well they’re only harming themselves by thinking 1x1=4” but they’re not, we need to start viewing these people as threats to our future. We no longer live in isolation, whatever bullshit your parents drove into you about “nothing on the internet being real and shouldn’t matter” was utter hogwash and even less relevant in 2025/2026. We get everything from the internet, including a sense of community and connection, which is why nutsoids find each other and turn something like a joke about earth being flat into an entire anti-science movement.
If you’ve ever seen those dumb sci-fi shows or movies where science if forbidden and people caught learning science are punished, and thought “that’s so unrealistic” well I have some real bad news for you.