User:Antigem/sandbox/Gematriarewrite

Overview
Conspiracy Gematria is a confirmation bias based system of converting words into numbers in order to search for matches that allegedly convey a meaningful connection. Although some regular content producers engage in something resembling classical Gematria, the focus of this article is the set of practitioners that indulge in the not so innocent form created by Zachary K. Hubbard. You can tell you are dealing with conspiracy gematria when the content resembles Alex Jones style harassment, bigotry and lack of empathy Jones exhibits. Naturally, tacked on to the usual “truther” content that inevitably has at most a tiny bit of truth, if any at all.

Rarely does it happen that a user settles for accepting results from a first attempt. The goal is to take a current news story and reverse engineer the story to find numbers to line up to the desired narrative. The vast number of “misses” are completely ignored. The “hits”, despite often times having the data manipulated to force the desired outcome are matched up with the same or even only vaguely similar numbers and proudly touted with a,”See, I told you so!!” attitude. The net result of the forced narrative is no more credible than an obviously photoshopped picture.

The Psychology of Conspiracy Gematria
First and foremost is that with the ability to alter numbers in a myriad of ways, the use of a dazzling array of different ciphers to chose from, and the fact that you get to completely ignore every time you’re wrong, with minimal practice it’s next to impossible for somebody to not find a match. And like a good little cult leader Hubbard will pump up the egos of the newbies. But the mere fact that someone can become a creator of content instead of just sitting in the audience and clapping has a large appeal. The downside of this, in the manner that conspiracy gematria is practiced means that every single person that livdd in the past, every single person living now, and every single person that ever will live is a member of the “evil empire”.. Conspiracy gematria utilizes the concept of cognitive ease to the extreme. Although a case can be made for an instructor to dumb it down to get a point across, instead of Neil DeGrasse Tyson trying to explain how a cat that’s both alive and dead at the same time relates to quantum physics we end up with things like “The Jesuits murdered a rapper because sports are rigged and it’s because of a two digit number.” The numbers are always easy to find, rarely topping three digits. Repetition is a common cognitive ease concept. And their favorite numbers are memorized and repeated by the entire gathering.