Why Do Tragedies Cluster Together?
It's demonic plague all the way down
For the first time in sixteen years, the United States had a fatal commercial aviation crash Wednesday evening. Then last night there was another fatal one, a smaller medevac jet this time, yet still, as of reports, with six deaths after the jet impacted the ground while making a large fireball. This also comes quite soon after two other major passenger crashes around the world, in Kazakhstan and Korea killed 38 and 179 people respectively in the last week of December. Air travel, statistically speaking remains safe, if one ignores the ever more clear risks caused by DEI hiring practices across the board. Crashes, fatal ones especially, mass causality ones even more so, are extremely rare compared to the number of worldwide flights.
And so the mind wonders, as many a post on X has responded to last night’s crash with something like this:
Incredulity, weirdness, and thoughts of “how could this be just a coincidence” fill your mind even without your trying. How—and why—could tragedies pile up on each other like this? Is there a deeper explanation? A conspiracy? An unknown safety risk?
I’m not here to deeply analyze the whys and hows technically speaking for either incident, and I can’t give any better form of condolences than as Vice President JD Vance posted and the TLM Requiem Mass prays: “Lux æterna luceat eis, Domine, cum Sanctis tuis in æternum: quia pius es. Requiem æternam dona eis, Domine: et lux perpetua luceat eis.”
I am here, however, to ponder a pattern. Perhaps it’s only an apparent one—and that’s why I’m thinking about it—but tragedies seem to cluster together. As my mother often told me growing up: “Deaths come in threes,” or deaths of family friends seem not to be equally distributed over time, but seem to all happen at once. I’ve noticed this, vaguely, not really thinking much about it all my life until I heard of another phenomenon of high coincidence, that of long-married couples where when one dies at an advanced age, their spouse soon also dies, and is said to have died of a broken heart where once they lost their spouse, the other gave up their “will to live.”
Before looking at prosaic explanations, let’s remind ourselves of a few other weird coincidental tragedies from the last few years that seem to point to something more.
In February 2023, the United States was hit by a seeming blitz of chemical spills and train derailments.
Remember East Palestine, Ohio? That was only the big one. There were several other major train derailments and chemical spills that followed within a few weeks, including a major nitric acid spill in Tuscon, AZ.
Then there are all the food processing plants going up in flames throughout 2022:
There was a spate of aircraft engine trouble in February 2021, and on February 20th, 2021 in particular as well as a spate of parts falling off of planes (alongside some actual crashes worldwide) in January 2024.
Conspiracy? Or bad luck? What’s going on?1
Let’s run through some ideas:
1. Filtering Bias
On examination, perhaps there is nothing really coincidental to see here. There are many more train derailments and chemical spills, fires and accidents in industrial facilities, and small non-fatal aircraft incidents that we don’t pay much attention to under normal circumstances.2 Chemical spills occur on average every two days across the United States, but we don’t normally hear much about them.
I pulled National Transportation Safety Board data for the last several years and made a chart of the number of fatal aircraft accidents worldwide by month. This includes private planes, where most accidents and deaths occur, and yes some spikes would be interesting to look into, like March of 2022, but the main point I gather is that dozens of accidents happen every month but most of the time we don’t hear about them either.3
What seems to be happening, often, is that our view of reality is heavily mediated and filtered. When a major incident happens in one field or industry, news attention and popular attention, limited as it always is in what it can cover, shines a much brighter light on that area, and, often, brings small incidents that would have been ignored in other circumstances to the forefront of attention.
These apparent coincidences could perhaps be only selection or filtering bias in our memory. We might only remember the coincidental occurrences because coincidences stick in our minds and not because apparent coincidences are causally connected. Media coverage alone can cause this, by focusing attention, and we can also contribute as our intellects (and even the lower cogitative power) are ordered to discerning order in the world, and biased towards seeing order even when it is not there.
When for some reason our attention is directed in one direction, we notice a lot of what we were looking for, because a lot of things happen in a lot of places all the time, and we just weren’t looking. Start looking for a problem and you’ll find it. That’s where and how propaganda often operates, saying true things, but choosing what to focus on and amplify and what to ignore.4
But even if this explains some coincidences away as merely natural (i.e. statistical), there could be something more going on in other cases.
2. Mutual Causality
There is also the possibility, as in the case of a spate of foodborne illnesses, that there is a single mutual cause, a “bad batch” behind otherwise seemingly coincidental incidents, in this case, perhaps a defective batch of airplane parts that led to both incidents. Here, of course, the explanation for seeming coincidence is that there is no coincidence, that a single cause that perfectly explains all the effects. In this hypothesis, we are seeing a lot of accidents of one type because there is a heightened risk out there due to one specific cause. The explanations posed by conspiracy theories act in this way, proposing that there is a hidden cause or cabal behind a range of seemingly disconnected incidents.
I don’t find the phrase “conspiracy theory” a pejorative because too many have come true, and I thus also consider the possibility that there is, perhaps, an active plot involving conscious intentionality, such as a terror cell sabotaging both planes that links the two events. Without sufficient reason to presume an active conscious conspiracy such as a terror plot, I will not assume such a hypothesis. Yet, as I will return to later, there is the possibility of an unconscious conspiracy here, one invisible to those involved, which could connect these two events.
3. Mimetic Example
This does not seem to apply to this week’s accidents, but as Darryl Cooper—and others—have pointed out, a specific new type of crime, a new tactic for mass murder, or a new mental/spiritual disorder breeds imitators as if the first act of that type of evil has opened a breach to allow more of its kind into the world.
Interpret this physically and psychologically and you say, as makes some sense, that there are a certain amount of psychotic killers in the world, and one of them performing, say, the first well-publicized mass school shooting in 1999 in Columbine, Colorado, gives all the others the idea and model to use to do it themselves.
Take it a level deeper and throw some Rene Girard in and, based on his theory of mimesis, the idea that human desire’s inclinations naturally incline to accord with those of each man’s peers and you say that the first mass shooting shifted the whole landscape of human desire into the grasp of a new type of evil.
And, perhaps, look at it one more time, a little deeper this time, and you could say that a demonic, infectious plague entered the world in full force in 1999 with regard to mass shootings and has been working its way to attack and take over the most susceptible ever since.
These are all metaphors for understanding a reality that encompasses all of them. The point is simple, however. The mimetic example of one act shifts the behavior of others and produces imitations of itself. We see this with other (I’m just going to say it) demonic plagues today like transgenderism which is a worship of the goddess Ishtar that (hopefully) is finally on the decline, on Tourette’s syndrome amongst young women on TikTok and Instagram, in a smaller way within “meme culture” online and the mimetic frenzy we all went into in 2020 through both the “Floydian Summer of Love” and COVID. In all these, evil begets evil by taking over the minds and wills of others first, perpetuating itself exactly like a virus. Lazy or sloppy work habits are also manifestations of the same problem within a factory, construction, or maintenance setting.
In the case of this week’s crashes, there is no sign of purposeful intent, even if incompetence on several levels is likely, so the mimetic example is likely not the primary cause, but perhaps mimesis is at least somewhat to blame, as we will return to in a moment.
4. Fear Is Itself To Be Feared
When an accident happens, every individual, pilots and air traffic controllers included, becomes a little more on edge, a little more distracted by fear, a little more concerned about one or two particular risks over all others. Rather than making people safer, this increases risk as everyone is paying less attention to all other risk factors, and is therefore more likely to fall prey to another one of them, pilots included. This also goes for hazardous materials transporters as we saw with the chemical spills and derailments in February 2023, as well as with pilots and mechanics in March 2021 (engine parts falling off) and perhaps the crashes in January 2024.
Fear and anxiety to a degree are positive attunements to the human mind that pressure one to perform at their best—primarily by warding off distractions from the mind. But when fear becomes a distraction, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. I noticed this myself when I had some car issues last week, my intent focus on one issue and concern over whether my car would make it home definitely made me a shakier and less attentive driver. A perfectly fearless soldier is a danger to himself and his comrades, but so also is the overly fearful one just as much of a danger. The virtue in the middle, the safest position between the opposing vices of fear and recklessness, is courage, the position where one’s actions are most ordered by reason. As St. Thomas Aquinas himself states in the Summa Theologiae, an excess of fear is itself a hindrance to action, that, through causing a “disturbance of his imagination”, can cause a man, who, say walks on top of a plank suspended in the air to fall.5
Accidents are overdetermined, so while I lend at least a possibility that this was a factor in this week’s crashes, in making the later pilots more on edge because previous incidents were on their minds, it was probably again not the only one. So also with the chemical spills of February 2023, since every event has multiple causes, physical, human (physical + mental + spiritual), and spiritual, fear is at least a contributing factor to some of them.
5. Spiritual Health
My final theory/reason for the clustering of evil is a summation of all of the prior ones.
It’s demonic plague all the way down. We are being attacked, and perpetuating those attacks mimetically to the rest of the world through the effects of the plague: society’s lack of spiritual health at all levels. We are distracted and weakened physically, mentally, and spiritually. Our businesses and government preach inclusion but not charity, selfishness instead of competence, and laziness as a virtue, and we promote the incompetent at all levels without pondering the consequences. We are encouraged to keep our minds full of vice, to get as much as we can out of our jobs, and out of other people, and to seek pleasure first, and reason last.
And what do we expect but that we are weakened, our technology is becoming shoddier and shoddier, and our infrastructure falls apart as we take on neuroses, follow political fads, and become more and more unreasonable, more and more governed by whatever spirit of the times comes upon us in each moment.
Call it laziness, call it DEI, call it wokism, call it leftism, call it “mouse utopia”, call it decadence, or call it spiritual attack, or demonic plague. It’s all the same thing, as all of these things are of the evil one, and it’s all connected, with overlapping, and self-reinforcing effects.
President Trump and others are right to blame DEI policies from Obama/Biden as contributing to this week’s tragedies, but they’re missing the larger picture. We’re all experiencing the impact of demonic plague, that is, a lack of spiritual health, of proper ordering within ourselves, and of ourselves up to God.
The sickness passes between us every time you decide to “just go with the crowd” on this one, or “take it easy” when you should uphold a standard of quality in your work or that of your comrades when you walk into church and attend in a daze rather than engaging in the liturgy with full attentiveness and love.
We are in the middle, not of one particular rash of coincidental tragedies with a cabal actively instigating them, nor in merely a mental, mimetically induced rash of tragedies, nor merely a crisis induced by fear, but in all of them at once, a spiritual crisis of greater magnitude because its roots affect all of us. Because we have chosen not to perceive it consciously, we are in a conspiracy of evil, a demonic plague of which we are blinded to the true reality.
Pilots are on edge and thereby at greater risk of getting into accidents because they know the system is on edge and broken. Mechanics, air traffic controllers, nay, everyone, know this at least implicitly. But we all perpetuate it through our own faults and our own, well, lackadaisically depressed and fearful attitude toward everything. Of course, as someone might challenge me, disorder has been the perpetual state of mankind since the Fall. I’m merely saying that we’re in a poly-crisis of deeper and greater magnitude than normal, and we’ve been in it for a while, as this site convincingly claims by way of statistics, at least the last fifty years or so. Many instances of tragedy are accidents, and some are just coincidences.6 But the whole weight of our spiritual disorder weighs on everything and is a contributory cause to all of them. Its effect is large enough to visibly drive statistical averages to a “new normal” level, but a “new normal” that is ruled over by demonic plague.
What caused the crashes, then? A lot of things, yes, but spiritual sickness and spiritual plague did contribute a lot. How do we make things safer again? Well we need to fix many things, but we can’t simply fix one policy, add one safety rule, or remove one DEI hire. We’ve got to turn everything back towards God.
This final quote from somebody’s perspective on the first crash posted on an aviation forum is a great way of summarizing all this from a secular perspective but still getting at where we are as a society:
It's like all the near misses served warnings. And now this crash was basically a way of telling us "Hey, we've warned you dozens of times. Now you have no choice but to face the brutal consequences."7
God and His world have warned us a lot of times. But now, yes, we “have no choice but to face the brutal consequences” of our lack of spiritual health as individuals and as a society.
And as to the couples whose deaths appear correlated, we might be advised to remember that our body and soul are far more connected, far more unified, for good and for ill than we realize. We can’t solve the health of one without the other. And we need to kick the demons out of both.
Keeping in mind of course that I’m mostly focusing on the human perspective here as for God there is not such a thing as luck within his providence. See https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~CT.BookI.C137
See the data I pulled out via a pivot table here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BHOPMUFiEqlRSGaaI-M5XYvhEee6l6KY2TR-6AoU74Q/edit?usp=sharing
See Balaji Srinivasan’s The Network State: https://thenetworkstate.com/book/tns.pdf
Channel distortion. That which favors the US establishment is magnified 100X, while that which disfavors it is downranked 100X or silenced entirely, such that the net distortion is 10,000X or more. We can think of this as analogous to channel distortion in signal processing. Media corporations aren’t just censors, they’re sensors - and self-interested ones. That is, they’re ostensibly measuring the world, but they actually have self-interested reasons for reporting that some numbers are low (like inflation and crime) and others are high (like whatever social ill they want to address). There are many such channel distortions, including (a) absence of criticism of media owners, (b) A/B testing to promote literal hate speech for more clicks, (c) self-referential quoting to give the impression of impartiality, and so on
The Central Limit Theorem and the rest of mathematical statistics apply, even in a world still ultimately governed by Divine Providence AND human free will AND where demonic contagion does exist.
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