Eclipse or Big Ophthalmology: Who’s really behind the April 8th conspiracy theories
This week on the corner of hope and despair: Big Optometry strikes back!
QAnons and others are convinced that the Eclipse on April 8th is the Rapture, but I’ve got some questions. Mostly, is Big Optometry behind this all?
It’s the End of the World as We Know it, and It’s totally forking bonkers
Earlier this week, a friend from high school shared a Facebook post that was about the solar eclipse. Re-shared from a Christian Apocalypse influencer (she probably wouldn’t call herself that), the post was both hilarious and terrifying. Relying on the excessive length (to make it look well-thought out) and nonsensical visualizations (because that makes it data!), the for-profit fear monger’s post traced the path of the solar eclipse and two others from the past few years. Did you know the eclipse paths cross through a magically-significant number (7) of towns named Nineveh? It’s a sign!
A sign that Christianity has never strayed far from its pagan roots.
The eclipse will also pass through the place where the catastrophically stupid Noah’s Ark museum is. This is also a sign. (Of what? It’s not like the ark is there.)
The bigger sign is that the eclipse paths looked like Biblical Hebrew and Ancient Greek Letters. Which all indicate the end of the world.
I’m a little worried that these people are so happy to die. I’m a lot worried that they want to take the rest of us with them.
Before we go forward, I highly recommend you take a look at the phenomenon known as apophenia. It explains how and why our brains like to organize things into patterns (which explains numerology, Nostradamus, QAnon, and how you know which pot to smash in Zelda).
Weaponizing Apophenia Works
As a teenager, I just found it a quaint contradiction that the “What Would Jesus Do” bracelet wearing, church attending, literal “believer” classmates were also the ones drinking, partying and having sex (or forcing others to have sex).
Then they grew up to be the same people who claim the End Times is coming while celebrating a literal golden idol of Donald Trump and buying Bibles from him (I’m not over either of those things). Any number of organizations weaponize apophenia. Check out Conspirituality and see how grifters put the con in conspiracy.
Who’s to blame?
I attribute it to untrained intellect. So many of the smart people I know who never went to college or into vocational training never learned how to harness their smarts towards critical thinking. Being naturally smart actually becomes the problem. Naturally smart people who have absolutely no discipline find themselves prone to noticing patterns without realizing they’re being shown a tiny part of a bigger picture that distorts the whole thing.
Or is it something more sinister? I realized that underlying all of these posts is the advice that you should not use the eclipse glasses. The idea is that God is coming back through the eclipse and God’s blessings will pass you over or you will not see God if you’re using the eclipse glasses, you must be looking with the naked eye.
The only group that benefits from a mass of people staring directly into the sun for long periods of time: Big Ophthalmology. I’m not saying we should all go protest outside of the LensCrafters (although with those prices, they’re kind of asking for it). What I am saying is that the logical Big Bad behind this looney tunes advice is clear: Big Ophthalmology got tired of being left out. We have Big Pharma and Big Government, the Medical Industrial Complex, the Prison Industrial Complex, and the Military Industrial Complex. Aside from Firefighters who seem determinedly resistant to being the kind of assholes you can make a hashtag against, most groups sooner or later get their own conspiracy. Ophthalmology just wanted its due, and it has been lying in wait for the right moment to strike us all.
Abusive Ideologies
Maybe this sounds wackadoo, but it is no more out there than the Rapture and far less abusive.
Watching grown adults raise children to believe they won’t live until high school graduation because the Rapture is coming is indescribable. I want to respect parents’ ability to raise their kids how they want, but at what point are some belief systems a matter of abuse? With the number of adult children from these groups reporting Rapture Anxiety, or the unknown number of children who die in faith-healing communities, this isn’t just a philosophical question.
How do we balance between parents’ freedom, religious liberty, and freedom from government in our personal lives with the fact that it is actually harmful to raise children with apocalyptic beliefs? When does the amount of “shouldn’t” become the legal “can’t”?
I’m not advocating for making this a legal thing, because I’d rather solve this problem socially. Yet, when someone abandons all reason, it doesn’t usually lead to anything good. Right now it’s going blind through staring at the sun, but we’ve all seen the social spillover from anti-vaxxers, Big Lie believers, and so forth. When the world doesn’t end on April 8th, they’re not going to stop and reflect, they’re going to dig in.
And I think this is what really disturbs me. It’s Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism.
Once someone deliberately abandons reason in a way that cannot be combated there’s nothing that can be done. I know people who believe that every time someone asks you to think about what you believe, they’re “trying to turn you from your God.”
This isn’t faith. It’s psychosis. Can you name any other belief system where you could publicly make all of these declarations without having someone report you for a mental health issue?
If this were all about personal beliefs, it would be 100% none of my business. We could end the conversation at “I don’t get it, but you do you.” But it is no longer about personal beliefs. They don’t believe in personal choice.
When you look at the Christian Nationalist manifesto that is Project 2025, you can see how well organized they are about it. They have a plan to dismantle the US government, erode the separation of church and state even more, and do everything they can to control all of our lives. Because they have magically convinced themselves that our personal choices are going to affect them. Maybe I’ve got it all backwards and Big Ophthalmology is actually the hero in this: it’s easier to see them coming when they’re blind. A fun take on the old Irish prayer to “know them by their limp.”
I don’t know what to do
If we’re going to move forward as a nation, we need to move out of this renewed religious radicalization (really all radicalization).
Of course, at the end of the day, they could be right and I could be wrong. It could be the End Times. The wars around the world, the lightening rod of religion, Jordan River turned red in 2021, we had a global plague, and the Anti-Christ is selling Bibles. I can’t say for sure there aren’t Four Horsemen.
But even if that’s happening, the fact that there are some people who want it to happen because they’re so anxious to show that they’re God’s chosen people is wild.
