New Death Cult ritual incantation just dropped.
Anyone who’s been paying attention has noticed that the Cult in charge of Western society has a peculiar lexicon. They use it to identify each other and cast hexes on their enemies.
Most of these terms come from STEM fields and are filtered through the soft sciences, where Death Cult priests in academia twist their meanings.
What’s interesting about this new one is we’re seeing the Cult hierarchy issuing the liturgical rubric update in real time.
The Cult’s old term for lone wolf attacks was “scripted violence,” which they liked because it included another hex sign popular with the Cult: “violence” which in their parlance means “Heretical statements.”
But it may have verged too close to Alex Jones territory, and they can’t be seen to associate with one of their most hated foes. So the Cult’s priesthood went digging in the STEM-to-social science pipeline.
In its original sense, “stochastic” means “random” In the original bugman, its specific meaning is “well-described by a random probability distribution.”
But all you have to do is scroll down to the Social Sciences entry to see the Cult magic in progress.
Author David Neiwert, who wrote the book Alt-America, told Salon interviewer Chauncey Devega:
Scripted violence is where a person who has a national platform describes the kind of violence that they want to be carried out. He identifies the targets and leaves it up to the listeners to carry out this violence. It is a form of terrorism. It is an act and a social phenomenon where there is an agreement to inflict massive violence on a whole segment of society. Again, this violence is led by people in high-profile positions in the media and the government. They’re the ones who do the scripting, and it is ordinary people who carry it out.
Think of it like Charles Manson and his followers. Manson wrote the script; he didn’t commit any of those murders. He just had his followers carry them out.
It’s significant that Neiwert is one of the guys popularizing the Cult’s new power word, since his interview excerpt indicates he’s illiterate. Ten-to-one his book was ghostwritten.
But it also dispels all doubts that the proliferation of this phrase in this context is the work of a hysterical cargo cult intended to project their own bloodlust onto unbelievers through magic.
All the hallmarks are there:
- Belief in consensual reality that can be molded by words
- Willful ignorance of the fact that they control the government and media so they can play the perpetual underdog
- Extreme cherry picking to portray their enemies’ statistically rare violence as a public safety crisis while memory holing their coreligionists’ frequent rioting and city-burning
This is all just for your reference. Now when you see some bluecheck spew a word salad tweet that includes the word “stochastic” used wildly out of context, you’ll realize Oh, that message has no denotative meaning. It’s just a cultist witch casting a hex.
By the way, if you’re an author and you don’t want your writing to come off as a Remedial English 101 exercise like David Neiwert’s, hire me to edit your work today.