Home For Fiction – Blog

The title (“Superstitious People and the Meaning of Life”) might come off as hopelessly pompous. Let me assure you that you will not find answers about the meaning of life in this article 😛

First of all, let’s start with the basics: what do we mean by superstitious people? And then we will have to deal with the crux of the matter: why are there superstitious people?

A superstitious person is one who perceives a connection that is non-causal between two events. In simpler terms, a superstition is the belief that event A causes event B, although there is no apparent link between them.

For example, an evident causal connection (a causal link, in other words) is that between accidentally dropping a glass of water, then seeing the floor wet and full of glass shards. Your dropping the glass (event A) has caused the state of the floor (event B). Sometimes a causal link can be more complex, such as in the linkage between thunder and rain. There can be thunder without rain, as there can be rain without thunder. But if there is thunder followed by rain, there is an obvious connection between the two events.

Superstitious People literally Perceive Things that Don’t Exist

Let’s assume that a superstitious individual tells her son: “I saw a black cat on my way home, don’t go out without wearing your lucky charm”.

Let’s focus on the causality between these events. The implication here is:

Seeing a black cat increases the likelihood of suffering an accident (unless one wears a pendant around his neck)

There isn’t anything even remotely serious to suggest an actual linkage between any of these three events. The likelihood for suffering an accident increases by such things as being in an impaired mental state (say, absentminded, stressed, or drunk); by running while holding sharp objects; by crossing the road without looking.

About the only connection you can find between seeing a black cat (or breaking a mirror; or walking under a ladder) and a chance for mishaps is a self-fulfilling prophecy: if you actually believe something bad will happen because it’s Friday the 13th, then you might be so stressed and anxious that you might indeed be careless enough to cause an accident.

What’s Love Meaning Got to Do with It?

Let’s face it, we live in a chaotic world. Even things that seem to make sense, actually don’t. For many people this is intolerable – hence the need to believe in a higher power, destiny, kismet, whatever you wanna call it. “There has to be some meaning behind it all” the scared individual whispers like a mouse. And so, when tragedy strikes, the thought that it was just a random event is simply unacceptable. At this point, the hapless person has two options (assuming s/he is unwilling to categorize it as a random event):

• Find meaning by assigning responsibility to a named entity.
  This usually means either a benevolent (“God works in mysterious ways”) or a malevolent entity (“It’s the Devil’s doing“). The latter is far less often used – I speculate due to unwillingness to assign omnipotent powers to anyone other than God. And so, it’s God who usually gets credit. However, this position quickly becomes unattainable. You’d have to be a real fanatic to see any meaning in an infant-killing God, for instance.
• Find meaning by assigning responsibility to a nameless entity.
  And now we come to superstition which, I remind you, is the tendency to create a non-causal linkage between two events. “Stepping on sidewalk cracks is bad for you”. Well, not really, but if you tripped, fell, and broke your arm the same evening, it’s much easier to blame it on anything than… dumb luck.