The Baader Meinhof Effect

Or is it Bader Mindhop? Imagine a disabled RAF pilot who, rather than applying himself to getting back in a plane, overcomes his disability through Yogic mental training and spiritual discipline, ultimately achieving Qephitzat ha-Derekh, and acquiring the ability to teleport using his mind alone. Were he then able to train others in this siddhi, maybe the War would’ve been brought to an end much sooner. The Bader Mindhop, as it is known, or was to me as a child, was what I imagined Baader Meinhof to be when they began to make themselves known in the early ’70s. They are, coincidentally perhaps, also known as the RAF – the Red Army Faction. Perhaps their ability to teleport psychically would’ve been used to gather intelligence and undertake sabotage and robbery, but the question there is, does one retain one’s siddhis if one becomes morally corrupt? Would that even have been moral corruption or were they heeding a higher ethical call than most?

I think I was probably influenced by ‘The Tomorrow People’ in this opinion. In case you don’t know, ‘The Tomorrow People’ was an ITV children’s series broadcast from 1973 to 1979 and later remade in I think the ’90s. I didn’t watch much of it as we were a decidedly BBC household, but we did read a novelisation in English class around ’79. I get the feeling it was indirectly trying to rip ‘Doctor Who’ off, although it doesn’t actually seem that similar, but it may have been more so back in the day. In the series, Homo superior is beginning to evolve in the form of adolescents who find themselves able to perform the 3 T’s of telekinesis, telepathy and teleportation, also known as “jaunting” after the Alfred Bester novel ‘The Stars My Destination’. It would be very flattering to a teenager of the time to be able to think of themselves as special in that way, and apart from anything else it’s in keeping with the focus on New Age ideas prevalent in youth culture at the time. It also places it in that line leading from Olaf Stapledon via Arthur C Clarke to David Bowie, which I’ve mentioned before on here.

Hence the question forming in my mind right now is this: if one is able to achieve some kind of higher plane of spiritual existence, would that all collapse if one abused any power one had, or are the two somehow compatible in a way we mere human-basics fail to understand? Alternatively, are siddhis actually inevitably associated with spiritual enlightenment or is that a version of the just world fallacy? Qephitzat ha-Derekh, the ability of a rabbi to travel without moving, seems only to occur on a need-to-do basis. One can only achieve it if it accords with the Divine Will. But is this really true? I can easily see that if someone was required for a ritual, or unable to reach home before the sunset that begins the Sabbath, they might find themselves miraculously in the divinely-required location, perhaps having travelled a great distance in less than the expected period of time. The aforementioned Arthur C Clarke once brought up the possibility that if Ha-Shem could be everywhere at once, rather than having to obey the apparent laws of physics and the ultimate speed limit imposed by the velocity of light, maybe we too could avail ourselves of that power, since in Clarketech “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.

During the Cold War, the CIA and KGB both tried to investigate and develop psionic powers but were also said to be unable to do so. Whereas this could just be put down to the plausible likelihood that they don’t exist, another possibility emerges. Maybe they couldn’t do it because they were not acting out of a purehearted motive. Maybe to one who has morally compromised too far, ignored one’s conscience rather more than most, the very laws of physics are different and one has no choice but to abide by a naturalistic view of the Cosmos because that’s how it is for one. That said, if this line of thought is pursued too far I suspect it will lead to victim-blaming.

There are a number of lists of siddhis. The Hatha Yoga Pradipika seems to mention ten, including things like ahimsa and samadhi, and many of them seem to be virtues rather than psychic powers. A number of other sources agree on a list of eight, including laghima, prapti, prakamya, anima, vasitva, mahima and vasitva (I’m not transliterating these strictly because it would make typing too difficult) plus kama-avasayitva or garima. These are respectively, and this is my interpretation, levitation, teleportation, the ability to have whatever one desires, miniaturisation, the ability to control people, enlargement and the ability to control forces of nature, plus overcoming desires or the ability to become infinitely heavy. These sound completely unbelievable on the whole, and we’re warned that they are only powers in a worldly way, and elsewhere there’s the tradition that these should not be used as parlour tricks. The link between virtues and more material siddhis seems to indicate that the ability, for example, to be completely non-violent is as great an achievement as teleportation, and I can believe that. However, the implication is also that both are attainable. I suppose the way I see these, if I do entertain the more startling ones, is that they’re like the ability to lift a heavy weight off one’s child in extremis, and they certainly aren’t the intended destination, if there even is such a thing, of practicing Yoga.

Quite a few years ago, I considered studying the Qabbalah, and it seemed that the first stage was following the Torah perfectly. Since this is a pretty tall order and the fact that it was portrayed as the first step made me wonder what the point of the rest of the Tree of Life even was. I am aware that a distinction is often made between what is divinely required of us and what is virtuous, but if it operates to that extent it just seems like a distraction from doing the right thing.

Oddly, all of this is really a preamble to what I was actually planning to say here. The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, or “Effect” as I called it above, is something I’ve experienced in the past few days. After I wrote Orange I found myself noticing orange the colour and orange the fruit everywhere. This does not of course mean that the Law Of Attraction is bringing me oranges. It means I’m experiencing the Baader-Meinhof Effect. This is a cognitive bias where after noticing something once, one starts to perceive it everywhere, laying one open to the conclusion that its frequency of occurrence has increased. According to Wikipedia, this was made famous by a man in 1994 hearing about the Baader Meinhof Gang for the first time, then coincidentally found it mentioned elsewhere shortly after. I can remember when our first child was on the way, Sarada and I both began to notice that there seemed to be pregnancy everywhere. However, clearly our child was not the first baby ever to be born in history. In the twenty-first (Christian) century, the Baader Meinhof Phenomenon was renamed the “frequency illusion”, possibly because not many people know what the Baader Meinhof Group was any more, although even in 1994 they were probably quite obscure. It’s considered to be a combination of confirmation and selective attention biasses. It’s suggested here that the BME is useful for creative writing as it leads one to focus on confirmatory experiences and pick up little bits of info which can be woven into a story. Presumably this means I could currently benefit from writing a story about oranges, but Jeanette Winterson already kinda did that.

But who were the Baader-Meinhof Group?

Well, back in the day there used to be rather a lot of paramilitary organisations who were sufficiently frustrated by the political process that they decided the only solution was to engage in violent action against the established social order, an idea I’m generally in sympathy with except for the violence, and one of these was the Rote Armee Fraktion. In the late 1960s, the establishment had committed the error of giving baby boomers a higher education in large numbers, and the result was that a lot of middle class people became aware of the flaws in the system and decided to act against it. Ulrike Meinhof started out as a pacifist and an activist in the nuclear disarmament movement. Her pacifism was criticised by the Socialist Students’ League. This was in 1964. In ’68, she left her husband and job and met up with Andreas Baader, who had helped set fire to a department store in Frankfurt-am-Rhein as a protest against the public’s indifference to the genocide in Vietnam, and unlike the other members of the RAF hadn’t been to university. Thus was the Baader-Meinhof Group formed. They were largely seen as a terrorist group, at least outside Germany.

Within West Germany they had popular support among the younger generation. Part of their belief system was that the people who were now in positions of power in the Federal Republic, which tended to be seen as the successor state to the Third Reich as opposed to the DDR, had also been working a couple of decades earlier in the Nazi state, and were therefore seen as culpable. Consequently, all the kidnaps, robberies and the like were seen as justified by a large fraction of the German population and many of them said they’d help hide gang members. This situation is considerably different to other Western countries with similar groups at the time. After a considerable police operation, the first generation of the RAF were arrested and brought to trial. One of their judges was, unsurprisingly, an ex-Nazi party member. The RAF itself was anti-imperialist and saw itself as in solidarity with the people of the South.

That, then, is the actual Baader Meinhof group, which didn’t wish to go by that name and after Baader’s and Meinhof’s arrests probably shouldn’t’ve been called that anyway. They were, so far as I can tell, well-educated middle class individuals on the whole, though not entirely, who were fighting on behalf of a cause without actually being directly oppressed, and therefore questions regarding the justification of their violence seem justifiable to me. But in any case, this post isn’t about them but the effect named after them.

In statistics there’s a division between sensitive and specific tests. Sensitive tests are likely to detect when something is so, but will also sometimes falsely report that it is when it isn’t. Specific ones do the opposite: they are unlikely to report something is there when it isn’t but may miss it when it is. I have a tendency to be specific rather than sensitive in my thought, which is part of what makes my thinking style depressive and means I often miss opportunities because I can’t perceive them. However, this also means I’m relatively safe from imagining something is there when it isn’t, and you may wish to consider the fact that I’m theist in that setting. It means I’m unlikely to develop paranoia, which is supposed to be called something else nowadays.

Now imagine someone is diagnosable as paranoid or schizophrenic. If they experience the BME, if it’s about the wrong thing, that may feed their delusion, or they may feel it’s significant and become fixated on it. Almost everyone’s brain does it, but for some people the fact that their brain does it, interacting with their learned experience or the tendencies they already have in their thought, can make it problematic. It can also be problematic in the context of continuing professional development. If you’re a professional and you go on a course, when you come back off it you may be more likely to see the things you learnt about when they aren’t really there. You might also be careful to guard against that and end up missing it when it is there.

It’s also a problem in legal testimony. For instance, someone can become convinced that a suspect is innocent or guilty and develop the appropriate confirmation bias, and that could be a detective, barrister, juror or witness.

Finally, it illustrates how the brain is substantially a filter. Before I wrote ‘Orange’, I’m sure I encountered just as much orangeness and oranges as I’ve noticed since I published it. Today I noticed the flag of the Dutch Royal Family and realised that Dutch soccer strip was also orange. But what am I not noticing now which I will in a few months’ time when, say, a rope swing or lollipop suddenly becomes significant to me? It seems right now very hard to believe that I was encountering so many orangenesses without noticing them up until a few days ago, but obviously I was. I believe the brain is a filter in other ways too, but this has really brought home to me how startling and overwhelming sensory impressions and experiences could be if one allows it. I do know I make too many associations though.