There are things that don’t make any sense, and yet we talk a lot about them, so we over-interpret them. Overinterpretation is a paranoid trait. Let’s say a man makes a vague gesture as he passes me on the street. Let’s say I continue on my way, but after a while I start thinking about that move. What did he want to tell me? Threat or salute? Maybe we met somewhere and I didn’t know him. But wouldn’t it be a man who hated me and warned me not to cross paths with him again? I am now beginning to study her features, and it seems to me that these are those of a subject with an evil face. I unwittingly attribute a perversion that is more the result of my paranoia than of objective issues.
After a while I turned around and started looking for him to ask for clarification. When I see him from afar, I see that the gesture he made to me was made to everyone. He does it even when he doesn’t cross paths with anyone. In short, it is a meaningless nervous tic. But I was about to start a fight because of my habit of over-interpreting what happened. I remember Tzvetan Todorov mentioning this in his book Conquest of America when he portrayed Moctezuma as a victim of the extreme interpretations we are so prone to. Nor would Moctezuma have been defeated by the famous explorer had he not believed that an ancient prophecy had come true with the arrival of Hernán Cortés. During the interpretation process, imagination can play tricks on us.
There are things that mean nothing. But if they become fodder for radio or television talk shows and the “experts” don’t stop hanging around them every day, from morning to night, they can drive us crazy so we can finally perceive meanings or intentions in them. they had nothing to do with reality. This is where the madness starts. In these moments, and because interpretation machines are more abundant than interpretable matter, we experience this danger every day. Most of the time we get angry at things that don’t exist.