Reading that article, I can't help but wonder if the effects of solitary confinement begin to manifest as a kind of pervasive low-level mental illness after peo

Reading that article, I can't help but wonder if the effects of solitary confinement begin to manifest as a kind of pervasive low-level mental illness after people have no physical, real life social contact for days on end. The plot points of the conspiracy sound like the experience of talking to someone who has been alone in their head long enough that they index on connections they made themselves, and they expect you to share their reference points. The details of these social hallucinations don't matter, it's the fact of them at all, and what might be causing them that is the important piece to me. I've met people seized by stupid ideas, and any attempt to dislodge the idea from the outside will trigger its immune response, so you just smile and nod and change the subject. Having travelled the periphery of evangelical circles, there is an element of that culture where metaphor and belief blur. What secular people might describe using terms from psychology or literary narrative, some evangelicals use a mythopoetic framework for discussing everyday struggles instead. The author references the idea of a "Big Lie," which I see as a fast filter for building a pipeline of people who are susceptible to being unmoored from reality if you just give them some enticement. From this, I think QAnon most resembles a new folk religion of isolated people, which is the effect of their social atomization. It's what you get when you disconnect people from each other and they need to understand the world in stories and create new ties. Viewed that way, it could look less like a single conspiracy theory and more like a modern variation of something like a "Voodoo," or a reactionary "syncretic religion," as described in wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syncretism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syncretism