The Conch: Stop all this glowbabble

Look, I have nothing against faith. It was faith that 70 years ago prompted 76 men to dig a 102m tunnel to try to escape the brutal German Stalag camp. It's faith that fuelled the struggle against apartheid.

But we seem to have descended into glowbabble: an immediate, overwhelming, and inappropriate emotional response to anything that is not positive. South Africans are serial glowbabblers. Their brains vault over reality with what psychologists call an amygdala hijack, a point at which the most unevolved part of our brains - the amygdala - overrules the truth in favour of woo-woo thinking.

Mothers never have dumb children. "He's very bright but he doesn't work." A drunk person is not an alcoholic, he's allergic to alcohol. Women of 50-plus are searching for life partners (one I know is set on a white wedding), because "don't you know, Lin, age is just a number". Fat people never eat too much. A woman rings an astrologer on a talkshow, should I leave my husband? He muses, "Ah, born 1974 May 4, absolutely the right time."

People with serious illnesses are told they brought it on themselves. Others are instructed to "manifest" their desires. The daughter of a friend has been "manifesting" an iPhone for months. These ideas spread like a stain through our lives because the gloweratti are powerful.

Employees of World Design Capital Cape Town 2014 were obliged to see a Dr Yvette de Villiers of lightwise.com who is on their payroll and describes herself as having a PhD in Metaphysical Philosophy (from an online American college). Her web pages mention Quantum Physics Feedback Balancing. It's a smash-and-grab of half-digested science and Hallmark card sentiments.

An ex-employee says, "We were obliged to see Dr De Villiers, who I thought was a medical doctor." I refused, but a meeting was held with her and we each got a pack of wisdom cards. If you were having a problem with someone, say, at the City Council, you were encouraged to bathe that person in white light. A chart on the office wall classified the staff by star signs.

It is seductive to believe this type of thinking is benign. But evidence points elsewhere. When the Synagogue Church of All Nations, Lagos, collapsed, killing dozens of people, it was the immediacy with which the good doctor became a Christian crackpot that was startling; the woo-woo words were crouching in his head. He assured his people that it had been a terrorist attack, absolving himself but not clearing up the matter of why God should want terrorists to blow up the church.

It is this thrashing around in the ground cover - and the tendency to actively refute or discount evidence that challenges a belief - that is scary. When an interviewer asked a believer of Christian healing why a man was not healed, she said, "Jesus just wanted him home."

At one course I attended the lecturer had a chair on stage. "This chair is the problem. You can either walk around it, jump over it, etc." A man piped up from the audience, "My problem is not a chair, it is my wife." Like a proof in mathematics when the first calculations are wrong, all the others will move you further away from the truth.

TS Eliot had a point when he wrote: "Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind/Cannot bear very much reality."

But I doubt he would sanction as an alternative this collision of astrology, angel workshops, past-life regeneration, mindfulness and me-dom. LS