Do you remember Rupert Sheldrake? He’s the English scientist who made a big splash in the anima mundi back in the 1980s with his theory of “morphic resonance,” the simple hypothesis Mother Nature may have a memory. His “heretical” book A New Science of Life was condemned in Science magazine as “the best candidate for burning there has been for many years,” this being long before J.K. Rowling ever got her name in print.
Physical phenomena were mere ingrained habits within Nature’s memory-banks, suggested the rogue biologist. Sheldrake noted that, when chemists labored to create new forms of artificial crystals, making the first sample tended to be extremely hard, but, following this initial successful synthesis, further new examples of the exact same crystalline form bloomed in distant laboratories with no effort at all. Physical laws, it appeared, were not perpetual arrangements, but more akin to customs oft-observed. The more a thing happened, the easier it subsequently became for it to happen again, like ghetto girls getting pregnant.
For Sheldrake, living species were automatically able to transmit their newly-learned biological “habits” like building nests or dams to one another via this same mysterious resonant echo, and humans were no exception. Once one human somewhere had done something novel one day, this feat’s own personal so-called “morphic field,” embedded invisibly within the universe like a Platonic Form of old, grew stronger, enabling other humans henceforth to do the same thing themselves too. As the achievement became ever more common, the relevant morphic field strengthened in automatic correlation, making the goal ever simpler to achieve.
Sheldrake proposed that volunteers tackling the previous day’s newspaper crosswords should be quicker to complete the puzzle, due to the cumulative effect of thousands of other readers already having finished them off the previous evening. Inspired, Rupert’s son sat a school test-paper by doing the last question first before starting at the beginning. Because he reached most of the questions after his classmates had already attempted them, the Sheldrake offspring speculated that it should therefore be morphically easier to answer with full marks.
Sheldrake’s idea may or may not have been true (maybe the more you believe it, the more true it becomes?), but it certainly inspired vast amounts of hatred amongst the skeptical 1980s scientific establishment, which called Rupert mad, bad, and dangerous to read. Besides burning the author’s book, certain of his more rabid critics seemed likely to have spent their days fantasizing about burning the actual author, too—or shooting, strangling, poisoning, and stabbing him.
And then, one day, someone finally did just that. Whilst Sheldrake was delivering a speech in New Mexico in 2008, a lone knifeman rushed up and slashed him with a knife. Rupert survived, but believers in the man’s ideas may have been led to wonder: Was Sheldrake nearly a victim of negative morphic resonance himself here? And, more relevantly in terms of current headlines, was Donald Trump nearly a victim of the very same process at the April 25 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, which was rudely interrupted by a lone wannabe assassin too?
Since entering politics, Trump has been subject to more assassination attempts than the lead in a touring production of Julius Caesar. Everyone remembers him being grazed by a bullet in Pennsylvania in 2024, but you may have forgotten the fool who tried to drive a forklift truck at Donald in 2017, the man who hoped to snatch a cop’s handgun and fire it at a Trump rally in 2016, and the Canadian lady who mailed him a letter laced with ricin in 2020.
The relevant political morphic field did not forget, however, with the Donald’s latest would-be Brutus, Cole “Friendly Federal Assassin” Allen, clearly having absorbed previous attempts upon the President’s life very well indeed. In his deranged manifesto, this one-time “Teacher of the Month” expressed a willingness to kill everyone else at the dinner too, if that’s what it took to waste Trump, “on the basis that most people [there] *chose* to attend a speech by a pedophile, rapist and traitor, and are thus complicit” in his crimes. (It sounds like Allen thought the dinner was actually being given by Bill Clinton here, not Trump.)
But should that tasteless little joke be immediately censored on the grounds that it might one day soon end up triggering a different bullet being launched towards Bill’s brain too, morphic resonance-style? That would be the opinion of the leading Rupert Sheldrake scholar Melania Trump, who condemned the left-wing TV comedian Jimmy Kimmel for quipping, a mere few days before Allen crashed the dinner, that the First Lady possessed “the glow of an expectant widow.”
Mrs. Trump held that, by repeatedly demonizing her husband as someone who deserved to die, smug leftists like Kimmel had made Allen’s attempt on her husband’s life occur for real, constant character assassination being midwife to actual assassination. Once the morphic field which said “Trump must die!” had been birthed in the nation’s mainstream politics and media, it began to grow ever stronger with each subsequent repetition, argued the learned FLOTUS, making more and more nutjobs with guns pop up to take a slug at her husband.
Was Melania right? Surprisingly, “science” says she is—but only when it’s a right-wing nutjob taking a shot at a left-wing politician, never the other way around.
Besides Nature calling for Sheldrake’s book to be burned, another leading scientific periodical, Scientific American, has also run hit-jobs on him down the years, of a kind Rupert himself found unfair and abusive; maybe he could have blamed them for stoking up his own later assassination attempt. This attitude is curious, though, as within a different context, Scientific American does appear to believe in morphic resonance after all, only fancily relabeled as “stochastic terror.”
In 2023, SciAm ran a piece by Bryn Nelson, author of Flush, a book about the science of disgust, in which he bemoaned how a normally useful emotion of the human “behavioral immune system which helps us avoid harm” by stopping toddlers eating sidewalk dog-mess as a free chocolate substitute, had been “weaponized against people” instead, by far-right Trump supporters, not to mention the man himself. Nancy Pelosi’s husband had just been attacked by an imbecile waving a hammer, something Nelson linked to something new called stochastic terrorism, “in which ideologically driven hate speech increases the likelihood that people will violently and unpredictably attack the targets of vicious claims.”
What was odd about this piece in a supposedly wholly unbiased scientific magazine of record was that the only examples of stochastic terrorism listed were of left-wing victims of right-wing insults; Nelson was particularly concerned about drag queens being nuked because of supposedly false exposés of them attempting to sexualize children by visiting schools dressed as giant cartoon prostitutes. But didn’t the left try and perform acts of stochastic terrorism/morphic warfare against their own right-wing opponents in the exact same way, as Melania has just claimed? No, explained Nelson, this silly argument was a form of wholly non-evidential “false equivalence”.
And don’t forget, that’s not simply partisan political opinion here, oh no: that’s actual science. And this comes from the same people who had the nerve to call Rupert Sheldrake a quack.
Figures like Kimmel should be allowed to make jokes about whatever they like in my opinion, up to and including the deaths of prominent politicians. People have been doing that ever since “But apart from that, how was your trip to the theater, Mrs. Lincoln?” Yet there is definitely a very large media imbalance at play here.
The number of times mainstream left-wing media organizations, public intellectuals and Democratic politicians have quite seriously implied Trump is “literally a Nazi”, or welcomed the potential killing of him and his allies, or even their children, is too long to tabulate. As another strong believer in morphic fields, J.D. Vance, wrote after a previous 2024 attempt on Trump’s life, “The central premise of [Democrat campaigns] is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
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By contrast, any comedian or politician who had made a statement—in jest or otherwise—about, say, lynching Barack Obama, would have been immediately lynched himself. The present disparity does not just affect Trump, but all left-wing political hate-figures. Over in the working-class English city of Liverpool, where Britain’s most right-wing PM in living memory was seriously detested, a new play, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, is due to launch next month, described as being “darkly funny” in theater publicity materials. “If the time comes to pull the trigger, which side of history will you be on?” adverts ask. The implied answer is obvious: blast her!
In an interview, the actor playing Maggie’s would-be slayer says he “wouldn’t be surprised if there were cheers” amongst the audience when he tries to kill her, as many lefty locals would love to “dance on that woman’s grave.” Among a long list of trigger warnings, as much emphasis goes towards the fact that the play “includes the use of herbal cigarettes” as it does towards the ex-PM’s potential bullet through the skull. It would be easy to imagine this production being readapted for American audiences to deal with the killing of Donald Trump instead—but certainly not to deal with the killing of Joe Biden, and not only because Joe was clearly already dead when he entered office anyway.
Insults should be allowed to run wild and free—but for both sides of the political aisle equally, in balanced morphic impartiality. Then, hopefully, come the next presidential election, both useless main candidates will end up getting shot dead by lunatics, and everyone can go home happy that America has been joined peacefully together again as one nation united under hatred.
