Why are some people responding to the assassination of Charlie Kirk with the phrase “Nothing ever happens”?

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the very same people who now tweet “Nothing ever happens” in response to the assassination of Charlie Kirk, will be tweeting that they always knew there’d be a civil war if one actually does break out. As the cliché has it, nothing ever happens . . . until it does.

 A not uncommon response among right-wing “very online” people to the vicious assassination of Charlie Kirk has been three simple words: “Nothing ever happens.” On the one hand, this is, perhaps, an attempt to be a contrarian and seem deep and edgy accordingly. Many conservatives are reacting with understandable fury to the murder of the 31-year-old Trump ally and are arguing that this is a “turning point” and even that it is the first shot fired in some kind of civil of war.

But on the other, “Nothing ever happens” appears to reflect a common, evolved psychological bias. As a rule, our psychological biases evolved, in essence, on the Savannah, when we were still living in our evolutionary match. Now that we live in a very different environment — one where we regularly interact with strangers and even with people of different races — this bias may be more of hindrance than a help.

As Pascal Boyer pointed out in his book Religion Explained, we have many evolved cognitive biases. We over-detect causation. Show people dots moving at random on a screen and they will insist that they are moving in some kind of pattern and even that there is a process of causation behind this pattern, such as claiming that the blue dot starts it off, for example. It is adaptive to find patterns in the world such that we can better make sense of and control the world. If we over-detect patterns, then we won’t miss a pattern when there is one. This leads to a bias towards seeing everything as interconnected and, of course, towards conspiracy theories.

Similarly, we are evolved to over-detect agency. If we are in the primeval forest and we hear a sound then, if we wrongly believe it to be a wolf, we have lost nothing. But if we incorrectly assume it to be the wind, when it is in fact a wolf, we may have lost everything. So, it makes sense, it is adaptive, to assume that there is an agent behind events. This is why, when people are under stress and thus highly instinctive, the whole world may feel like an agent and the whole world may suddenly all appear interconnected and to make sense. And this leads us to certain kinds of religious experiences.

The “Nothing ever happens” response is likely to be a similar kind of adaptive bias. If you are right-wing, in the insane Clown World in which we find ourselves, it may be adaptive to be pessimistic in order to manage your own feelings — such can be the crushing nature of disappointment. According to the study “Defensive Mechanism: Harnessing Anxiety as Motivation,” an optimum level of pessimism motivates people to prepare and reduces anxiety about an uncertain world. It results in better academic performance; being able to think more logically.

Another study, “Pessimism, optimism and depressive symptoms,” found that mildly depressed individuals with pessimistic outlooks were better at assessing risks and avoiding unrealistic optimism (and thus crushing disappointment), aiding decision-making in uncertain environments. But, of course, the fact that you feel pessimistic does not mean that your predictions about the future are correct, as they have nothing to do with the nature of the evidence. You may be examining that evidence in a slightly more logical manner than the optimist, but this does not make your gut reaction inherently right. Your reaction, to use internet parlance, is a “cope.”

A second, broader, explanation behind the insistence that “Nothing ever happens” may well be Nomalcy Bias, which is that we tend to disbelieve or minimize warnings of serious threats. Let’s be clear, there will be nothing pleasant about a civil war, except, possibly, in the very long term, if the side we are on wins it. Telling yourself, in such a context, that “Nothing ever happens” will reduce immediate stress. Also, in pre-history, it may have been true that nothing much ever does happen, at least nothing out-of-the-ordinary. Accordingly, this cognitive bias means that we don’t waste energy thinking about or reacting to threats that are probably nothing to really worry about.

Naturally, this cognitive bias can have very serious consequences when something seriously out-of-the-ordinary actually does happen. In 79 AD, Mount Vesuvius erupted, destroying the city of Pompei and most of its inhabitants. The townsfolk ignored the signs, such as intense earthquakes in the build up to the eruption. People continued to bake bread and renovate their homes even as ash began to fall on the city. This is why so many of them were found buried in their houses, having made no attempt to escape. To give a more recent example, in summer 2022, there was a terrible heat wave in the UK. Many people downplayed its seriousness and ignored government warnings (possibly understandable, considering the lies recently told during Covid). The result was houses catching fire and 3000 excess deaths due to heat stroke and related issues.

The cry of “Nothing ever happens” may well, in part, reflect this cognitive bias, a bias which has been adaptive for most of our history. The bias likely explains why sudden changes — such as the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and of the Soviet Union — generally seem to take us by surprise. All of the signs of collapse are there but our reassuring normalcy bias means that we are adapted to not notice them and to not think about them. Then, when it does happen, another cognitive bias hits in, “hindsight bias,” where, in order to feel that your world makes sense and that you are perceptive, you tell yourself that it was all inevitable and even that you knew it was going to happen all along.

We vary in the degree to which we are instinctive. Intelligent people are better able to rise above their cognitive biases, meaning that they are less instinctive. Neurotic people, subject to constant anxiety, are less able to do so, so they may be more instinctive. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the very same people who now tweet “Nothing ever happens” in response to the assassination of Charlie Kirk, will be tweeting that they always knew there’d be a civil war if one actually does break out. As the cliché has it, nothing ever happens . . . until it does.