Many bitcoiners subscribe to the "strong men, bad times" etc. theory, and somehow link this to hateful polarization (and even the prevalence of transgender people - I'm not kidding). I don't fully believe this theory, not even in its basic form, but I wonder if there is some natural phenomenon that is cyclical, maybe with a random component to it, that affects peoples minds. It seems like there is something now and then that just make people crazy and angry at people they previously knew and liked, en masse, because of some perceived thing about them, whether real or not (e.g. witches). I'm thinking of things like: Electromagnetic radiation in some frequency band - though I would think we would have detected that by now. Naturally occurring chemical or microbial pollutants in air or water. Gravity modulations (maybe from Earth's spinning core somehow)- elephants get restless long before there's an earthquake, believed to be because of infrasonic vibrations, and at least some people see ghosts or similar, and/or get a strong uneasy feeling when exposed to infrasound. Some type of radiation we don't know about - wasn't it at your last roundtable that someone had seen dowsing with metal rods work? I have witnessed that myself, too. There simply has to be at least one form of radiation/wave that science doesn't recognize yet.