I've been thinking about the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, and I do not believe that the distribution of the mentions of any particular discrete concept is uniform throughout cultural space. Nor is the distribution purely random (which is similar, but would allow for random clusters).
I think there really are clusters of "Baader-Meinhofs", where there is a cultural background that was previously seeded with it, and a sort of viral person-to-person transmission taking place over this background, and then when some threshold is reached or some mysterious mental button is triggered, we suddenly notice it. Most of it was there all along, but not all of it.
But I could be wrong.
This song is haunting, although not directly applicable to my personal experience.
There's an interesting semi-parallel in Revelation 7:17 and 8:1:
"...and God shall wipe all tears from their eyes. And when he had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour."
Some years back there were some public comments from famous authors about the Susan in the Narnia books not being present for the Final Battle and what followed. It was framed as bigotry against women and people of average morals.
Neil Gaiman's came in the form of a short story, "The Problem of Susan," which from an excerpt I found is apparently quite vile.
Gaiman has fallen out of public favor as allegations against him have begun to surface.
Two other authors were J. K. Rowling, who ought to know better, and Phillip Pullman, who also writes vile stories, I've been told.
Pastor Douglas Wilson has a lucid, sensitive, and rather long rebuttal to the Problem of Susan; link below.
My own, lesser contribution here, is that C. S. Lewis was a fan of George MacDonald, and MacDonald wrote some vivid portrayals of spiritual devolution. In The Princess and Curdie, Curdie was given the ability to discern which beast a person's moral character was descending into by holding their hand. In ...
