The psychosis of resemblances

The psychosis of resemblances is the self-reinforcing habit of treating similarity as proof of connection and every fact as a clue to a hidden design. The novel presents it first as a comic method for inventing the Plan, then as a dangerous mental discipline: the men’s deliberate associations train them to believe the pattern they made, while the people who adopt it turn its fiction into an effective reality.

From Coincidence to Conspiracy

The Plan begins as an answer to the desire for a single explanation behind disorder. One formulation imagines a secret society whose worldwide plot is to spread the rumor that a universal plot exists. The paradox exposes how conspiratorial thinking can make even the suspicion of conspiracy self-confirming: the absence of visible evidence may itself be treated as evidence of concealment. The same reasoning offers relief from uncertainty by shifting responsibility for failure onto an external enemy, a tendency the novel connects to the political usefulness of enemies for dictatorships.

The method expands through the rule that no fact should be allowed to remain ordinary. When a minor detail such as Minnie Mouse’s engagement is admitted into the web, the men insist that omitting even one supposedly non-mysterious fact would violate hermetic thought. They then state their governing axiom: the Templars have something to do with everything. The joke is also a practical instruction. Once every detail must disclose a mystery, selection no longer limits interpretation; any fact can be recruited, and nothing can disprove the theory.

How the Game Becomes Belief

At first, the three collaborators recognize that their associations are unwarranted shortcuts. They understand the exercise as a parody of their Diabolicals’ reasoning and can still feel ashamed at the thought of being taken seriously. But the long intervals spent collecting material and repeatedly connecting it in meetings make the operation habitual. The narrator describes a gradual loss of the ability to distinguish likeness from identity and metaphor from reality: pretending to believe begins to resemble believing.

The collaborators do not undergo the change in the same way. The narrator thinks that his daily life with Lia and the baby leaves him least affected; he imagines himself standing outside the emotions he helps manage. Diotallevi, as the narrator later understands, trains himself viscerally to think like a Diabolical, while Belbo identifies with the system more consciously. Their different paths—addiction, corruption, and conversion—show that the Plan is not only a set of propositions. Repetition alters the habits of its makers, and the people inventing the pattern become increasingly vulnerable to it.

Lia’s Test of the Plan

The narrator eventually tells Lia the whole Plan, including its details and Diotallevi’s illness. He presents it as bravura, but her response challenges the standard by which he has been judging it. For her, the Plan is grotesque rather than poetic: its murk, hot air, promises, and contradictions invite insecure readers to find whatever they want in it. She contrasts that deliberate incoherence with the clarity of Homer, arguing that a meaningful story need not conceal a secret or provide a blueprint for action.

Lia’s criticism names the danger of confusing obscurity with depth. People who have been taught to expect an unfathomable God may mistake incoherence for the divine, and may take the far-fetched as a sign of miracle. She therefore calls the Plan a fabricated hair oil: a sham whose persuasive surface exploits the wish to believe. Their disagreement does not end their weeks in the mountains, but it leaves something unresolved. The narrator has been put in a tight corner, yet Lia remains unsure whether she has persuaded him.

The Plan’s Real Effects

The fiction achieves power when its readers supply the belief it lacks. People do not merely accept the nonexistent Plan as real; they identify fragments of their own muddled mythologies as episodes in it, joined by analogy, resemblance, and suspicion. Once they act on that interpretation, the invented scheme has consequences as though it existed. The narrator anticipates that Diabolicals will swarm through the world looking for the map.

The novel links this process to the urge to explain failure through plots. In the example of a market crash, a sequence of individual mistakes produces collective panic, but people lacking confidence may ask who is behind it and who benefits. Guilt or incomprehension encourages the invention of enemy plots; those who construct them may then organize their own plots in imitation. Accusation and imitation reinforce one another, until opponents can appear to confirm the very design attributed to them.

The Secret That Must Stay Empty

The Plan’s ultimate promise is a secret that would dispel frustration or deliver salvation simply by being known. Yet the narrator concludes that a revealed secret disappoints: the sought-after mystery must remain unknown to sustain the search. What persists is not a final piece of information but an endless chain of associations, in which one supposed meaning points onward to another. Initiation becomes the practice of never stopping the interpretation.

This logic clarifies the power of the secret Belbo appears to possess before the Pendulum. The more he refuses to disclose it, and the more he insists that he has none, the more convinced his captors become that it must be genuine. The secret grows in their minds precisely because it remains unavailable. Their search has held them together despite schisms and conflicts; if the secret were revealed, it might prove disappointing, and the search itself would end. The psychosis of resemblances thus reaches its starkest form: a pattern can command belief without a hidden truth at its center, sustained instead by the refusal to let the mystery close.