Why Are People So Weird? Steps Toward Understanding Humans and Their Societies Using Fantasy Bubble Theory, Part 1
Kim Griest: January 2022
1. Introduction
Texas elects a person to its state board of education, who says President Barak Obama is a drug addicted homosexual prostitute. Roughly half of Americans don’t believe in the well proven theories of evolution and global warming. With very strong public support, the USA killed millions of Vietnamese and Iraqis for no apparent reason. People actually think it matters which football team wins the superbowl. For hundreds of years, Americans strongly supported slavery, child labor, and the beating of wives, but now they don’t support any of these things. Family gatherings degenerate into political yelling matches even though the family members clearly love one another. How can one understand these seemingly completely irrational behaviors and beliefs? Fantasy Bubble Theory (FBT) shows us how and why such strange behaviors and beliefs become acceptable and almost unavoidable. FBT shows us that beliefs such as those above naturally arise in human minds and human society, and also tells us what we can do to try and make more rational beliefs more common. In the context of FBT these solutions are easy to understand, but not so easy to implement. But first we need to understand the problem. To become free, one must first accept that one is in prison, and second, to study the cage in some detail.
The first thing we need is an understanding of how and why human minds come to believe things that are not consistent with reality or stated moral principles. I call this Fantasy Bubble Theory (FBT), though the basic ideas here have been discussed often before under many different names.
Then we need to understand some basic facts of survival including the food chain, which is a main organizing principle of all life forms, and gives rise to various social structures in human societies. I speculate on how evolution theory, the discovery of agriculture, plus the food chain gave rise to a Power Instability mechanism that explains the most common social structure that humans have used over the past 10,000 years: monarchy/dictatorship/patriarchy.
Fantasy Bubble Theory, along with the Power Instability, are the basic ingredients needed to understand most of the seemingly weird behavior, societies, and beliefs of humans. For example, I discuss politics, culture, economics, and religion.
I also discuss solutions to the problems above, and how to make a better society and a happier life.
In the next Section (2), we give the basic operating principles of Fantasy Bubble Theory, including why they are necessary for human society. In Section 3, we give several simple examples of Fantasy Bubble Theory, explaining why people support sports teams, why we have heroes, why slavery was once acceptable but now is not, and an example of Thanksgiving with the family. In Section 4, we return to the theory, discussing the importance and relevance of the Food Chain. In Section 5 we continue with the theory explaining the Power Instability and why humans tend to organize themselves as patriarchies. Finally in Section 6, we explain how two important human inventions: science and democracy, can counter the tendencies previously discussed: science can be used to improve defective Fantasy Bubbles, and democracy can be used to forcefully redistribute power to prevent patriarchal society organization.
2. Fantasy Bubble Theory
We all live inside Fantasy Bubbles (FBs). These are really just habits of thinking or stories that we use to organize our sensory inputs and decide how to behave in the world. When faced with any sensory input we interpret it using our habits of thoughts. We cannot see anything clearly because of this.
Some individuals cannot hear facts about global warming or evolution because of their fantasy bubbles. Racists really believe certain skin colors or nationalities are associated with inferior humans.
Fantasy bubbles are basically invisible from the inside. You can see another person’s fantasy bubble, especially when it is very different from your own. But it is difficult to believe that you yourself have a distorted view of reality. Pretty much everyone thinks they are a good person and thinks they act in good and reasonable ways. This includes political leaders such as Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, or the American generals who ordered the killing of Native Americans; they almost certainly believed they were doing something good as they committed atrocities.
When two people have similar fantasy bubbles the fantasy bubbles easily merge into one larger bubble encompassing both people. People tend to like this, and since their habits of thoughts are similar, they tend to agree on things. This is the human herd nature. We group with people who have similar fantasy bubbles. In fact, the drive to harmonize fantasy bubbles is one of the most powerful human needs, determining much of human actions and culture.
Fantasy bubbles (FBs) are not fragile like soap bubbles. They are more like transparent protective shields and are nearly indestructible. They come in various degrees of flexibility. If the FB story differs from experienced facts, the bubble can distort a little, but will usually keep the basic world view intact.
Everyone thinks their world view is correct. This is a result of their FB. We have a drive for consistency in our ideas and thoughts because the world is consistent with itself. A model of the world (fantasy bubble) works better the closer it matches the actual world. Severe inconsistencies with facts can cause a person trouble. Someone whose bubble says the CIA is trying to kill them when they go outside has trouble doing well in this society. But the necessity of living in a FB means that inconvenient facts can be excluded from the FB. And convenient “facts” can easily be fabricated, e.g. Jews or Blacks are evil, the only good Indian is a dead Indian, tobacco does not cause cancer, humans are not causing global warming, etc.
It might be hard to accept that we all live in a delusion created by our fantasy bubble, but just think back to life in human society several hundred years ago. Slavery was accepted then; the Bible condones it and people throughout Europe and U.S. believed that Black Africans were not really human and so could be forced to be slaves with no moral consequences. The Europeans believed they were good people and lived in a fantasy story about themselves and the world that supported whites owning Africans. This bubble allowed conquering and committing genocide against the Native Americans and much of the less technologically sophisticated world. In those days, girls were not allowed to read and females were the possessions of the males. The fantasy bubble at that time was a story that women were incapable of being doctors, of voting, or holding any positions of power in the world. Pretty much everyone agreed with these stories. We now know that these ideas were false and complete fantasy. Humans also believed that blood-letting cured diseases and that the Sun orbited the Earth. The fantasy bubbles of the past are easy for us to see as such. So why is it hard to accept the societal fantasy bubbles of today? Does the military, the police, the media, and the corporations actually serve the average person or just the very wealthy? The answers to these questions are obvious but just as most people from several hundred years ago couldn’t see that Blacks and women were equally as human as white, male, property owners, most people today can’t see the equally obvious societal fantasy bubbles they live in today.
Note, that I am not saying that fantasy bubble theory explains all of the behavior of humans and their societies. There is a mountain of work in psychology, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, theology, etc. making models of humans and their society. Workers such as Maslow and Rosenberg have made exhaustive lists of human motivations, and societies in general are very complicated. In particular the “higher” human motivations such as self-actualization, transcendence, beauty, oneness with nature, freedom, and creativity are not obviously part of the simple theory I present here in this introduction. Also, many elements of fantasy bubble theory already exist in the literature of these fields, so it is not really new. I add fantasy bubble theory to these other theories because I’ve found it to be a useful way of organizing and understanding many of the weird things humans and their societies do.
2a. Why Fantasy Bubbles Are Necessary
Why do we have fantasy bubbles? Because our minds are simply not capable of accurately modeling the world. We have to simplify and approximate, that is, make up a story about the world. Each human being has a few pounds of meat inside their head with a few billion neurons trying to model the entire outside Universe. The Universe is much too complicated to allow a perfect model, or even a good model. It is not surprising to us that a dog or a snail can’t understand how electricity works. Humans’ brains are somewhat more complicated, but still have severe limitations that we are only dimly aware of. In general, our minds have only a few capabilities, and our entire world model must be made from these building blocks. Some fundamental building blocks include: 1) The story (i.e. causality): this causes that, which in turn causes something else. Such a remembered chain of events is a story and stories form the basis of all human reasoning and modeling. 2) Isolation of features: The world can be broken into discrete concepts: body, mind, tree, sky, country, race, etc. Then these pieces can be sewn together in a story. 3) Comparison: items of the same type can be compared for size, age, color, etc. Basically we have only the simplest a>b>c comparison (along with transitivity, etc.). To compare things we have to put then into the same category (i.e. use item 2 above). There are certainly other building blocks of our fantasy bubbles, but you get the idea. Thus, FBs are built entirely of thoughts, emotions, etc. which cannot possibly be completely correct.
These few building blocks are not sufficient to model the world, so all FBs are only approximate and therefore MUST be wrong in some ways. An obvious and incontrovertible example is the theory of quantum mechanics (QM), one of the most successful scientific theories of all time. In QM a single electron can be in two places simultaneously. No human can understand this intuitively. Things are either here or there. But QM says things are not what the world is made of; QM says the world is made of wave functions, which are in some sense the square root of a probability function. To “understand” QM one must use mathematics. The math that describes QM is not quantum mechanical; it is just symbols written on paper that are manipulated using very simple rules; to make a quantum prediction one writes a single symbol for each electron, then solves the equations mechanistically by rearranging the symbols using classical rules. While the manipulation of the symbols for the quantum wave functions is classical, the meaning is not. Thus we humans can accurately model the world using QM even without an intuitive understanding of it, and thereby create quantum devices such as lasers, superconductors, etc. The process of science has led humans to several realities that are beyond our direct, intuitive, brain-based understanding. Because of this, it seems reasonable that there are many other aspects of the world we live in that humans have difficultly modeling. What we do in these cases is use an approximate model. That approximate model is what I am calling a fantasy bubble. To paraphrase Murial Ruksyser, the world is not made of atoms, it is made of stories.
Now it should be obvious that some fantasy bubbles are better than others. A model of the world that is a better approximation will allow more accurate predictions of what is coming in the future. If one’s FB did not include the story that it will become cold in the winter, then there would be no storage of food or fuel for the future. Such a person or society would have trouble surviving, and evolution would eventually remove them from the gene pool. Likewise, FBs that more accurately predict the behaviors of the physical world and of other people are very useful. The mathematical theory of QM is part of the collective human fantasy bubble now and allowed the invention of the laser, etc. So, while it is true that all fantasy bubbles are false in some respects, it is also true that some FBs are more useful than others. Thus we turn to understanding what creates and modifies our FBs, and how they interact with each other.
2b. Operating Principles of Fantasy Bubbles
1.Everyone operates within a Fantasy Bubble (FB) and interprets the world through the distortion caused by their FB. One cannot interact with the world and with other people in the world free of one’s FB. Thus to understand why people act the way they do it is crucial to understand their FBs. A FB is simply a set of stories (thought patterns) that describe the world, one’s self, and one’s relationship to both.
2.FBs are not delicate bubbles that easily pop, but are very tough, transparent, protective shields that are difficult and even painful to change. They can be changed, but it takes the right environment or extreme effort to do so. Usually a person’s FB includes the story that they themselves are a good person and that what they do is good. This belief is somewhat independent of an objective description of their behavior.
3.People are much more comfortable when they interact with people who have FBs similar to their own. The more similar the FBs, the more comfortable, and the less similar, the less comfortable. Interaction with someone with a very different FB causes distress and can actually be painful.
4.When dissimilar FBs interact (e.g. you are talking with someone with very different political opinions) there is a strong force that wants to make the FBs more similar. This is one of the main forces that drives much of human social interaction and human society. There are several ways this can happen as discussed below.
4a. Change your fantasy bubble to agree with others. This is difficult because of Operating Principle 2. It is also fairly rare. It happens among scientists when the one scientist presents strong evidence that is more supportive of their FB (scientific theory). It also happens when many people you live among have a similar FB that differs from yours.
4b. Try to change the other’s FB to agree with yours. This is also difficult. It happens among scientists and scientifically minded people when your evidence strongly supports your story. It happens when many people share your FB and the other person is somewhat isolated from people with similar FBs.
4c. Place the person you disagree with into an “out-group”. A very common fantasy bubble story is the existence of in-groups and out-groups. You and your family, friends, sports teams, and social groups are members of your in-group. These are people you respect and trust and mainly treat well. Because of FB Operating Principle 3 above, the in-group people have large overlaps in their FB stories. One of the easiest modification to one’s FB, is to place certain other people (or objects) into an out-group, resulting in you not caring so much about what they think or what happens to them. This reduces the discomfort caused by the fact that their FB differs from yours. The FB story about out-group people typically is that they are less worthy of respect, somewhat inferior, or even evil. In the later case, your normal moral principles and actions are not necessary for out-group people or objects. Many, if not most, of the evils done by humans to other humans can be understood as being done by in-group people to out-group people.
3. Understanding Why People Are So Weird: Simple Examples of Fantasy Bubble Theory
Before turning to more theory we give several simple examples of understanding humans and their societies using FB theory.
3a. Support for Sports Teams
Many people really believe it is important that their sports team wins the championship. They get upset when their team loses and get angry at the opposing team and at the fans of the opposing team. We can understand these beliefs and behaviors using Fantasy Bubble Theory. Hard core sport fans have created a FB where their team is superior and it is very important that their team win. The FB they live in typically also says that those who support their team are members of an in-group and those that support the opposing team are an out-group. This FB creates a lack of empathy for the opposition team and its supporters and will result in strong emotions when the story of the FB proves false (e.g. their team loses). When their team loses, they think of (often false) reasons why their team lost, struggling to preserve a FB that is in contradiction with evidence. At times, fans of competing teams even get physically violent with each other.
3b. Heroes of the Past
Americans believed that Christopher Columbus was a great man for hundreds of years, even though all the best scholarship on the subject (including from his own journals) show that he committed genocide.
The colonial fantasy bubble was that Europeans were superior people whose destiny was to conquer and oversee the world. Thus Europeans were the in-group and the natives were the out-group and therefore not really human. Even though evidence showed that those FBs were false, almost all Europeans had these ideas as part of their FBs because it was so prevalent. Those Europeans who tried to correct the errors (e.g. the Quakers) were ignored or ostracized. In the late 20thcentury society started to allow the story that Columbus committed genocide and that Native Americans were people who deserved respect, i.e. not part of an out-group. Gradually society’s FB came to be a closer approximation to the historical truth and now it is acceptable to say Columbus committed genocide (though some groups of people in America still have the old FB about Columbus and the Native Americans).
3c. Slavery
Looking back at history, how can we understand that the institution of human slavery was accepted by most people throughout most of history, yet, from today’s point of view slavery is viewed as purely evil? Fantasy Bubble Theory explains this easily. Slaves were almost always taken from members of an out-group. The Hebrew Bible explicitly condones taking slaves from conquered peoples, which, almost by definition, would be members of an out-group and therefore not deserving of respect or basic human rights. Of course slave owners were very wealthy people who could use their influence over society to enforce the FB that slavery was acceptable and even good. After the U.S. civil war, slavery was ended and the strong financial motivation for the story that slavery was good also ended. Thus even in the American South, there was room for the FB to change to the obviously correct belief that African-Americans are people who deserve to be respected and have human rights. The resilience of FBs and the difficulty of changing them (FB Operating Principle 2) explains why It took generations for the current FB that African-Americans deserve respect to become dominant, and also why there are still some racists who continue to live in the old FB.
3d. Thanksgiving with the Family
Suppose a family gets together every Thanksgiving for a nice meal and visiting with relatives. Everyone enjoys each other’s company and catching up on family news. But at some point politics comes up and suddenly the liberals/Democrats and the conservatives/Republican/Libertarians are arguing loudly. The whole day seems about to be ruined as emotions continue to rise. Why are these people, who clearly love each other and care deeply about each other, suddenly so angry with each other?
Fantasy Bubble Theory explains this: The two groups live in different and incompatible fantasy bubbles (FBs).
The liberals/Democrats spend their year with other liberals and so live within a fantasy bubble in which the environment is important, women should have control over their own reproduction, taxes should serve the common good and not just the wealthy, climate change and evolution are real and well established science, etc. Since the people the liberals spend their time with agree, there is a similarity of FBs among all the liberals at Thanksgiving, and so it is comfortable for them to interact and talk politics with the other liberals.
On the other hand the conservatives/Republicans/Libertarians live inside a different fantasy bubble and spend their time with people who have similar FBs. Spending time of course includes TV, social media, etc. where specific FBs are strongly reinforced. Thus the conservatives think government environmental regulations hurt businesses, abortion is murder, taxes are too high, wealthy people deserve their wealth, climate change and evolution are myths perpetrated by dishonest scientists, etc.
When these two groups of people interact, their FBs conflict and the differences between these FBs cause discomfort for everyone who is paying attention (FB Operating Principle 3). Then FB Operating Principle 4 comes into play as each person tries to change the FBs that differ from their own. Sometimes, due to love, a liberal may accept a conservative FB story, or a conservative accept a liberal FB story, and this will often reduce the conflict and allow the family gathering to return to peace. However, many times this does not happen. Even worse, the in-group/out-group dynamic may have been operating during the year, causing liberals to have the story that conservatives are the cause of many problems and therefore are not really deserving of respect, and similarly the conservative’s FBs may tell them that the liberals are the source of their problems and not deserving of respect. This kind of FB story often leads to war among nations, and at Thanksgiving can lead to a terrible time being had by all.
3e. What can be done about fantasy bubble differences?
What can be done about the problems discussed above? It is not easy, since FBs are invisible to those who live inside them and very resistant to change (FB Operating Principle 2). So, first people must accept that they have a FB which is preventing them from seeing the other’s story. One can, using logic and empathy, explore another’s FB. By delineating the stories that make-up the other’s FB, one can find the source of the discomfort. One can “agree to disagree”, putting the other into a “partial out-group”, where one cares less about their opinion, but also tries to keep some respect/love for them.
Note, that accepting that someone has a different FB than you, does not mean accepting that their FB is equally good. Some FBs are clearly superior to others. For example, a Flat-earther who thinks the Apollo moon landings were faked clearly needs to change their FB. Making that change, however, will not be easy. Even more difficult to change are FBs that are not fact based, but are based upon perceived moral principles. For example, a racist white supremacist whose FB contains the story that African-Americans are an inferior sort of person clearly needs to change their FB, but in the not too distant past, such racist views were very common, making very strong FBs. However, now-a-days very few people admit to having such views. Society’s current FB, as enforced by TV, media, etc. has strongly pressured most people into having FBs that accept that all humans are basically the same and that racism is not acceptable. Currently most racists deny they are racists since society’s FB says racists are bad, and no one wants to think they are bad. Still remnants of those strong FBs of the past persist in many people.
Fantasy Bubble Theory operates at the level of individuals and family groups, but it also operates on the scale of large groups of people, such as religions, nations, cultures, and society as a whole. Before discussing these and other examples, there are two more important concepts to consider: The food chain and the power instability.
4. The Food Chain: Essential for Survival, but Brutal
To understand life on earth, one of the most important concepts is the food chain, also known as the food web. All living beings need energy to run their programs. We will call that needed energy their food. They also need to reproduce, which in most cases involves sex. So food and sex are the two most important ingredients of life, and it is not surprising that these things play outsized roles in the lives of pretty much all living beings.
The food chain is one of the most important and under-appreciated aspects of life. At the most basic level life consists of an individual that gets energy from somewhere outside itself and then uses that energy to run its “program”. This “program” is basically to survive and reproduce, but also includes everything that any living being is doing; for example, all of a given human’s activity is its “program”.
So, plants, at the base of the food chain, get energy from the Sun and through photosynthesis they turn sunlight (along with water, CO2, and minerals) into carbohydrates and cellulose, which are used to run their programs, that is to grow, build their bodies, and reproduce. The carbohydrates store chemical energy, and the plant bodies store carbon and other minerals, so animals eat plants in order to obtain that energy and those minerals and to run their programs (again to grow, move about, reproduce, etc.). Animals higher up the food chain, hunt and eat other animals to obtain the energy, minerals, and proteins they use to run their programs in turn. Mosquitoes suck the blood of mammals to get the energy to lay their eggs. Thus all living beings obtain the energy and materials to live on from outside themselves, and we call this process “eating”.
The idea can be extended to human beings. Humans certainly eat food to get energy to run their programs. They might find or grow plants or hunt animals, like other animals do. But in modern society they more likely have a job which gives them money which, in turn, is used to purchase those plants and animals for eating. Thus, money is a form of energy, and people getting money from other people can be said to be part of the food chain. Note humans also eat in order to grow and reproduce, but typically include many other activities in their “program”. For example acquiring stuff, gathering power, fame, wealth, status, etc.
The food chain is thus the basis for life and it controls who eats whom. In some sense the food chain should be considered “sacred”, since without it all life would cease. One doesn’t complain when a lion eats a deer, or when a bunny eats some grass, though in both cases eating involves killing another life form. The food chain is about killing. People like to put morality into killing and causing suffering for others, but somehow anything involved in the food chain is exempt from this morality. In this sense actions that are part of the food chain are “sacred”. One cannot understand life without accepting this brutality. Of course, we all do accept it at some level. When a lion kills a deer or a big fish eats a small fish, we may not want to watch, but we accept it. Thus the food chain must be respected.
In this way of looking at the food chain, humans trying to get money from other humans is the food chain in action. Money is not food, but is used to get food, and more importantly it is the energy needed to run each human’s “program”.
For most plants and animals the “program” run using the energy obtained from outside is set by their DNA. I guess the same is true for humans, but certainly there is a huge variety in the “programs” humans run. Grow, move around, eat, and reproduce suffices for many animals, but humans also seem to want to increase their power over other humans and the environment. They want fame and status among other humans. And they want wealth in amounts far more than they can really use. I guess other “pack” animals, such as wolves, bison, or crows also have “increasing status” as part of their programs, e.g. becoming the alpha member of a wolf pack.
In this way of looking at it, when a thief steals your money, it is part of the food chain. The thief is above you on the food chain, and you are the thief’s “food source”. The entire complex relation of economics in society can be viewed as part of the human food chain. This way of looking at things is helpful, since when a salesman is trying to get you to buy insurance or solar energy panels, you can realize that he is looking at you as a “food source”, and take appropriate action. When a deer sees a lion coming after it, it knows what to do: run like crazy. But much of what happens in human society is based upon deception, so the salesman tries to pretend that they are your friend, or the advertisement tries to make you think you will be happier if you give your money to the company. When you see the salesman and the advertisement as entities above you on the food chain, you know what to do. Run like crazy!
The food chain idea helps one understand human society and one’s place in it. Of course, animals like wolves hunt together in packs and then share the food they kill. Humans also do this. So it is not the case that all human actions are predator/prey relationships. But many are!
Given this, what should we think about a person who robs another person for their money? A person taking money from another is just getting energy to run their program, so in that sense it is part of that person’s food chain. But unlike a lion hunting a deer, a person usually has several choices on how to get the money to run their program, and also has choices about what program to run. Society creates rules (aka collective fantasy bubbles) about what energy a person is allowed to take. It is ok to take remuneration for working at a job, inheriting from a parent, or winning the lottery, but it is not ok to take money by robbing, counterfeiting, etc.
The essence of these modern “eating” rules seems to be to minimize suffering to the other humans. In the past it was ok to get money through slavery, war, etc., but luckily, now most believe these parts of the food chain are evil. Of course, some suffering is necessary; it takes work to grow food to eat, or to do a job you don’t like, so it is always a judgment call as to what means of obtaining the energy and minerals to run your program are acceptable. It is also a judgment call as to what “programs” are acceptable.
So, morality enters the food chain when there are choices or options on how to obtain the necessary energy. Cats must eat meat or they will suffer, so there is no option there, but humans are omnivores and have a choice. Thus many believe that eating plants rather than animals is morally superior. This reduces suffering, one of the main moral guidelines. But others believe differently; for instance that humans have always eaten meat and therefore should be grouped with mosquitoes and lions that cannot survive without getting energy from other animal’s flesh or blood.
Status in the Social Hierarchy
A main part of the “human program” aka “human food chain” is trying to obtain status in the social hierarchy. This is the human equivalent of bison or wolves fighting to be the alpha in a herd or pack.
Humans use all sorts of ways to move up the social hierarchy. The top of the hierarchy is the emperor or monarch or dictator or president or CEO, etc. depending on the organization under consideration. For almost all of the past 10,000 years (since the invention of agriculture and animal herding) the basic human power structure has been a patriarchy, with a single man at the top, and a group of nobles/advisors/board members below him, and some form of military/police entity to ensure continued power of the patriarch.
Why do humans organize themselves this way? How do these patriarchies come about and how are they then maintained? Fantasy Bubble Theory can explain it, but we need one more topic first: the power instability.
5. The Power Instability
It is important to recognize the power instability as a primary organizing principle in human societies. In any group of humans, some will have more power and wealth than others, and almost always they will use that power and wealth to maintain and gather more power and wealth. The original imbalance in power can come about in several ways: differences in physical, mental, or societal abilities, parentage, hard work, chance, etc. One might hope that those with more power would share it with others, but experience shows that humans with more power and wealth almost always want to keep that extra power and wealth and also to increase it. This desire seems to be a basic part of human nature, probably coming from our human pack nature operating in service of the food chain. Even if not every human has the desire for more power and wealth, as long as a few do and are willing to work hard to acquire it, then those who want it will end up with more.
Thus any excess of power and wealth, even if originally small, can be used to get more power and wealth, and then that extra power can be used to get even more. This continues until something stops it. If nothing stops it then eventually all the power and wealth ends up in the control of just one (or a few) humans in the group. We call that person the tribal chief, the warlord, the gang leader, the duke, the king, the dictator, the oligarch, the monarch, the communist party chairman, the CEO of the corporation, the president, etc. In science, this type of runaway situation is quite common and is called an exponential instability. For example, think of a pencil delicately balanced on its tip. An initially small imbalance is amplified into a larger imbalance, which causes even more imbalance, eventually reaching some end state, in this case the pencil falling over onto its side. In humans, I called this process, where an initial small difference in power/wealth becomes ever larger, the Power Instability. This tendency seems to always be present in a group of people and usually results in a hierarchical power structure in that group.
History shows that this hierarchical power/money structure is extremely common throughout human history, and it is quite stable. Anyone attempting to redistribute the money or power can usually be stopped by the superior money and power of the leader. However, even within such a power hierarchy the power instability is still operating. One king cannot be everywhere at all times and so must delegate authority to helpers. If these helpers have the chance they will try and take the power from the king. And these helpers must also delegate some of their power to nobility lower in the hierarchy, and so on. Thus assassination of kings, courtly drama, etc. is very common throughout history. Kings and nobility, of course, know this and try all sorts of ways to stop this and to keep their power. Fantasy bubbles have been a major player in this strategy throughout history. If the FBs of the people lower down in the hierarchy contain the belief that the king should be in power, they are more likely to resist their own belief in equality and support the king. Thus loyalty is an important part of many fantasy bubbles. In addition, if they think the king’s helpers and the nobility are somehow superior humans, they will again resist the natural power instability tendencies that make them want to take power away from the nobility.
Thus throughout human history we find that the main stories told in most societies are of the worthiness of kings and the nobility and the need to be loyal to them. The story the king would most like to have in the fantasy bubbles of his subjects is that he is divine. Thus the pharaohs of Ancient Egypt, the Mayan Kings, Gilgamesh in Sumeria, Rama and Krishna of the Hindus, were all considered divine beings. Next best would be a belief that the king that was divinely appointed by God, e.g. King David in the Hebrew Bible, King Author, Charlemagne, Louis XVII of France, and most kings throughout history, even through modern times. If society’s fantasy bubble says the king is God or is appointed by God, there is less chance someone will try and topple him. So nobility, throughout human history, worked very hard to create stories about how their “noble blood” was somehow superior. Even today, these stories are extremely popular in fiction, where certain bloodlines give a person special properties, i.e. make them a special in-group. Thus for thousands of years most societies demanded fantasy bubbles that included the story of the superiority of the king and the nobility. Given how difficult it is to change FBs, it is not surprising to see that such beliefs are still common today even though democracy has replaced simplistic patriarchy in many nations. It is also not surprising that many people, even in democracies, actually believe that certain people are superior.
Note that the power instability also operates on levels below the nation state. In any group, a small initial power difference will be magnified as the more powerful individuals use their power to increase their power. One can see this operating in almost any group of people, from teams at work, church groups, sports teams, non-profit organizations, etc.
6. Democracy and Science to the Rescue
The discussion of the near inevitability of patriarchal power structures due to the power instability and the food chain discussed above might leave one feeling discouraged. But humans have come up with possible solutions to both this problem and to the problem of bad fantasy bubbles in general. The main solution to the power instability is democracy, where societies periodically remove the power of the leader by force, returning it to the people via elections, who then pick a new leader. And the fundamental problem of horrible fantasy bubbles created by the food chain and power instability can be solved using the human invention of science. In science, fantasy bubbles (aka scientific theories) are compared with factual evidence and rejected when found lacking. Thus over time science causes society’s fantasy bubble to become a better and better approximation of reality.
6a. Science: How To Improve Fantasy Bubbles
Science is one of the most amazing human inventions of the past thousand years. Science is a method which can force the collective fantasy bubble into closer agreement with reality. Recall (FB Operating Principle 4) that there is an intrinsic psychological force in humans to coalesce their individual fantasy bubbles into a semi-coherent group FB. We discussed earlier that these collective FB are what we call religions, philosophies, and cultural norms. The variety of beliefs that human societies are capable of is truly amazing. History shows us that societies have many ways of enforcing this coalescence of FBs, from shaming, loss of status, banishment, laws, and even violence against non-believers.
As discussed, the collective FB gives rise to human society and the set of commonly accepted beliefs each society has. It is nearly impossible for an individual in a society to strongly contradict the collective FB. However, science has shown many times that it can contradict and, over time, shift the collective FB, even in the face of extreme opposition.
In science, a hypothesis is formed to explain some phenomena which happen repeatedly in the world. This hypothesis is called a “scientific theory”, aka a fantasy bubble. Then when the phenomena happen again, the prediction of the theory is compared to the actual measured evidence (aka facts). Then, if the facts disagree with the theory, the theory is said to be “proved false”, and must be rejected. That is, the hypothesis, aka FB, must be changed, and a new, modified theory proposed. When the phenomena happen yet again, yet again a comparison is made and yet again the FB is changed if there is disagreement. This cycle continues until the facts match the theory. This scientific theory then is NOT disproved and joins the body of knowledge called “science”. Note that a scientific theory can never be proved true, it can only not be disproved. This set of theories makes up the fantasy bubble of the scientists, and according to the scientists, is always subject to change if facts arise that don’t match the theory.
The method above of creating a scientific fantasy bubble is not written into law anywhere; the people contributing to the scientific endeavor just all “buy into” it, that is, live within a FB that includes the story above. The society of scientists hold the scientific procedure very dear and rejects anyone who doesn’t follow it. If a scientist tries to keep his theory, by say, distorting a few measurements, that scientist is publically shamed and will never again be trusted. Scientists live in fear of making a mistake and being accused of faking or distorting data. This strong scientist fantasy bubble is what holds the whole subject of science together. To publish a scientific result, other scientists must first check the work for distortions or dishonesty. It is a kind of democracy where all the scientists collectively ensure that the basic scientific method (FB) is obeyed. There is no central authority, though individuals who are successful in creating accurate scientific theories are held in greater regard and their opinions carry more weight.
The value of the scientific FB is that, once created, it will be a better approximation of reality than any other FB. No amount of argument, money, or force will be able to create a better FB. So, as long as the scientific community holds onto its values, the scientific FB will eventually win. This is true even in the face of strong opposition from powerful people and when the new scientific FB contradicts the current society FB.
Classic cases of this include the heliocentric astronomical system which went directly against the geocentric fantasy bubble of the time. The power holders of the day, including the main religious institutions, fought very strongly against this new “Earth goes around Sun” FB theory, even threatening Galileo with torture. But the new scientific theory agreed with the facts, and by the rules of science, theories can’t be changed just to agree with powerful men. So after around 100 years of battling (yes it took that long!), scientists won, and the collective FB of how the Solar System works became identical to the scientific FB, with even the Catholic Church FB changing.
Other examples include the germ theory of disease as opposed to the evil spirits or God’s wrath theory of disease. More recently the hundreds-of-year-old practice of smoking tobacco was shown by science to cause cancer. Powerful men, politicians, and large corporations fought aggressively against changing the then current fantasy bubble that smoking was cool and desirable. Again, it took 50 years, but because science is so persistent and because it agrees better with reality, eventually we arrived at the current fantasy bubble where almost everyone agrees cigarettes cause cancer.
Science’s forceful changing of collective FBs can still be seen in action today in many areas. For example, the theory of evolution is gradually taking over from the “God created us” theory in the face of incredible resistance from most of the major world religions. And in most of the world, the theory of human induced Global Warming has joined the collective FB, against the concerted efforts of many of the world’s most powerful corporations and richest men. We also see evidence based history gradually changing the traditional belief that colonialism was beneficial to the conquered natives, to a more accurate belief that it was mostly just genocide.
Note, that the creation of scientific FBs in no way says that scientists are somehow better or even different than other humans. Scientists strongly resist it when new theories challenge their old ones. There was tremendous resistance among scientists when Einstein’s theory of gravity said that the Newtonian theory was not completely correct and needed to be abandoned. Even stronger resistance was given to the new theory of quantum mechanics. But, in both cases, experiments showed the new theories agreed better with the evidence, and so over time the scientific community changed its fantasy bubble. The result of these newer, more accurate FBs was the amazing technology that resulted from the better theories: GPS, lasers, transistors, MRI, X-rays, etc.
One might ask, given the enormous power of the collective FB against new scientific theories, why has science not become like every other human endeavor and become susceptible to manipulation and “fashion” by the powerful men in science and in society? Why didn’t the normal power instability result in a few men coming into control of science and causing the science FB to lose its basic fact-matching methodology? The answer to this question is not clear to me. I am surprised how successful science has been and how over the past few hundred years it has changed so much of the collective FB.
Perhaps science’s success was just luck. The collective FBs that science changed might not have been that important to the rulers, compared to the powerful inventions the scientific FB enabled. For example, science gave humans radio, electronics, disease cures, atomic bombs, etc. Perhaps, the powerful men who ran society saw, through direct examples, the power of having a scientific FB that gave a more accurate description of reality and allowed manipulation of the physical world. The loss of the competing non-scientific FB was perhaps not too high a price to pay, since the science FB did not directly challenge their power. Note, that if this is the case, science may be abandoned by humans once it stops giving important inventions or does challenge actual power. For example, many don’t believe in human induced global warming because, unlike many scientific discoveries of the past, it does not help them make more money. Physicists note that society’s support for enormously expensive particle accelerators is dropping rapidly. Past support has been hypothesized to be because these same physicists invented the atomic bomb, and the rulers were afraid to stop supporting science and so perhaps miss the next such invention. As nuclear physics and particle physics becomes less relevant to everyday life, this hypothesis says that public (and private) support for fundamental science may drop. In which case, one might expect much of science to eventually be dropped by society and for society to revert to FBs that are far from reality (as humans often did in the past). The basic science needed to create useful machines would be retained in the collective FB, but research into subjects that are not useful for the powerful might be dropped and go unfunded. Alternatively, perhaps science’s success was not just due to luck; perhaps the answer is related to our next topic: democracy.
6b. Democracy: The Forceful Redistribution of Power
As discussed above, normal human nature gives rise to what I’ve called the power instability, which usually results in patriarchy, where almost all the power lies in the hands of a king, emperor, dictator, party chainman, etc. In this case, the majority of people live in substantially worse conditions than those with the money and power. This strikes the average person as unfair, and throughout history various attempts have been made to redistribute the power and money to make things more equitable. Apart from the last few centuries, these attempts were usually failures. The superior power of the nobility and patriarch was wielded to destroy any attempts at revolution, and when a revolution succeeded, the winners usually just established a new patriarchy with themselves as the rulers.
But, several times this attempt at power redistribution succeeded, and by far the most successful result has been the democratic form of government common throughout the world today. In a constitutional democracy, the rules of power transfer are written in a document, the constitution, which specifies that periodically the power of the leader is forcefully removed and given to the citizens in the form of an election for a new leader. Somehow, this piece of paper directly confronts and defuses the power instability described above. Karl Marx’s communism of the late 1800’s and early 1900’s had basically the same goal, but failed miserably at giving power to ordinary people. Why has democracy succeeded where no other system has? The answer is not clear to me, but here are several thoughts.
First, after a constitution is accepted, a very strong societal fantasy bubble is created that constitutional democracy is superior to monarchy, dictatorship, etc. People living in democracy believe that they should have rights and that the government should serve them, not just the wealthy and powerful. This fantasy bubble largely replaces the older FB where the nobility were superior to the commoners and so deserved to rule over everyone. Because of this strong FB, the people as a whole continually fight to ensure that no leader refuses to honor the constitution. Any leader wanting to take permanent power would need to confront this strong fantasy bubble. Of course, there are many of examples of leaders doing just this successfully and then taking power; Adolf Hitler winning public support by saying a strong leader is needed to fight the Jews, then winning elections, and then taking all the power, quickly comes to mind.
Second, in the USA and other democracies, a system of checks and balances is set up, so that at no time does the most powerful person (president or prime minister) hold all the power. In the USA, the Congress controls the money and writes the laws, while the Supreme Court enforces consistency with the Constitution.
However, it is important to remember that within all human societies, including both democracy and idealistic communism, the power/money instability still exists. The powerful and rich are always working to find ways to increase their power and wealth. Thus communist countries all became totalitarian dictatorships with the party chairman taking all the power. And many attempted democracies have reverted to dictatorships when democratically elected heads of state refuse to give up power, or when powerful people within the society manage a coup. Even within working democracies, the wealthy find ways to get more than their share of power. For example, while the U.S. and European nations have managed to avoid reverting to the natural human organization (dictatorship), the power/wealth instability is still strongly at work, with the richest 400 people in the U.S. having more wealth than the bottom 180 million. Thus the 1% richest of Americans have almost all the power. Actually it is the top 0.1% or 0.01% that really have a disproportionate amount of the money and power. We note that in almost all societies throughout all of human history the richest 1% constituted the “nobility” and controlled and owned almost everything. The “middle class” did not come into existence until around the 1940s due to unusual circumstances. For more discussion on this point, see my article: https://medium.com/@kimgriest/the-real-reason-the-american-middle-class-is-disappearing-e7700c593368 .
Given the pervasiveness of the power instability it is in fact remarkable that democracy was ever implemented, and that it continues in many nations today. Democracy was instituted in both America and France via revolutions where powerful groups of people overthrew and/or killed the current holders of power. George Washington was offered the position of King, but turned it down, an historically rare occurrence of someone not following the power instability. The creation of a democracy is almost always strongly resisted by the patriarchs in charge, but still today a fairly large fraction of the world is run by democracies at the national and state levels. Note, also that since power and money are very closely related, democracy, if it is working, also redistributes wealth.
Next consider that perhaps the same force that gave humans democracy also gave us science, and perhaps the continued existence of science depends upon the continued existence of democracy, and vice versa. Note that a huge increase in the pace of scientific discoveries correlated strongly with the rise of democracies in Europe and America. There were some scientific discoveries in the 1500’s and 1600’s before democracy really got under way, but these were dwarfed by the discoveries that started in the 1800’s, 1900’s, and 2000’s. Before democracy, scientists (called natural philosophers) worked for the Nobility. The great mathematician Carl Fredrich Gauss wasted much of his life calculating the orbits of minor planets. Why? Because that is what his nobleman sponsor wanted him to do. Independent, curiosity based research arose with the Age of Enlightenment (17th-19thcenturies), that same FB that gave rise to the democratic experiments in America and Europe.
One argument in favor of this view, is that it has been extremely important for scientific advancement that most scientists work at Universities. Universities are non-profit organizations that are largely not under control of either governments or corporations. They are, in most cases, democratic institutions run by their members. Currently science is almost entirely funded publically through democratic governments and the distribution of funding is almost entirely done through peer review, where the scientists themselves decide who gets the money. Publication of scientific results is also mostly out of control of the powerful (governments, the wealthy, and corporations) and again is peer reviewed. So perhaps as long as democracy survives, so will science. In this case, we then see that the basic idea of democracy (redistribution of power) is essential for the success of science. If tobacco companies had controlled scientific publication then we still wouldn’t have proof that smoking causes cancer. If this peer-review (i.e. democratic) structure of scientific research can be maintained, then perhaps science can continue to force collective FBs towards reality even when there is no obvious benefit to the powerful.
On the contrary, if the Power Instability somehow destroys democracy we might expect science to eventually also be lost. Note that Nazi Germany was very slow to develop Relativity (and the atomic bomb) because it was “Jewish science” (started by a Jew, Albert Einstein). Similar occurrences happened in the early years of the communist dictatorships. These restrictions on science were mostly dropped when it became apparent that science gives rise to powerful new weapons and powerful improvements in engineering and agriculture. However, almost all important scientific advances have come from the democracies, with dictatorships mostly just copying US and European science and then playing catch-up. As nations adopt democracy it is remarkable how quickly their scientist’s contributions increase.
If the science-created FB can continue to expand, this may bode well for humanity and for democracy. Physical Science started by addressing questions that only the powerful religious institutions were discussing, often inventing FBs that disagreed with those institutions’ FBs. Science won every one of these FB contests. Perhaps science will also start to address questions that are still only addressed by religion and cultural institutions. For example, is there a best way to raise children if you want happy, creative, and productive citizens? If economics is better understood using science, is there an economic system that maximizes the total happiness (i.e. utility) of everyone? Are there lifestyles that are better than others? Are there better ways to deal with criminals, drugs, the environment, etc.? Currently, these questions are answered by society’s collective FBs without strong regard to whether or not these theories are good approximations of reality. We know science is capable of forcing fantasy bubbles to come into closer agreement with reality, but we don’t know whether or not science can be applied to these questions. However, it is not obvious that science can’t be applied here and many other places.
As another example, consider the “social science” of history. The endeavor of modern history has its goal recording and explaining what happened in the past as accurately as possible. For most of human history, however, the subject of history was used to praise the powerful men who were running everything. The example of Columbus comes to mind; he was once considered a great man with many things named after him, but more recently he is also known for his genocide of native peoples. This change in the goal of the history profession seems directly attributable to historians wanting to be more “scientific”, and to the use of peer-reviewed (i.e. democratic) publication criteria.
Finally, just as democracy plays a key role in making science work, it is probably true that science plays a key role in maintaining democracy. In a society where the collective FB is far from reality the voters might chose in a very stupid way. In order to correctly choose leadership for their society, the average person needs to accurately know what those choices mean. Having a working science FB means that many people are used to checking the predictions of the collective FB with the actual observations. Thus if a politician says “I will double your wealth in the next 4 years”, but no increase in wealth occurs, the more scientifically oriented citizens will start to discard the statements of that politician as propaganda. On the contrary, if the ordinary citizens are continually fooled by false predictions, and never pause to check those predictions with observed reality, then a person with a strong ability to influence people’s FB may be elected, even if it leads to the end of democracy.
Thus we conclude that it is extremely important for humanity to continue with a collective fantasy bubble that includes the value of both science and democracy.
Future Topics
This concludes Part 1 of Fantasy Bubble Theory. Part 2 will give applications of the theory. For example, how to make a better society, how to understand religions and religious fanatics, how to change people’s opinions, and many other potential uses of FBT.