Delusion is what happens when our reason bouncer fails as the gatekeeper to our beliefs—when our imagination is stronger than our judgment. It might be the most universal human quality.
Delusion isn’t the same as fogginess. Fogginess on its own is just confusion, disarray, forgetfulness. Delusion is fog plus the illusion of clarity. Delusion isn’t confusion about what’s true—it’s full belief in what’s not true.
Over hundreds of centuries, hyper-optimized superglue stories came to cover all the bases so thoroughly, they were able to do something biological evolution never could—convince masses of human beings to cooperate. Rather than repress the human primal flame, these stories harnessed it, grabbed its reins, and redirected it—lining up individual flames in parallel lockstep, pointing them all in the direction dictated by the story.
Language is so magical because it allows individual brains to connect, like neurons, to form a larger thinking system. If a human’s Inner Self is like a neuron, the Outer Self’s ability to express itself gives the neuron its axons, and its ability to see or listen to the expression of others gives it dendrites. These channels let individual human brains combine together to form a larger communal brain. Humans can form brains of all different sizes, depending on the number of people communicating with each other. There’s no limit on how large a brain humans can meld into. In human societies, vast interconnected gossip networks, with the help of tools of mass broadcast, allow thousands of communal brains to quickly connect, turning huge portions of a society into giant thinking systems.
Every citizen, whether they realize it or not, is a neuron in the mind of a giant organism, and what they do and say in their lifetime contributes to who that organism is, even if only a little bit.
To really understand society, we’ll need to take a closer look at a miniature version of it: you.
When we move up to higher levels of emergence, where groups of people function like giant organisms, a group’s culture becomes the giant’s personality.