Why We’re Fundamentally Wrong About The World — Collective Illusions
Currently, we live in a society where collective illusions may be the defining characteristic. These are situations where most people in a group share a view with which they disagree because they mistakenly believe that most people agree with it. It’s not just a matter of getting a few people wrong.
It’s about the majority believing something they don’t believe.
One of the biggest illusions is that of the trust itself.
The vast majority of people believe themselves to be trustworthy and value being trustworthy. However, they believe that almost everyone else in today’s society does not care about being trustworthy and is not trustworthy.
There is no greater illusion in today’s society than the illusion of distrust itself.
The greatest consequence of this is that we have stopped trusting each other, which is fatal to a free society. Given the profound lack of trust in today’s society, we often look for the cause of this in others.
But because of the way our institutions treat us, taking away our choices and basically treating us as untrustworthy, we have come to see each other through these glasses.
When you actually study honesty and trustworthiness, you find time and time again that the vast majority of people are actually trustworthy.
A study where random people were called and told there was a sweepstake going on and all they had to do was flip a coin and if it fell on tails, they got a gift card. If it fell on heads, they got nothing.
It was almost 50/50 heads or tails, and in fact, it was slightly more in favor of heads, which tells me that most people, if not all people, were telling the truth about how the coin landed when no one else could have known.
So not only do we care about being trustworthy, we care about being seen that way, and yet we live in a society where our institutions keep reminding us that that’s not true, that in some ways we’re not trustworthy.
We can only interact in one of two ways. We can trust people to make decisions for themselves, or we can control those decisions for them.
If you want a trusting society, you need to work to overcome this top-down view of our institutions and give more power to the people. Insist that our institutions treat the public with trust.
In another astonishing study, people were asked how they define a successful life. They received a collection of 76 different attributes to choose from. What was perceived as the most desirable?
Becoming famous.
There is only one problem. In the private sphere, it is actually in the last place. It is in 76th place out of 76 possible attributes. We don’t care about fame, but we believe that most others care more about fame than anything else.
Our public institutions are built on a false idea of what people want out of life. In our media, in our companies, these people are subject to exactly the same illusions. There are commercials, movies, and television shows that all tell us that a successful life consists of being famous, gaining influence and having a solid reputation.
I’ve published another article where I discuss optimistic nihilism and happiness, make sure to check that out in order to learn how a successful life actually looks for most people.
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