Collective Illusions

Collective Illusions: Conformity, Complicity, and the Science of Why We Make Bad Decisions (2022) by Todd Rose is a highly interesting and very enjoyable read full of anecdotes and scientific tidbits. The book opens with a story set in the 1920s about a tight-knit village community in which everyone believes it's a sin to play with face cards. The belief dated back to the Puritan prejudices towards monarchists centuries earlier but had endured because of conformity, people’s commitment to self-silencing and last, but not least because everyone believed that this is what all other people believed. This “Emperor's New Clothes” kind of story nicely illustrates how collective illusions are perpetuated by social dynamics or inertia.

The core of the book is a study by the author and his collaborators regarding values, especially what “success” means to Americans:

Of study respondents, 97 percent defined personal success as following “their own interests and talents to become the best they can be at what they care about most.” Yet almost the same number, 92 percent, said that society views success as the achievement of fame and fortune. In other words, our private understanding of success is entirely different from how we think everyone else sees it. The “good life,” as measured by education, relationships, and character, matters most to nearly all of us, while status is the least important. Generally speaking, we all want the same things: to be loved and cared for, to have enough resources to be comfortable, to be good parents, to be happy at work, to be healthy, and to be contributors to our communities.

The takeaway: Americans are much less polarised than politicians, the media and in particular social media want to make us believe. The danger of such collective illusions is that they become the norm among the next generation, a fact that is borne out by our teens' obsession with fame and posting selfies on Instagram and their own YouTube channels.

I have seen enthusiastic reviewers claim that this is the book that will heal the rift in America. However, I think that these reviews, just like the book itself, are overly optimistic. It is great that human core values are the same for all people, we all want to belong, be loved and be appreciated. The problem is that beyond those core values the differences persist. This is the point where the book lacks depth and can’t explain why collective illusions arise in the first place, only why they are perpetuated. Collective illusions arise exactly because we do have different values and people tend to get used to them, even if we don’t personally subscribe to them a lot, they don’t arise from a collective madness, even if that is what they might develop into as in the case of fascism.  If it were for Tod, we could just bust all those bubbles and be left with the truth. But whose truth? Strictly speaking, the opposite, liberal democracy is also a collective illusion, one I love to subscribe to, but also one that we have been seeing crumble in the past decades.

Like most psychologists, Todd tends to assume that we all run on the basic operating system. Evolutionary psychologists like to call this operating system “hunter-gatherer”, as this is the subsistence mode we humans followed most of our evolution. However, I think this is not true, because farming and pastoralism also left their evolutionary traces. Based on the four temperaments and Shlomo Schwartz’s circle of values I have devised the following diagram:

According to this “map” fame is mostly a pastoralist (herder) value (visible success). Indeed, I would dare claim that most people who aspire to fame are pastoralist types: pop stars, football players, and the Kardashians ("famous for being famous" type of people). This value can easily become culturally entrenched and therefore also become important for farmer and forager types. If Todd Rose is right, it would really be only a matter of education to destroy our collective illusions. It should be easy to get people more interested in scientists than the Kardashians or Heidi Klum, right? No, of course not, this would be an illusion itself, albeit a desirable one. Our heroes should be people who change the world for the better, rather than athletes, pop stars and bimbos. It’s never going to happen as much as I wish more people would be familiar with Malala Yousafzai than Kim Kardashian or Paris Hilton.

I am aware that these are rather trivial examples, but nevertheless, they illustrate that things aren’t as easy as Todd Rose envisions them. To begin with, conformity itself is a value that is far more important for farmer types than hunter types. In fact, some of the best passages in the book are where Todd describes his own struggles of not fitting in. Any neurodiverse person (Todd was diagnosed with ADHD in middle school) is well familiar with the struggle of being authentic and truthful when one really earns to fit in and vice versa. While reading the book I often get the hunch that Todd gets sidetracked and starts to write a self-help book for people like him by describing his own struggles and how he overcame them.

All in all, Todd Rose’s book is a very valuable contribution but it takes much more to destroy our collective illusions. It’s important for us to acknowledge the things that unite us, but even more, the things that separate us. Todd talks about the importance of “positive deviance” (citing Václav Havel, one of my personal heroes as an example) to bring down our collective illusions. However, “neutral deviance” - accepting our differences -  is just as important and will make the lives of countless people better.

For more check out my book Mapping Human Nature: Foragers, Farmers and Pastoralists

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09QP6QSJM

and

https://www.amazon.com/-/de/dp/B09J2JXYX3