One of Us Is Delusional, But Which One?
Mr. Consensus represents the mainstream. One of us--myself or Mr. Consensus--is completely delusional. The question is, which one?
The reasons the film Sunset Boulevard is considered a classic are many, but the primary one is left unstated: it depicts one of humanity’s core traits, delusion, so affectingly.
The film’s plot revolves around former movie queen Norma Desmond, played by Gloria Swanson, forgotten by Hollywood but living in a musty mansion on Sunset Boulevard, consumed by the delusion that she’s poised to return to the silver screen as the star she once was.
Her psychological need to maintain this delusion is so great that her loyal butler provides visible evidence that she is still a great star by conjuring up fake fan mail for her consumption.
Struggling screenwriter Joe Gillis, played by William Holden, stumbles into her fantasy world and moves into the decaying mansion to help her rewrite her comeback script, knowing full well the script has no potential.
When he tires of her claustrophobic imaginary realm, he tells her he’s leaving, and she promptly attempts suicide, pulling him back into her delusional orbit. When he is leaving for good, she threatens to shoot herself. When this fails to persuade him to stay, she shoot him.
The film contains scenes of dark humor, a signature of director Billy Wilder. When the cinematographer John Seitz asked Wilder what he required for the pet chimpanzee’s funeral scene, Wilder replied, “you know, just your standard monkey funeral shot.”
Which brings us to the present moment. I’m summarizing the mainstream consensus as the convictions of Mr. Consensus. One of us--myself or Mr. Consensus--is completely delusional. The question is, which one of us has become lost in our own imagination to serve a profound psychological need?
Let’s start by noting that every human conjures visual stories--internal movies--every night in our dreams. Dreams serve many complex purposes, but the point here is we think in stories that can be told visually. We each have a story that explains the world around us, and a story that makes sense of our own lives.
In Sunset Boulevard, Norma Desmond’s internal narrative has lost all connection to the real world. Only fabrications--the fake fan mail and the screenwriter’s self-serving offer to help her polish her script--connect her delusion to the tangible world.
What makes her delusion so indelible is its complete disconnect from reality. But in real life, the majority of our delusions have some connection to the real world which we interpret to fulfill a deep psychological need to make sense of the world in a way that grounds our narrative about who we are and the trajectory of our life.
Psychiatrist / author R.D. Laing noted in the late 1960s at the height of the Vietnam War that what President Lyndon Johnson considered obvious was not at all obvious to the war’s critics.
This provides a clue to how delusions work: in the construct of our beliefs and convictions, we find our particular interpretation glaringly obvious, and those who don’t hold the same devotion are obtusely, frustratingly blind to what’s clearly obvious.
Since humans are a social animal, this devotion is strengthened by the shared beliefs of others in the same story. We must be right because other smart, good people share our conviction. They too see what’s obvious. We can’t all be wrong, so we must be right.
Those holding lofty positions of power and high-value credentials agreeing with us further bolsters our confidence: The Whiz Kids, experts and gurus all see what’s obvious too, and so how can you claim we’re all misguided?
Financial bubbles are a prime example of how groupthink inflates a mass delusion that has lost connection with those elements of the real world that offer contradictory evidence.
These convictions serve both the self-interest of the believers (we’re all going to get fabulously rich) and the profound psychological needs for certainty and self-regard: we who see that this time is different are geniuses.
Well, yes, of course.
These dynamics characterize the delusional disconnect from reality not just of financial bubbles but also the waging of wars and politics. An inspirational story is introduced that just so happens to serve our interests and aligns with our core narratives of how the world works.
The US is presently engaged in a full-spectrum war. Mr. Consensus believes that our leadership controls the war’s trajectory: we can turn the war on or off like a water tap. The evidence of this is obvious: the President turns the tap on and off and the global stock market responds accordingly.
But wars are not one-sided. Just as it takes two to tango, there are two or more participants in a war, and one participant cannot turn the war on and off at will because they don’t control the other participants’ actions--much less their convictions about what’s obvious.
So Mr. Consensus is delusional about the current war. By the very nature of war, one side cannot turn it on and off like a water tap, from day to day or week to week.
Mr. Consensus also believes that the war’s consequences are short-term, and can be distilled down to the price of oil. If the price of oil drops, the financial impact of the war goes away in a few months. Other consequences are minimal or don’t matter--at least not to the US.
There is literally no real-world evidence for this belief, so it’s delusional. We are still living with the consequences of World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the wars waged in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.
The consequences of war are complex and multi-dimensional, playing out over time as second-order effects (consequences have their own consequences) unfold. Wars are emergent, not movies with a tidy ending.
Wars are not controllable like water taps. Those attempting to maintain the illusion of control distill the war down to some metric which acts as a signal or signifier.
For Mr. Consensus, the price of oil is the only signifier of the war that matters. In the Vietnam War, it was the body count of enemy combatants killed.
Signals and signifiers are not the totality of the real world. They are a crudely drawn map of a complex terrain. They are also prone to being manipulated to put those leading the war in a positive light.
This manifests as self-serving narrative control: we’re fed a constant stream of assurances that we’re winning, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, etc. In the Vietnam Era, this institutionalized charade was called The Five O’clock Follies.
The Five O’clock Follies now run 24/7 on every media imaginable. But this doesn’t actually change the real world, it only influences what’s obvious. And what’s obvious to those untethered from the need to believe that a distant war has few consequences that matter to us is that Mr. Consensus is delusional.
The key to understanding the iron grip of delusion is the need of the devoted to dismiss or attack anything that threatens to undermine their belief. It’s all or nothing, for if a single brick crumbles, the keystone might give way and the entire arch of their inner structure will collapse.
Which brings us to AI. Mr. Consensus is confident that the war will soon blow over, and since the US has plenty of energy, money and know-how, we’ll just continue on our merry way to ever greater prosperity by building more data centers for AI, which will obviously transform the world to the benefit of all, because:
1. Technology is always beneficial
2. Technology is therefore always Progress
3. Progress and technology are unstoppable
4. AI is therefore by its very nature Progress, beneficial and unstoppable.
This logic is admirably simple, but as I explain in my book The Mythology of Progress, technology also generates Anti-Progress by its very nature, and while it’s comforting to believe that Progress always outweighs Anti-Progress, this is not a Law of Nature, any more than the other conviction that Mr. Consensus holds to be fact: the past is an unerring guide to the future, and so data from the past is our technological crystal ball.
So since the stock market went up both times the chart looks like the present, it will go up this time, too. Never mind the economic conditions or profitability or stretched valuations or concentrations of risk: the data from the past is unequivocable.
The same can be said of the conviction that every new technology invariably generates more and better jobs--the data from the past is unequivocable.
But all these data points are not the totality of the real world; they are only signals or signifiers, not Laws of Nature akin to gravity.
So while Mr. Consensus holds that it’s glaringly obvious that AI will be transformative in unimaginably positive ways--curing cancer, freeing humanity from drudgery, and so on--the actual evidence from the real world is that AI’s most profitable and compelling uses are virtually all malicious or harmful.
The profitability of conventional AI is not just unproven but doubtful. What managers glowingly describe as “productivity” is from the workers’ experience “workslop” that actually generates more work and reduces productivity.
Bosses say AI boosts productivity -- workers say they’re drowning in ‘workslop’: Workslop refers to AI-generated work that seems polished but is flawed and in need of heavy corrections.
All this, Mr. Consensus holds, will go way as AI improves. But there is very little evidence that such improvements will generate legitimate-use profits, while every improvement generates tsunamis of highly profitable malicious exploitation.
As I’ve described in my books, the core conviction of the Mythology of Progress is technology must be allowed to run wild, as any restrictions will throttle its limitless potential to benefit humanity.
But this is delusion, for what we find if we’re not blinkered by our psychological need to believe in the magic of technology is 14-year old boys generating and posting hundreds of harmful nudified images of female classmates.
The list of profitably malicious or harmful applications of AI is lengthening so quickly that it’s already essentially endless: ransomware, fraud, extortion, deep-fakes, workslop, content-slop, AI psychosis, and so on.
The damage wrought to cognitive and emotional development is undeniable, yet those with a deep need to believe that AI is beneficial and unstoppable turn a blind eye to the overwhelming mass of evidence that AI’s primary profit centers are all malicious, and to the scantness of evidence that the hundreds of billions being invested will ever generate a commensurate return.
Efforts are being made to limit the damage but the genie is already out of the bottle and it’s impossible to limit the viral-like spread of malicious AI. Passing laws is a signal, but the enforcement is already out of reach, as deepfakes become increasingly difficult--and more time-consuming--to identify.
Passing a law against malicious or harmful uses of AI is a positive step, but if there is no liability imposed on the AI companies and platforms, then it’s as hollow a gesture as passing a regulation on the Titanic banning the sinking of ocean liners.
AI is easily applied to malicious, harmful uses while its legitimate applications are difficult to implement and assess, and the profitability of such applications is at best uncertain and realistically unlikely at the scale needed to justify the enormity of capital being invested.
What’s easy and immediately profitable wins, and that’s malicious, harmful applications of AI.
So AI tools designed to thwart malicious AI going 70 miles an hour are chasing applications expanding at the speed of sound (767 miles per hour).
It’s the Red Queen’s Race: not matter how fast the “good” AI is being developed, the “bad” AI is accelerating an order of magnitude faster.
The point here is the delusional reject open minded inquiry because that threatens their psychological foundations. They not only need to hold fast to their convictions, they also need us to agree with them, and stop introducing evidence that their conviction no longer maps the real world.
So when the devotee demands that we agree that beneath the lunar surface the moon is actually made of green cheese, our shrug of disinterest is as catalyzing to them as a denial, for what’s obvious to them must be made obvious to us or the keystone of their entire narrative is threatened.
In other words, a detached, noncommittal inquiry is as threatening as one trying to tear down their edifice, for a detached inquiry is even more dangerous than an opponent caught up in defending their own interpretation.
And so the detached observer sees how an unsubstantiated claim that AI already found a cure for cancer immediately goes viral, reaching millions of screens, while hundreds of documented cases of malicious exploitation and harm are dismissed with a wave of the magic wand, “all that will go away as AI leaps to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).”
In other words, psychological defense mechanisms kick in to protect the deep needs fulfilled by the delusion.
The problem with the delusions of wars that can be turned off and on like a water tap and AI is inevitably beneficial as it tears down real people is that these delusions ignore the even deeper problems of moral decay--there are no longer any social or cultural limits on profiteering, exploitation or inflicting harm--and the delusions of the Waste Is Growth / Everything is Disposable Landfill Economy funded by ever-expanding debt.
Arthur Conan Doyle invented an allegory delivered by his fictitious detective Sherlock Holmes in the story A Case of Identity that goes something like this: There is danger for him who taketh the tiger cub, and danger also for whoso snatches a delusion from a devotee.
Is there a test for delusion? Yes. If we have no emotional attachment / response to which interpretation is “right” because that sort of definitive conclusion is not supported by the evidence, that’s not delusion.
If we claim to be objective while defending our hidden convictions with all our might, that’s the psychological dynamic of delusion: snatch away our tiger cub and we will respond with an intensity fueled by emotional need, not the full spectrum of evidence.
Humility and self-awareness are useful tools in identifying when we’re getting lost in our own imaginations. Delusion is a core human trait, so we can reliably expect to find it in ourselves. Being aware that we’re attracted to a particular interpretation of ambiguous or partial evidence helps us avoid falling into a psychological dependency on a particular interpretation.
To admit we’re engaged in a delusion is painful, for we pride ourselves on being rational and open-minded. Some delusions do us or others little harm (for example, Emperor Norton in Old San Francisco) and others provide us needed solace: for example, proceed as if success is inevitable. I personally find this delusion helpful when a wave of failure washes over me--a remarkably common occurrence.
So which one of us is delusional--me or Mr. Consensus? That’s for you to decide, but the evidence suggests it’s Mr. Consensus who’s delusional about the war, the stock market bubble and AI.
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