Delusional Societies
Delusional Societies
How Fantasies Can Engulf Nations
As we’ve started to unravel in Part 1 of this series, although modern, Western society has romanticized and sugar-coated the human imagination, it is far more complex than the rainbows and unicorns we imagine the imagination to be.
Fantasizing can lead us down rabbit holes that can take us anywhere from short-term infatuations to lifelong delusions.
But the problems due to fantasy are not just the creations of our own minds. We can just as easily get swept up by other people’s imaginations, and end up having a very hard time getting out of the worlds they’ve created for us.
If and when we allow them, the fantasies of others become our realities.
This is the stuff of branding, advertising and marketing. If people wanted to sell New York City tap water for a a buck fifty on the street, and up to six or seven bucks at baseball games and airports, they could, and they do. Logos, packaging and advertisements can take the run-of-the-mill and dress it up to be seen as top-of-the-line in the public eye.
More than the thing itself, it is the image of the thing that captures our imaginations, and thereby shapes our behaviors.
This is also the stuff of political campaigns and propaganda.
Nearly as long as there has been civilization, cult leaders and dictators have used sleight of hand and illusion to make themselves seem larger than life — as infallible as gods.
It is for this reason, that 3,000+ years later, Jews view their time in ancient Egypt as the archetype of oppression. It was not only due to the physical oppression we were subjected to there, but also for how it distorted our images of ourselves and the world around us.
Egypt became the global capital of exploitation in large part because it had become the global capital of fantasy and illusion.
The Jews (and all other people exploited there) were physically enslaved with work, and mentally enslaved by an elaborate and extreme web of lies carved into the pyramids and obelisks in whose shadows they toiled. Like in Nazi Germany, and in Gaza, the West Bank and elite colleges today, Jews are demonized and dehumanized in the people’s minds through cartoons, sermons, and slogans which pave the way for the torture and murder that follows.
What allows such lies to fester to such a degree?
A massive part of the industry of deception emerged in the ancient world from the free market of idol worship in Egypt that boasted literally thousands of “deities.”
After all, you can only start a cult if you cultivate belief and devotion in your followers in the deity you’ve chosen. And you can only convince people to give their lives to something if you capture their imaginations with smoke and mirrors, hypnotic music, dramatic lighting and resounding echoes of your voice for effect.
If you think this kind of manipulation is only for uneducated, gullible, ancient people, you have to look no further than the 39 people, part of the Heaven’s Gate cult, who took their lives in 1997 as the Hale-Bopp comet passed overhead, convinced that an extraterrestrial spaceship would beam them to the “kingdom of heaven.”
Don’t be in shock that almost 3 in 4 Palestinians support Hamas’s attack on October 7th. What’s shocking is that 1 in 4 don’t — in a culture that has been cultivated on fantasies of eradicating the Jewish men, women and children “from the River to the Sea.”
People do not wake up one day and murder civilians in their beds. They have not gone crazy. They are just deeply deeply delusional.
When “martyrs” are glorified in textbooks, on posters, and murals — when clerics deliver weekly sermons of the sensual reward for those who eliminate apostates — when one literally lives in a fantasy world, the actions that follow are the most natural consequence.
Ancient Egypt was as much the global capital of fantasy and magic as it was the global capital of human trafficking and infanticide. It’s not a coincidence.
At the top of the pyramid scheme was Pharaoh himself. The whole structure of power that made the Kingdom of Egypt function was built upon the notion that he as king was a god, when obviously he was just a dude, terrified in his heart that he would ever let on.
What’s amazing is that we can “drink the koolaid” of our own lies and then proceed to feed them to others.
When Moshe first showed up to Pharaoh’s palace and performed the miracle of turning his staff into a snake, they laughed in his face, and summoned others to replicate what they had understood to be the kind of illusion that was their bread and butter. When Moshe’s snake swallowed theirs and then turned back into a staff, they were temporarily stumped, but as we know, they stayed entrenched in their perspective for over a year — even as their country got pummeled by plagues — and then raced headlong into the sea against all reason to get their slaves back.
Our fantasies are always our undoing.
Fantasy, it turns out, creates a bubble that is very hard to pop.
How resistant are our fantasies to the harsh realities that oppose them?
And what does it take to burst the bubble of delusion?
These questions point to where our journey in XL is headed…