What are collective illusions?
Do other people value what you value...
Do you want to be famous?
If you ask most Americans what they think other people value, they will tell you that on top of the list are fame, power, and status. Surprisingly, when asked what they themselves valued, those traits were at the bottom of the pile, instead, they valued personal fulfilment.
This difference between two worlds - of your own private thoughts and your perception of public opinions, is where collective illusion lies:
Collective illusions— false assumptions about society that many people share.
Currently, we are living in times of mass production of technologies that produce mass illusions. Right now, advertisers and social planners have more knowledge of the human psychology than they ever did, so we are very hackable.
The consequence of mass illusions is that we pass on these false perceptions to the next generation. A new generation of children will grow up to want to be TikTok superstars and not know why. When you look at the evidence of famous child actors such as the kid from Home Alone or the girl from Parent Trap, it doesn’t look so tantalising. What people value is not fame, but, privacy.
The illusions in higher education
What do students think other students value?
Prestigious university
Great social life
A degree
What do students actually value?
A good job at the end with a low debt burden
Individualised learning with less content but more useful stuff
Hybrid on-the-job training and apprenticeships
Opportunities
Technical and vocational education had a bad reputation in the past (in the UK), this perception is now being challenged
Deloitte and Bloomberg provide pathways that allow you to get a traditional degree without the costs of paying university fees
If an employer has already trained you for three years, they are more likely to hire you
Social norms
The greatest collective illusions that exist is in the form of social norms. As soon as you walk outside your home, you are conforming to certain societal standards, these are norms. The moment you go against the group, there is a negative sensation that feels like abandonment, it served a purpose in the past, to keep you safe in the herd.
Artists shine a light on what is normal, they do weird things which help us define the boundaries of our social norms. Sometimes it can be used by social planners to effect change. Consider ‘social shaming’, authorities in Bogota put some out-of-work mime artists on several traffic intersections, calling out dangerous driving and reckless jaywalking, this had the effect of significantly reducing accidents and deaths.
Another example is positive social deviance. This is where you reward positive behaviour that goes against the norm. Researchers found that mothers who supplemented their children’s food with shrimp, which was widely and cheaply available, were able to reduce stunting in their children. But this practice became a social taboo in Vietnam, so researchers promoted the voices of these positive social deviances, thus, helping to reduce stunting in children.
The problems of democratic institutions
If you live in a democracy it’s wonderful. However, the price we pay for the institutions that we’ve developed is that we’ve given up almost all decision-making processes and ceded control. We feel like we have very little choice left. Everything has been decided for us. We are cogs in a machine, making us feel like we are irrelevant and replaceable.
Frederick Taylor developed the concept of Scientific Management, finally bringing Science into the social domain and raising efficiency and productivity. What he unwittingly did was make us trust each other less.
The key idea of modernity is that we live in systems, this is usually centralised and top-down. Democracy’s goal as a system is to perpetuate the system, this is the goal of any system, it’s designed to live on forever. It focusses on things like GDP growth and climate change because focussing on these things helps to secure its power and legitimacy.
Co-production: a new model
New models of governance are changing the top-down model. Experiments of co-production have been launched in countries from Denmark, Malaysia, the UK, and the US.
Co-production is an asset-based approach to public services that enables people providing and people receiving services to share power and responsibility and to work together in equal, reciprocal, and caring relationships. (Co-production Network for Wales)
In simple terms, this model assumes that you are as smart as the government and the experts. We live in an expert-driven reality of the world, but people often question whether that reality actually exists. This is why researchers are now partnering up with community stakeholders on a long-term basis where both are seen as assets. This approach converges the top-down and bottom-up approaches, so we end up with more “real” reality of what’s going on.
The seeds of our problems are also our solutions
Hacking our psychology has allowed the outside world unfettered access to manipulate us to want things we might not even want. The solution I present is counter-intuitive, we need more introspection, this time not about us, but what we think about the world around us, the reality we all share, this is something called inter-subjective realities. These things exist because we all believe they exist such as money, trust, and corporations.
Todd Rose draws on neuroscience and social psychology in his book Collective Illusions to highlight conformity, complicity, and the science of why we make bad decisions. He was a Professor at Harvard, serving at the faculty of the Mind, Brain, and Education, he now heads up Populace, a new type of social research which explore what we think what we want, and what we think others want, and finds the difference - the collective illusion. Perhaps this new type of research will burst the bubble of our collective illusions and give us insight into what we really want.
If you want to get a more in-depth immersion into this topic, I highly recommend this 30 mins YouTube video to develop the ideas I have presented in this essay.