The audacity! The pride! To assume that some stranger would want to read my piddling little words, infinitesimal drops in the vast and ever growing ocean of verbal soup sloshing around in the containerless container of cyberspace. We’ve made words (and their symbolic big brother, narratives) available for consumption on nearly every device with a screen, and there are more people more sure of more things than at any point in human history at this very moment.
But what if the sense of knowingness that pervades internet discourse is just a pose? What if we don’t “know” half the things that we claim to know? What if we’re placating our ongoing individual existential crises, born of living in an uncertain world with madness, illness, and death closing in, with impotent cries of certitude?
While there have been undeniable leaps in technology and hard science, we’re not much closer today to understanding and “knowing” ways to improve persistent social problems than we were in the 1960s, the 1920s, or any other moment when people thought they finally “knew” what to do.
What makes a successful life? What makes a happy life? What is my purpose? What is justice? How can we ensure that people have the liberty to live life as they choose, regardless of what the majority of people think about it? How can people avoid falling into poverty? How can we be sure that the elderly and those who can’t take care of themselves aren’t abandoned?
These questions are still very much open, even with millions of human minds working on finding the best answers.
What we do have is a plethora of theories or narratives that collect statistics, descriptions of social institutions and the ways they function, and abstract models of “the economy” that purport to explain what’s REALLY wrong and what we need to do to “fix” things.
Philosopher Alfred Korzybski explored the ways that people confuse theoretical models with real phenomena, and came up with what he called the “map/territory” distinction. In his words, “the map is not the territory.” No map could accurately describe every detail of an area - the only truly accurate map is the territory itself. Robert Anton Wilson expanded the metaphor with the idea that “the menu is not the meal” - if you tried to eat the printed, laminated word “hamburger” you would be sorely disappointed.
In our overly-online world, where interaction with the physical world has been cut further and further back to allow people to engage more fulsomely with digital entertainment and avoid interaction with all but the most scrupulously selected friends and acquaintances, we’re papered over with maps. Entertainment is communication, and all communication brings implicit arguments that map the world with it.
Take visual media - depending on its contextual location, a video of a beautiful sunrise can be a condemnation of people with the leisure time to enjoy sunrises without thinking of all the other ways they are oppressed, or a reminder of the presence of God. A picture of a man in a well tailored suit can be an aspirational spur or a reminder of the wickedness of capitalism and patriarchy. A picture of someone wearing a face mask can be a heroic depiction of social consciousness and care or a disgusting example of cowardice and conformity.
All of this is based on assumptions of “knowing what’s really going on.”
Instead of engaging with the underlying reality of what’s being depicted, we argue endlessly about which map of that territory is more accurate, or accuse each other’s maps of being inherently emptyheaded or emptyhearted.
Blind confidence in your maps makes you stupid. If you’re being honest, you can’t accurately describe your own bedroom, let alone the innumerable complex social interactions and processes that create social outcomes.
“But wait!” you say, “that’s solipsism!” Thankfully, you are wrong. Saying that it’s very difficult to truly know something is not saying that knowledge is unattainable, or that we’re all just brains in vats being tortured by some alien intelligence, or that everything is an illusion. The corollary to Korzybski’s map-territory distinction is an important one - “all models are wrong, but some are useful.” The fact that a map does not EXACTLY represent the territory it shows doesn’t mean it’s useless, it just means you have to know what it’s useful for.
As I continue to write this Substack, I want to accomplish three things:
Identify and explore the most useful maps humanity has created to describe the territory of human civilization.
Help to reduce the fanatical confidence that animates modern politics by showing people they can live in reality instead of fantasy by giving up the zealot’s mindset.
Understand and explain controversial current events through open-minded, honest, and reality-grounded investigation.
I’ll also be sharing some stuff about music and food, so watch those sections for posts. Thank you for reading - lots more to come!
Heyo,
you might be familiar with it already, otherwise you might be interested in reading LessWrong's Map and Territory sequence of posts (and look around there in general):
https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/map-and-territory-sequence