Shaping Reality
How simple lies can end up destroying lives
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When I was four years old and living with my family in Arabia, I attended what today would be called a pre-school. Fortunately for me, it was not merely a parking-lot for children designed to facilitate the ability of fathers to work undisturbed and mothers likewise to enjoy drinks with their friends (this was, dear reader, a great many decades ago). This particular establishment encouraged children to learn to read and write as well as to run around in the playground — which given the outside conditions of 40+ Celsius and 98% humidity, was just as well.
Nevertheless, despite the scorching conditions, we did do quite a bit of running around and congregating in groups suitable for the playing of various childish games. And it was here that I discovered a rather curious aspect of human behavior that begins in childhood and persists throughout most people’s adult lives: the ability to believe things that quite clearly are untrue.
In the playground, some child would make a random accusation along the lines of “Jenny smells funny!” Other children would obediently squeal and distance themselves from the hapless Jenny (who, obviously, smelled no different from any other four-year-old). Inventive types would create nasty rhymes while others would take the opportunity to push Jenny or appropriate her toys. And not only did nearly everyone participated in this deeply human ritual, but it was obvious that a great many persuaded themselves that the random accusation must in fact be true. It could be many long days before Jenny rehabilitated herself by making some other child the butt of the playground instead.
We humans are unlike any other animal insofar as we live largely within imaginary worlds and are very poor at living in the real world. While certain intelligent species such as corvids, cetaceans, and cephalopods clearly have theory of mind and can solve complex problems, we are the only creature that reliably forms entirely erroneous mental representations of reality. Thus we invent and then worship a wide variety of invisible magical pixies we call gods, ghouls, and goblins. We believe in all manner of impossible nonsense ranging from telepathy to alien abduction. And we can be persuaded to believe practically anything at all, provided the proposition…
