The Age of Collective Delusion

Why Societies Unable to Cope With Reality Are Retreating Into Fantasies Which Rip Them Apart

Image: Jabin Botsford

When I look around the world today — and particularly at English speaking societies — entire nations seems to be having a kind of severe mental breakdown. America. Britain. Nation after nation is falling into the grip of a kind of mania, driven by strange, foolish, downright bizarre myths. You can see evidence everywhere you look — once you know what you’re looking for. The new wave of fascists. Incels. Anti-vaxxers. Flat earthers. Extremists. Supremacists. Religious fundamentalists. Collective delusions, all. But I want to go deeper in this little essay, and explore the collective delusion at the root of this age of collapse.

The truth is that our societies are not ruled by reason, logic, and morality anymore. They’ve been conquered by collective delusions: mass fantasies, which please us in a time when facing the truth, reading the headlines, becomes a little more difficult every day. When we say things like “the truth doesn’t matter anymore” or “our leaders are pathological liars” or “nobody can reason with those people,” we’re talking, really, about collective delusions: a psychology which can’t distinguish what’s real from what’s imagined anymore. 

Doesn’t that line seem to have been crossed — that enough people can’t tell what’s real from what’s imagined — to plunge even rich, powerful societies like America and Britain into spectacular breakdowns, that the world’s jaws are dropped by…in just a few short years? That’s how powerful collective delusions are — and we ignore them, their growth and genesis, their existence and reality, at our peril.

(Now, collective delusion doesn’t mean that every single person in a society believes in outlandish, bizarre things — you, gentle reader, probably don’t — but it does mean that enough of them do, to badly destabilize a society. How many is enough? The unfortunate truth, which we still haven’t quite grasped, is that it doesn’t take a majority to plunge a society in chaos — just a committed enough, collectively deluded minority, as in the cases of Brexit and American collapse, neither of which are supported by majorities anymore, but it’s too late, really, to change the explosive nature of catastrophe.)

There are three types of collective delusions which are ripping the world apart. Let me go through them one by one.

The first are delusions of grandeur. What is “Make America Great Again!” or “Brexit means Brexit!” but a delusion of grandeur, really? The technical definition is “a sense of over-inflated worth, power, or status” — or more accurately, the need for it. And that is exactly what we observe spreading around the globe — as the global economy stalled, societies reverted to age old supremacies, and show no signs of stopping. 

Our tribe must be number one! Our nation is the best! Our destiny is not to be poor! We are the rulers of the world — everything belongs to us! This is the fundamental delusion behind the spreading wave of global neo-fascism — a return to the imperial politics of tribal warfare, the need to be superior to others, instead of coexisting as equals.

Delusions of grandeur are afflicting the English-speaking world first and hardest because the English-speaking world has long had a fragile psychology of narcissism. Britain and then America built the world’s mightiest empires. They came to think the world revolved around them — and in a way, it did — but only by force, not through consent. 

Brexit and American fascism are the shadows of these dead empires, the feelings of inadequacy and neglect that haven’t been “processed” yet, as an American psychologist might say. They are reflections of the need to be above, atop, beyond everyone else — and centered by them, too. But that world also requires a return to war, supremacy, hatred, and colonization — and that is why America regressed at light speed, and Britain soon followed. Enough Americans and Brits genuinely believed they must be the most powerful and supreme people in the world to sacrifice their entire societies for that very cause — breaking up with neighbours, tearing up alliances, lashing out, banning books, criminalising existence — which, of course, is a Pyrrhic victory for any modern society.