Useful fictions

Human brains are fickle things. Certainly, it is amazing that these chunks of fat are capable of complex abstract reasoning while consuming less energy than an incandescent lightbulb. However, even they are still fallible – just look at any children’s illusion book and you’ll understand how easy they are to fool. How easy we are to fool. And more importantly, how easily we fool ourselves.

At an individual level, psychologists have been studying our cognitive biases for a very long time. For example, most people believe that they are morally good, even though they do not tend to examine their own actions ethically. Most people also believe that they are above average at various skills, functionally impossible as that may be. Some researchers think that these fictions are necessary to keep us going. After all, if we are fundamentally evil and can do no good, why keep living? As the kids say, delulu is the solulu.

Just you wait, someone will invent a wonderful win-win fix for *insert current problem here*

Sometimes, these useful fictions grow and embed themselves in the superstructure of society. Humanity is intrinsically good, the anthropocentric myth goes, and technological progress is the way to solve problems. Sure, maybe we make mistakes, but we can use our wits to solve all the problems we create. Just you wait, someone will invent a wonderful win-win fix for *insert current problem here* and we won’t have to worry about it anymore.

TU Delft is not free of these fictions either. Here, we use them as fig leaves to cover unsightly (and unpleasant) realities. Sustainable aviation, green cement, hydrogen, carbon capture will allow us to solve the problem of ecological overshoot while keeping our lives exactly the same – so goes the story. I’m not against optimism, but there’s a difference between being an optimist and thinking you’re flying after you jumped off a cliff. RIP Otto Lilienthal.

And sometimes the fictions we create come back to bite us, compounding our problems or becoming problems themselves. For example, the mainstream discourse is flooded by an obsession with growth and competitiveness. Dutch businessmen, Italian central bankers, and German politicians rail about how Europeans are lazy bums who need to cut regulations and get to work so that we don’t get left behind by China or the United States (the birthplace of such amazing inventions as the PlagiarismBot [in Dutch] and BetOnTheNextBombing.com). This all happens while more and more empirical evidence is piling up that continued economic growth brings us closer and closer to planetary catastrophe.

Delulu, I am afraid, is not the solulu. Sometimes, you may need to believe that you’re a good person in order to do good. Sometimes, we may all need to believe in something so that we don’t eat each other. But when these fictions get between us and reality, we’re in serious trouble. It’s time to stop dreaming. The ground is approaching really fast.