Dreams of the Collective Unconscious

an apologia for apologetics

Visions of Dystopia

David Friedman has a neat post¹ about how every big modern American political group has a different apocalypse myth, each playing out in parallel. It’s catastrophic climate change for the left; total coastal-elite institutional capture for the right; AI takeover for the rationalist sphere. Fifty years ago it was overpopulation. Over this time period I would also add Cold War nuclear fears, peak oil, and Y2K. Friedman also mentions the apparent rise in dystopian themes across literature and film (it’s always been interesting to me that “climate fiction” forms a whole genre). These range from “explicitly fiction, but with some allegories to contemporary social issues” to “realistic concrete fear exaggerated into unrealistic scenarios”. He’s puzzled by this trend, since many statistics would suggest the world is on a positive trajectory.

Part of what makes the pattern so odd is that, by objective criteria, the world has not only not gone to Hell, it is in multiple respects strikingly better than in the past. Some of that is obvious in our ordinary lives, where we have access to a variety of entertainment and a quality of medical care that has never existed before. Some of it is visible in statistics. World life expectancy is currently 72.6–73.2. It was 45.7–48 in 1950, 31–32 in 1900, ~29 at the beginning of the 19^th century. It has been going up a lot, faster in recent decades than in the past.  

The fraction of the world population living in extreme poverty has fallen sharply, is now about a fifth what it was fifty years ago.

World GNP per capita was about five times as high at the end of the 20^th century as at the beginning.

So what’s going on?

If GNP Is So High Then Why Aren’t We Bounded In A Nutshell Counting Ourselves Kings Of Infinite Space?

I’ve been thinking about this convergent-myth stuff for a while too…

(1, 2)

…and here’s my current best attempt at a reconciliation.

I suspect the world is getting better in easy-to-measure, number-go-up ways and worse in complex but directly perceptible ways². That's why you can point to graphs where simple metrics like GDP and starvation levels are improving, but there's a universal sense of doomerism. I think that intuition is really telling and not worth dismissing. For one thing, it's common across so many groups. For another, it's happening now in particular, more than at other times in history even when mass media existed. You could think of these varied visions of apocalypse as the dreams of a collective unconscious, which sounds woo, but I think it's a reasonable hypothesis if you buy a few uncontroversial assumptions:

1. Collective intelligence exists. The stock market (or prediction markets) can generate information no individual can, a corporation can process information and act in a coherent way, cultural memes spread and evolve independently of their human hosts. On a society-wide level, something you could call "cognition" is occurring (this doesn't require sentience).

2. In the human mind, some information is known only (or mostly) on the emotional level, and this has an analog in the case of society-level cognition.

3. Dreams have random elements but are largely not random; rather, they often correspond to complicated emotions in the dreamer, with made-up plots to contextualize the emotions.

So different subcultures collectively develop narratives that stick because they capture a mood, an intuition lots of people have but don't know how to describe, and each culture substitutes its own mores and bogeymen. From this perspective, you can't debunk climate doomerism any more than you can look at someone tossing and turning in their sleep and say, "Ha! You fool – you're not really showing up late for the final exam naked, you're just lying in your bed!" instead of saying "Huh, what in your life maps onto a feeling of being stressed and exposed?".

(I remember being really weirded out when I found out that apparently, having stress dreams about all your teeth falling out was a common trope. I’d been having this dream for years, but always figured it was so strange and specific that it must be a personal idiosyncrasy. Likewise, given how little flooding threatened the average person throughout history compared to other fears like disease and predators, it fascinates me how universal the flood myth is as a collective dream: climate change, Atlantis, various mythologies of the Cheyenne and Ohlone, Gilgamesh, Noah's Ark. Are there more such dream-myth archetypes?)

One theory for the underlying cause of the parallel evolution of the particular dystopian dreams we’re having right now is something like "misalignment.” AI is one instance of this, but the general principle is something about technological advances quickening the pace at which the modern environment differs from the ancestral environment, so that the subtler human and cultural capacities, the ones that had to evolve instead of being invented as technologies or discovered from first principles, become ineffectual; and load-bearing traditions and institutions get displaced faster than we can catch up to rebuilding infrastructure to handle all the auxiliary loads those traditions/institutions were bearing without us realizing it. The left calls it capitalism, the right calls it the decay of traditional values or something, the gray tribe calls it Moloch.

Also, "things are consistently getting better" seems largely orthogonal to "shit's on the brink of hitting the fan", rather than being a counterargument. If you're running a scam, your trajectory looks like "get more and more and more money and then oops implode and go to jail". If you're using up a finite resource, your trajectory looks like compounding returns followed by a nosedive. The higher you build on top of an unstable foundation, the less robust your system becomes; optimization pressures tend toward centralization pressures, which trade off against resiliency.

What If Dan Ariely And Francesca Gino Are Misunderstood Shamans?

My pet offshoot of the collective dreams theory is that most academic psychology is so fake it circles back around to being real. The trouble with psychology is that it takes complicated things (minds and their social interactions), flattens them to proxies simple enough to measure, and then is stuck trying to map those metrics back to the complex phenomena they’re supposed to be proxies for, which I think is epistemically impossible because the compression process introduces so much loss. The implicit, but in my opinion most important, step in the social-scientific method is the pop-psychization step – the process by which a study goes from a journal to a headline or to a “Researchers at such-and-such university found that…” in an airport book. This is because, I claim, everyone of sufficient age already knows everything important to be known about the human psyche. It’s just that this information is high-dimensional and gestalt, and thus natively represented on the level of intuition. Therefore the knowledge is not discoverable via a cargo-culting of the real scientific method as used in fields like physics, but it is discoverable by elicitation. Studies enter the popular awareness to the extent that their results are memetically powerful, and it’s the fact of being memetically powerful, not of being rigorous, that constitutes evidence about what human minds are and aren’t like.

In this view, power posing is real not because there are studies on it, or because the studies are good (they're not), but because those studies got popular. Fundamentally, the role of experimental psychology in culture is like a form of tarot or astrology: give people a language of rich, textured associations, and observe which ones naturally stick. It’s not even particularly important that the studies have good methodology or even that they not be faked! The important part is their inclusion in the marketplace of stories, the same way proverbs get collectively chosen and whittled.

Lucid Dreams

You know what’s a neat concept you don’t hear about much anymore? Apologetics. Like what Tertullian, Thomas Aquinas, or C.S. Lewis did for Christianity. Deciding first what your position is, then logicking up a defense. Rationalists hate this!

And it would be correct to hate, if you thought that knowledge mainly originated from symbolic reasoning. I don’t think that’s true. One problem, as I mentioned, is that the raw stream of perception relating to other humans, animals, and the environment is far too complex to be represented in low-dimensional symbolic logic. There’s just too much input to reason about. (See the history of AI.) Another problem is that for certain questions it's fundamentally hard to come up with verifiable closed-form solutions. The domains I have in mind are evopsych, signaling, and game theory, which are powerful and heavily overlapping universal forces. The trouble is that these cause everything, but figuring out how they do that in any given case is a minefield of just-so stories from which the first-principles reasoner is relatively helpless in selecting the true best explanation without the help of an keen intuition. Ultimately, the bulk of usable knowledge has to be tacit.

What’s an apologist, then? Someone who trusts their intuitions deeply and tries to investigate the underlying structures that give rise to those intuitions, rather than inventing some theory from first principles and overriding any instincts that disagree. Religious apologists know what they’re doing: they explicitly start from a base of faith and build from there. For other kinds of people, and for cultures thinking and dreaming as a whole, it’s less explicit; I think we can feel ourselves doing this process of fumbling around for gears-level explanations that match our intuitions, but there’s not much of a language for talking about doing it, at least within intellectual spheres, where it’s frowned upon.

One implication of taking apologetics seriously is, don’t write people off too fast for choosing a flimsy gears-level explanation for their intuition. They might be getting the wrong answer, but they’re using the right process. It’s rather like the scientific method, in fact – the alternation between observing evidence, generating hypotheses, and modifying theories – except that intuition is considered valid evidence, on both individual and collective scales. In other words, don’t reject a feeling because the popular rationalization of it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

On the other hand: among the accepted best practices in the field of dream analysis, I learned recently, is that if you dream about your mother, or your neighbor, or your best friend, you shouldn’t assume that the dream is directly about your relationship with that person; usually, the person represents some part of yourself, which has to take on a temporary human form in order to appear tangibly in the plot. Likewise, if a cultural story feels emotionally right to you, be wary of immediately taking it too literally or attaching it to a particular rationalization³.

Here’s a pithier way to describe apologetics. There’s an etymologically related word, apologue, meaning (Merriam-Webster) “an allegorical narrative usually intended to convey a moral”; I think most real cultural knowledge exists in this form. Thus: an apologist is a person who interprets apologues. Try it today!

1. This essay is an expanded version of a comment on that post.

2. The quality of most climate fiction, I’d argue, belies Friedman’s claim that the “variety of entertainment” available today makes daily life “strikingly better than in the past.”

3. In this sense, the weirder, more transparently pan-leftist strains of ecopessimism – climate feminism and climate justice and climate-change-as-divine-punishment-for-capitalism and even climate antiracism, which I just made up but am positive exists – are best characterized as dream logic. They’re more attuned to The Vibes Are Off and less wedded to the particulars of the object-level issue.