I could start with some anecdotes about high pharmaceutical and medical-procedure prices in the USA, and about much more reasonable prices that I and many others have encountered abroad. But why bother? Every American knows that healthcare-related prices in the US are insane. This crisis needs no introduction.

I should point out, though, since many Americans seem to have forgotten, that this crisis originated long before the risibly named Affordable Care Act took full effect in 2014 (ostensibly to help fix the situation). Thus, any enduring solution needs to cover not only the problems the ACA a.k.a Obamacare introduced, but also the more fundamental problems that have been festering for decades.

Some of the reasons for America’s grossly inflated healthcare prices are obvious. A law from 1986, for example, forces most hospital emergency departments to provide screening and stabilizing care regardless of patients’ ability to pay—which means that paying customers foot the bill via higher prices. The cartel-like organization of American doctors, and the American tort system with its lottery-like jury awards—the costs of which are, again, passed on to healthcare consumers—also have clearly contributed.

But there is one feature of American healthcare that towers above all others as a source of high costs. I am referring to health insurance, which generations of Americans have been gaslighted into seeing as a critical necessity.

Insurance makes sense in theory as a way of covering extreme medical expenses. In reality, American insurers long ago began covering even minor healthcare costs, and that gross overreliance on insurance has allowed the entire structure of healthcare prices to drift ever-upward.

Insurance inflates prices by inserting profit-making insurers into what should be relatively simple, transparent, cash-on-the-barrel transactions. It erodes buyers’ sensitivity to cash prices by replacing those prices with streams of smaller premium payments. (Via the same behavioral mechanism, credit-based purchasing has lifted the cash prices of houses, cars and higher education.) Employer and government/taxpayer subsidies for these premiums reduce buyers’ sensitivity further by hiding true prices.

Potentially worst of all is the “moral hazard” of costless consumption—after the out-of-pocket limit has been reached—that insurance introduces. Imagine an insurancized grocery system in which customers pay for their shopping up to the deductible limit, but thereafter can fill their shopping carts without further significant cost—what effect do you think this would have on grocery prices?

Obamacare has exacerbated these problems with its cost-hiding government subsidies and its mandate that insurers cover pre-existing conditions. The latter rule also has vitiated the fundamental risk-pooling advantage of insurance.

On the whole, Obamacare seems to have been designed to move the system—in a way that would be hard to reverse—towards the socialized medicine model its architects saw and presumably still see as the true ideal. What has really happened, though, is that the US healthcare system has become a worst-of-both-worlds arrangement, in which everyone nominally “has access to health insurance,” while the cost of that access is many, many times higher than it should be. I think it’s important to note as well that the unfair impoverishment of the tax-paying, premium-paying Americans who have to foot the bill for the whole thing corresponds to an unfair (and really stupendous) windfall on the insurer/provider side.

That the current system is defended fiercely by its beneficiaries, including not only insurers, hospital chains and Big Pharma, but also politicians who use Obamacare to buy votes, is to be expected. Unfortunately, their gaslighting is made much easier by “expert” commentators who—with only the rarest exceptions—continue to cling tightly to the assumption that insurance is the only valid basis for modern healthcare.

As a straightforward reality check, though, consider what would happen if insurance and all other forms of cost-spreading and cost-hiding were banned in healthcare markets, so that patients and healthcare goods and service providers had to revert to simple, open, cash-on-the-barrel transactions. If you run a drug company that currently bills insurers hundreds of thousands of dollars for a course of some drug treatment, or if you run a hospital that has been charging similarly exorbitant amounts for a few days of inpatient care, would you keep your prices up at those levels, where almost none of your customers could now afford them? Of course not—you would now be in a normal, competitive market situation, where survival requires making products and services affordable. And by the way, roughly a million American “medical tourists” every year fly to foreign countries where cash-on-the-barrel payment for private healthcare is still the norm, prices are much lower, and quality of care is often superior.

A better way

That part of the solution is obvious, then. But what about Americans who could not afford healthcare even with the drastically lower prices of a de-insurancized, market-based system?

Until modern developments including Medicare and Medicaid made them largely redundant, charity hospitals were ubiquitous in the US, and often were supported not by government budgets but by private philanthropists and even community funding drives. Some of these hospitals had endowments large enough to keep them going indefinitely without further external funding.

How much would it cost to convert 20% of US community hospitals—roughly 1,000 of them—to fully endowed, free-care status? The annual operating cost for an average US hospital has been estimated at about $250 million. For a no-frills, 200-bed charity hospital, an estimate of $200 million annually is probably conservative, and could be very excessive if costs come down with the elimination of insurance. In any case, multiplying that $200 million by 1,000, then dividing by a standard 5%-of-endowment-per-year expenditure assumption, suggests endowments totalling $4 trillion. That figure, though it might seem huge, represents only about twice the annual cost of Medicare and Medicaid plus Obamacare subsidies—and of course it is just a tiny fraction of the philanthropic potential of America’s wealthiest.

Again, if a network of charity hospitals were to be endowed to this extent—or if all hospitals had endowments allowing the same proportion of free and/or subsidized care—little or no further support would be needed to keep this charity-care system afloat. Charity hospitals and market hospitals together could replace the current Medicaid, Medicare and Obamacare-subsidy systems, removing entirely those gigantic taxpayer burdens.

Important details would have to be worked out, including how to confine charity care to those who really need it, and how to transition to the new system. But overall and in the long run, it could hardly fail to be a significant improvement over the current arrangement—an arrangement that is not only unreasonably burdensome and stressful, and a major driver of socioeconomic inequality, but also an ever-present reminder to citizens of the inadequacy (thus illegitimacy) of their government and elites.

***

The United States by any money-based standard is a wealthy country. Yet much of its population struggles financially—and this struggling subset extends well beyond the demographic groups that are traditionally dependent on handouts. Around 50 million people in the US use food banks, implying that they couldn’t feed themselves otherwise. A third of citizens and legal residents earn so little that they pay no federal income tax. A third—perhaps the same third—live paycheck-to-paycheck without savings. Meanwhile about nine million Americans work more than one job, presumably in a desperate attempt to make ends meet.

I could go on citing stats, but everyone knows that the “struggling class” is very large now, and struggles not so much because they can’t find work but because the prices for important things in their lives keep rising, while their wages fail to keep up.

Why their wages have failed to keep up is not hard to grasp. Mass immigration—including the legal immigration of skilled and semi-skilled foreigners—has put downward pressure on wages, as has the weakening of labor unions, DEI-based preferences (especially in years past) for blacks and browns over whites, offshoring, and automation/AI.

Why prices for important items keep going up—and up and up—also should not be hard to grasp, though it has been a remarkably under-covered story, as if the beneficiaries of those prices don’t want consumers to understand what has been happening.

What has been happening is that, mainly over the last century, American markets for healthcare goods and services, for housing, for college tuition and other big-ticket items have been modified from their traditional forms, financialized, in order to boost demand.

Financed Purchasing

Expanding credit has been the main form of financialization. Consumers like to think of expanding credit as a development that benefits them—empowers them to buy more stuff. But in an easy-credit society, it is really the business owners who are empowered. The business owners have no downside—they simply get more customers into their stores. The customers, on the other hand, while they can “buy” more stuff, are apt to be burdened increasingly by debt. More importantly, the advantage that customers think they have, in terms of buying power, is largely fleeting.

More customers means more demand, and we all know from Econ 101 that more demand, all else being equal, means higher prices. Conceivably in the long-term higher prices invite an increase in supply, which then brings prices down again. What they don’t teach in Econ 101, or at least don’t emphasize enough, is that the ramp in prices from expanded credit and other demand-boosting measures is not necessarily temporary.

Suppliers of goods and services don’t like to lower prices once they have raised them. Public companies tend to be punished in capital markets if their revenue ever drops. But even privately held companies in a given industry tend to adhere to their own industry culture or set of standard practices, and those practices, including pricing, can be very “sticky” once they are widely adopted. (Most American industries are effectively cartels in this loose sense.)

There are also technical, structural, and/or legal factors that can make it harder for producers to create enough supply to meet excess demand, even when they want to do so. Real estate is an obvious example: For decades now, there has been a finite and probably dwindling supply of real property in the vicinity of desirable places with good jobs and good schools. Even when there has been undeveloped land available for new home-building, states often have blocked such construction—or, worse, have devoted it to “low-income” or “multi-family” construction that dooms the quality of local schools and jobs. Moreover, corporations can and often do buy up much of the scarce stock of available housing, forcing would-be home buyers to rent from them instead. Meanwhile, mass immigration, the rise of two-earner families, and ultra-low mortage rates during 2009-2022 have helped keep demand on the boil.

The story of the American housing market and its levitation away from affordability thus illustrates that financialization in the form of expanded credit can, over time, paradoxically weaken consumers by reducing their buying power and burdening them with increasing debt. On the positive side of the ledger, businesses and their investors are enriched, overall economic activity (GDP) is expanded, and the stock market goes up and up—all of which tends to discourage any talk of harmful side effects.

There is another, more intuitive way of looking at this issue, which focuses on the actual payments made by the consumer. Actual payments are, after all, what the consumer is considering as he or she mulls over a potential purchase. When the price is a simple cash price and there is no credit in the picture, the buyer considers whether that full cash amount will excessively draw down (or exceed) his or her savings, whether the purchase represents good value in that context, and so on. When the price is, instead, not a lump sum but a string of much smaller payments including interest—let’s assume monthly payments—the buyer starts to consider how the size of each monthly payment relates to his or her monthly disposable income. The net price, in other words, stops being the principal basis for the buyer’s decision, which means that the buyer no longer exerts direct and downward pressure on that price, which in turn means that, ceteris paribus, the cash price can float upwards. Only when the size of each monthly payment becomes unmanageable in the context of monthly income, other credit sources, liquid savings, etc., does the buyer’s resistance start to intensify meaningfully.

We have seen this phenomenon at work not only in the housing market but also in the credit-goosed market for college tuition. Both of these markets are, of course, notorious for their price inflation in excess of CPI. The market for automobiles is well on its way to the same destination, though cars are not yet as badly overpriced because the switch to a credit-based norm for buying cars has begun relatively recently, and the used-car market is still largely cash-based.

This idea or hypothesis that financialization drives prices higher we can test with a simple thought-experiment: What would happen to real estate, college tuition and car prices if loan-based purchasing were suddenly outlawed? Obviously, prices in all three of those markets would have to come down dramatically, and stay down, due to the disappearance of a large subset of buyers. It should also be obvious that regaining and sustaining the previous levels of per-capita sales would require these industries to redesign their products and services so that selling them would be profitable at much lower prices.

Leasingization and Insurancization

Credit-based purchasing is not the only form of financialization. Another is to replace purchasing altogether with “leasing” or “subscribing,” as has been occurring, for example, in the markets for cars and higher-priced software. Both leasing and subscription replace lump-sum cash-on-the-barrel payments with long-term streams of monthly, quarterly or annual payments, and in that sense have the same magical effect as credit-based financialization: expanding the pool of buyers while raising effective prices.

Nowhere in the American economy is the malignancy of financialization more evident than in the market for healthcare goods and services. Here, of course, the old-fashioned practice of simply paying cash for doctors, hospital procedures, pharmaceuticals, etc. has been replaced by a system of “insurance”—which deserves to be in scare-quotes because it increasingly resembles a leasing or subscription-based system rather than a true insurance system.

The modern American health-insurance disaster originated, of course, from the understandable desire to insure people against medical costs that their savings could not cover. Health insurance in that sense was compellingly analogous to home insurance against a catastrophic fire or flood. Over time, of course, the insurancization of healthcare has come to cover not just catastrophic medical costs but virtually all medical costs. “What insurance do you have?” is the first question any American medical receptionist or pharmacist will ask a customer these days, even for small things like checkups or generic pills. And as I know all too well from my own profession, academic discussions of how to fix the American healthcare system universally assume that healthcare must be insurance-based—it is never an object of debate, other than in the context of advocacy for 100% socialized medicine.

Insurancization lifts costs principally in the way that other forms of financialization do: by replacing traditional cash prices with a stream of usually monthly payments. It also interposes a large industry between buyer (patient) and seller, even for small transactions—indeed, in the eyes of the care provider the insurer becomes the true “customer.” There is also the insurance-related phenomenon called “moral hazard,” which, after deductibles and co-pays are exhausted, manifests as greater risk-taking and less sensitivity to expenditure (“someone else is paying for it”). Other price-inflating factors include the law that mandates effectively “free” ER care for those who won’t pay, rules that force health “insurance” policies to cover pre-existing conditions, the cartel-like practices of the doctors’ lobby, and the rules and traditions by which corporations help hide costs by covering employees’ healthcare insurance premiums. (A 2009 piece in the Atlantic by David Goldhill does a decent job covering all these factors, even though it was written before the ruinous Obamacare law took effect.) Not all of these factors fit into the category I call “financialization,” but I think it’s fair to say that when you disrupt a market with financialization, it becomes easier to disrupt it in other ways too. I think it’s also obviously true that the American healthcare fiasco serves as the ultimate cautionary tale of how well-meaning “tweaks” to markets can end up inflating prices, hurting consumers and widening economic inequality.

And speaking of inequality, the impacts of financialization clearly extend beyond the economic realm. When a modern society stratifies into rich and poor, it becomes inherently less stable politically and fertile ground for radicalism. When young people can’t afford to buy a house or pay for healthcare (including pregnancy/childbirth care) they are less likely to marry and have children, and ultimately this can cause a society literally to die out. When citizens are overburdened with long-term financial obligations (mortgage payments, car loan payments, college loan payments, health insurance premiums) they are made much weaker relative to corporations and the state. In that sense, of course, corporations and the state have a strong interest in continuing and expanding financialization, and in discouraging discussions such as this one. Still, it is not hard to imagine that the vicious chain-reactions set in motion by financialization must eventually reach a point of crisis.

***

On a recent Saturday in always-sunny Palm Springs, California, a 25-year-old who could have been your son or mine drove his car into a parking lot behind a fertility clinic and set off a homemade bomb within the car, in an effort to obliterate the clinic and himself. The first media report I saw gave me the impression that the bomb was not very big, as the people in the clinic were only injured. In fact, the device was remarkably powerful, nearly destroying the low concrete clinic structure despite detonating five to ten meters away, and throwing pieces of the car—and of its driver—blocks away. It seems to have been the largest bomb built for such a purpose since 1995, when Timothy McVeigh used a 7,000-lb truck-borne fertilizer bomb to destroy the ten-story Federal building in downtown Oklahoma City.

The bomber of the Palm Springs fertility clinic, whose name was Guy Edward Bartkus, shared some important characteristics with McVeigh. He was young, male, and girlfriend-less. He was fascinated by things that go bang—explosives and incendiaries in his case. He felt alienated from modern society and hated its trends. He was functional but showed at least mild signs of mental illness. He seemed to have found a cause for which he was willing to die—and kill.

The particular cause that Guy Bartkus embraced might seem a parody of Internet-nurtured extremism were it not for the tragedy it engendered. Bartkus described himself, in online writings and a recorded manifesto before the attack, as a “pro-mortalist.” He hated being alive, believed that life brought only suffering, and held, moreover, that birth itself was wrong because the unborn could not consent to being born—thus his targeting of an IVF clinic.

Some media organizations fastened on this “pro-mortalist” theme in the days following the blast, declaring for example that there were “fears the movement may be on the rise.” Of course, there was and remains no real evidence of a substantial movement of pro-mortalists. In the world of the always-online can be found every half-baked idea and ideology imaginable—if you can imagine it, someone will have posted about it somewhere—but it is rare that any of these mutant mindsets results in an organized social malignancy. Why? Probably because the people who are captured by these fringe beliefs tend to lack the necessary social skills.

Still, while there may be no real pro-mortalist movement as yet, I can’t help wondering if the appearance of this unusual worldview in the ongoing story of American Performative Violence (my term for it) offers a useful hint about what is driving this story—a hint that reminds us of the deficiencies of the standard expert explanation.

The standard expert explanation for the acts of the Bartkuses and McVeighs is that they are lonely, resentful, mentally friable and socially inept males, usually young ones, whose crime would never have occurred but for American society’s libertarian laxity. In regard to the latter, the experts—in every big-publisher book on this subject—specifically blame weak restrictions on access to large-magazine firearms and bomb-making materials, weak restrictions on violence-inducing Internet content, and inadequate law-enforcement and social-services monitoring.

Since the experts’ prescriptions appear to require gun laws that violate the Constitution, as well as a police-state-like surveillance of citizens and restriction of Internet content, they haven’t been adopted to the degree needed to be effective. Thus, the problem continues to fester, even as the expert view of it remains unchallenged.

*

The idea I would like to introduce here is that the expert opinion and “received wisdom” on the causes of this type of violence place far too much emphasis on policy shortcomings, and far too little emphasis on cultural shortcomings—especially the loss of identity, social connection, and the overall sense of meaning and contentment.

First, though, some caveats and clarifications: The spectacular mass killings (actual or attempted) at issue here are distinct from the stealthier, one-by-one murders of “serial killers” such as Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy. The latter represent a comparable problem for law enforcement and public safety, but these men (rarely women) are, in a sense, psychopathic killers we will always have with us. They are not exclusive to modern technological societies—think of Jack the Ripper—nor even to the First World; the serial murderer Luis Garavito killed hundreds of young boys in Colombia in the 1990s, for example.

Moreover, mass shootings/bombings/stabbings/car-rammings and so on have two non-policy-mediated causes or inspirations that everyone already acknowledges, namely 1) militant Islam, for a subset of Muslim perpetrators; and 2) simple “monkey-see-monkey-do” imitation of acts that reliably (albeit mostly posthumously) bring fame/notoriety. Both are recent cultural developments—militant Islam is largely a reaction to modern secularizing influences and trends, while the imitative aspect of these crimes is enabled and enhanced by modern globalized electronic media and especially the Internet.

We should look to recent cultural developments for the causes and inspirations of American Performative Violence for the simple reason that it represents, at least in its frequency and intensity, a new social phenomenon. For the same reason, we should give less weight to policy-related explanations: American gun laws were much looser, and gun ownership per household much higher, in the mid 20^th century when these performative or “rampage” mass killings were still very rare[1].

In relation to these killings, I expect the most important difference between the mid-20^th century and the present is the difference in the overall health and structural integrity of American society. I could reel off a hundred sets of statistics, but probably the most relevant facts are that the US population in the pre-performative-violence era was mostly based on two-parent families, was relatively religious and churchgoing, was relatively socially interconnected, and (not counting African-Americans, who were sequestered by the apartheid system of the day) was racially and ethnically homogeneous. Most Americans, in short, had healthy and intact senses of identity, meaning, purpose and social rootedness in 1950—whereas a lot fewer have all that three quarters of a century later.

When people don’t have these things, they become more susceptible to despair, even if they are not consciously aware of it. And within any large population affected by despair, the most unstable and disconnected ones will be the first to “snap.” How will they snap? Mostly by killing only themselves—directly with a gun or pills or homemade noose, or indirectly through food, drink, and/or dangerous recreational drugs. Only a tiny minority, acutely affected by a compulsion to redeem their sense of uselessness, will opt for performative murder-suicide—a paradigm that the culture in effect has chosen for them. As loathsome as these murderers of the innocent may seem, their deaths too are “deaths of despair.”

*

The underlying problem therefore is not loose gun policy any more than it is loose “knife policy” that causes contemporary mass stabbings, or loose “car policy” that causes the increasingly common practice of driving cars murderously through crowds. Unfortunately, the roots of this cultural problem lie so deep that there probably isn’t any policy in a contemporary, democratic Western society that could solve it.

Western—and even “Western-adjacent”—societies have been going through rapid cultural, structural and demographic changes. These changes have multiple drivers, including the socially atomizing “technologicization” and related power of corporations in virtually every domain of ordinary life; the historically sudden establishment of parity or dominance by women in virtually all institutions and organizations [link]; and the strong rejection—as a concession to the fait accompli of mass immigration—of the old ethnonationalist basis for societies in favor of the new “contractual” or “free agent” model [link].

The new Western model of society, is, in short, an emasculated, polyglot conglomeration of lonely—and mostly childless—consumers, relatively bereft of any sense of identity or social connectedness, or even any stake in the future. The God that once animated this Western civilization and its feats died long ago, or switched to being some sort of not-very-effectual personal therapist.

Arguably the hardest problem here, though it may be the most neglected, is that the comforting cosmological sense of place that religion once provided has been left to science. If you listen to cosmology popularizers supported by the contemporary publishing industry, or to a high-profile space nerd like Elon Musk, the main message of science is that the universe, vast and wondrous, beckons us to explore it—so that maybe we shall even “become one with it” someday. However, if you ignore all the hopium and the book-selling propaganda, you may begin to grasp what the discoveries of science over the past few hundred years really have been telling us. This message, not such a nice one, is that we are, most likely, in comparison to the complexity of the universe and the development of its older entities, much as ants or even bacteria are to the human world. To grasp this, one doesn’t even have to believe in an infinite universe or an infinite multiverse of parallel universes—but once those potent concepts and the evidence for their reality are also grasped, it becomes hard to ignore the likelihood that our lives, our hopes, our moral systems, our efforts to invent “meaning,” are all incurably naïve, even delusional.

And, of course, once that dark reality is glimpsed, even unconsciously, inhibitions against antisocial behavior of all kinds will tend to be weakened.

In this view, then, American Performative Violence belongs in a broader category that I suggest could be termed “Positive Despair” because it features positive, or added, symptoms and behaviors—in this case, mass-murdering violence—in comparison to what is normal. If I am right, the incidences of this and other manifestations of social and existential despair are going to keep rising, increasingly blurring the line between “sick” and “healthy.”

***

[1] https://en./ wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Unruh

In the summer of 1950, Nobel-winning nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi didn’t understand the scale of the cosmos as we understand it today. But he knew that it was at least hundreds of millions of light-years across, encompassing thousands of galaxies and more than a trillion stellar systems. Unless Earth was a vanishingly rare exception, the universe should be teeming with life-forms, whose civilizations often would be far more advanced than ours.

And yet, as he asked his lunchmates at Los Alamos one day that summer, “where is everybody?” ET visitations to Earth seemed either absent entirely, or—even if some might be marked by UFO sightings—impossible to pin down as such. This discrepancy between the theoretical abundance of ETs and their observed scarcity or elusiveness became known as the Fermi Paradox.

Ponderers of this supposed conundrum have devised dozens if not hundreds of potential solutions. The most popular, unsurprisingly, are those that echo contemporary human concerns over climate change, nuclear war, rogue AI, etc., positing that such self-made disasters—and maybe also natural disasters like asteroid strikes and supervolcano eruptions—tend to extinguish civilizations before they can reach the star-faring stage. Elon Musk has made clear that he worries deeply about such hazards and hopes to minimize their impacts by making humans “multiplanetary,” for example by colonizing Mars.

The popular, accident-centered conjectures explaining the Fermi Paradox generally assume that in the absence of such cataclysms, civilizations will continue to advance scientifically and technologically, eventually venturing out to the stars. This premise also underlies the contemporary talk of a science- and tech-driven “Golden Age,” in which space travel will become routine.

But what if civilizations normally do not continue to advance beyond a stage of very limited and local space travel? What if the very process of scientific advancement in understanding the cosmos creates a toxic byproduct, analogous to pollutants from industrialization but psychological rather than chemical, such that people inevitably lose the will to explore that cosmos—and ultimately can survive only by regressing to static, relatively pre-scientific social forms?

A Bizarre Conceit

Although at first this might come across as unhinged doomerism, the idea that at least some important parts of science are psychologically toxic is an old and somewhat respectable one. Humans, plausibly as a condition of their civilization-building dynamism, tend to cling to a worldview in which they are very intelligent and special, there is higher “meaning” and “purpose” to their existence, and the universe is somehow about them. As philosophers have been pointing out for hundreds of years, science’s most consistent theme has been the refutation of this grandiose self-image: ”dissuading man from his former respect for himself, as if this had been nothing but a piece of bizarre conceit,” in the words of Nietzsche, who certainly did consider this a bizarre conceit:

However high mankind may have evolved – and perhaps at the end it will stand even lower than at the beginning! – it cannot pass over into a higher order, as little as the ant and the earwig can at the end of its ‘earthly course’ rise up to kinship with God and eternal life. The becoming drags the has-been along behind it: why should an exception to this eternal spectacle be made on behalf of some little star or for any little species upon it! Away with such sentimentalities!

But can humanity survive without such sentimentalities, as science smashes them one by one?

It’s a tough question to answer, since it concerns an influence that probably works mostly beneath conscious awareness, in a psychosocial environment that is complex, to put it mildly. But one thing that seems obviously true of pretension-puncturing scientific discoveries is that they can take generations to “sink in.” Even evolutionary theory, which was already broadly accepted by scientists more than 150 years ago, does not yet seem to have fully replaced our ancient picture of ourselves as creatures made in God’s image. That delay may be attributable to powerful mechanisms of “denial,” to simple ignorance of science, to the residual competing influence of religion, and presumably also to various other socioeconomic factors that tend to counter or crowd out existential questions.

In any case, scientific advances that can create such “existential dissonance” tend to be relatively recent developments on the human timeline. Neuroscience’s refutation of our “free will” illusion occurred only in the last two decades, so unsurprisingly it has hardly begun to be assimilated into our self-image and our moral structures.

Among the sciences, cosmology is plausibly the greatest producer of existential dissonance, and in that sense its influence too has developed only recently. While it is often said that Copernicus demoted us from the center of the universe in the 1500s, his theory was not as revolutionary as it is commonly portrayed. The traditional, pre-Copernican model of the cosmos held that the Earth with its God-chosen beings lay at the center of existence, while all else revolved around it. Copernicus’s model made just one change, putting our sun at the center, which allowed a simpler, more elegant account of celestial motions even as it kept our stellar system in its place of supreme privilege. Thus, a fundamentally anthropocentric view of the universe continued to dominate cosmology—and as late as a century ago, astronomers still believed that the cosmos was very small and tidy, consisting of just our galaxy, with our solar system at or near the center.

It was only with the development, in the 1920s, of better techniques for measuring stellar distances that astronomers finally understood that the universe was much, much larger, consisting of multiple galaxies, among which ours held no special status—just as our Sun, in a spiral arm far from the Milky Way’s center, held no special status among its galactic peers.

That was a major change. Even so, when I was coming of age a half-century later, the scale of the universe still seemed somewhat manageable. Like millions of other children, I watched Carl Sagan’s Cosmos documentary series in the early 1980s, learning that the universe contains not just a handful of galaxies but at least tens of thousands of them, yet I wouldn’t say that that put an irreparable dent in my belief in human potential. It still seemed conceivable that mankind, with exponentially improving scientific knowledge and technology, could spread outward and someday comprehend—maybe even “conquer”—it all.

The expansion of our cosmic model was still just getting started, though. By the turn of the millennium, with the help of tools like the Hubble Telescope, standard models assumed billions of galaxies. Astronomers also were starting to use the term “observable universe” to delineate the space their telescopes could reach, which, despite its vastness, was apparently incomplete. Indeed, they increasingly embraced the idea that the universe is ever-expanding, and is not just tens or hundreds of billions of light years across but infinite—in all dimensions, presumably including dimensions we can’t perceive.

In a truly infinite cosmos, any local reality would have essentially identical variants elsewhere: “parallel worlds.” As physicist Brian Greene put it in his 2011 book The Hidden Reality, “I find it both curious and compelling that numerous developments in physics, if followed sufficiently far, bump into some variation on the parallel-universe theme.”

MWI

The best-known and most widely held parallel-world theory these days is the “Many Worlds Interpretation” (MWI), initially devised by Hugh Everett III (1930-1982) in the mid-1950s while he was a physics PhD student under John Wheeler at Princeton. Everett’s work was mostly ignored while he was alive, though other physicists, notably Bryce DeWitt and David Deutsch, did much to popularize it later among physicists and the general public—and to extend it and give it its present name.

MWI is called an “interpretation” because it tries to make sense of a conundrum at the heart of quantum mechanics: In certain types of experiment, any quantum-scale particle such as an electron or a photon seems to possess an innate multiplicity. In other words, it manifests as a ghostly ensemble of particles (with different positions and velocities) and only when an experimenter tries to detect it more directly does it stop acting like a ghostly ensemble and resolve to just one particle. The leading interpretation in quantum mechanics’ first half-century or so was that this “collapse” to just one state is induced by the experimenter’s act of observation, and that the other, left-behind states are somehow not real. Everett proposed instead that all these states are real and essentially represent different versions of the particle that end up being captured—by different versions of the experimenter—in different universes. In short, MWI holds that reality consists of multiple universes, in which, collectively, anything that can happen does happen.

Everett’s idea was rejected at first, as new ideas that threaten the status quo and its defenders typically are. But the reaction to MWI wasn’t just the usual circling of the wagons by the old guard. Even many who admired the theory’s elegance were discomfited by it. As Oxford philosopher of physics Simon Saunders said to a reporter in 2007, “The multiverse will drive you crazy if you really think about how it affects your life, and I can’t live like that. I’ll just accept Everett and then think about something else, to save my sanity.”

Still, MWI was and remains elegant and consistent with experimental results. As alternative interpretations of quantum mechanics have fallen by the wayside, it has risen steadily in popularity, not just among physicists but also among science popularizers—and popular audiences, as suggested by the success of the MWI-themed 2023 movie Everything Everywhere All at Once.

MWI recently received further support when Google reported a “quantum supremacy” demonstration by its experimental quantum computer Willow. A feat of quantum supremacy is a feat that a quantum computer—whose computational bits exist not as discrete 0 or 1 bits but in ghostly superpositions of both—can achieve that an ordinary “classical” computer can never match. It is regarded as an empirical proof that quantum computing is real, which for many physicists also bolsters the validity of MWI, because the idea of quantum computing—first developed by Deutsch in the mid 1980s—is that such computers gain their advantage in effect by performing computations across different universes.

—from Google Quantum AI blog post 9 Dec 2024

A Concealed Toxicity

The scientific and technical elites who have brought us these developments have been, at best, silent about their implications, and at worst, actively deceptive—although maybe they have been deceiving themselves too. As I was rewatching Cosmos (1980) recently, I noticed it was now prefaced by Ann Druyan, Sagan’s widow and a writer and director on the series, who invokes the “soaring spiritual high” of science’s “central revelation: our oneness with the universe.” Essentially every mainstream author or commentator on cosmology has had similarly upbeat things to say—about the beauty of the universe, and/or the cleverness of humans in their recent leaps of discovery. This is not just self-deception—these experts have to sell books and other media content, and publishers want positive themes.

But it is all deceptive. Why? Because, again, science’s central revelation—cosmology’s especially—is the insignificance of humanity, and for MWI and other infinite-cosmos theories this is not just a relative insignificance but an absolute, one-over-infinity insignificance.

The MWI cosmos is, in a technical sense, more splendid and elegant than anything found in human religion. What could be more perfect, what could be more complete, than an infinitude in which everything that can happen does happen? The problem is that this perfect completeness, or maybe unendingness, leaves no room for “purpose,” “meaning,” or “achievement” in any substantive sense. It also mocks our childish notion that we could somehow explore and/or “conquer” it all.

In fact, MWI implies that there is no higher purpose or meaning to any human being’s actions or existence, other than by filling out, in an infinitesimal way, the infinite space of possibility. Are you a good person in this universe? Are you “successful”? How can this be substantially meaningful (from the perspective of a Creator who transcends the multiverse), if otherwise indistinguishable variants of you are bad and unsuccessful in other universes—and presumably average to a mediocrity across all instances? When you combine this “MWI view” with the modern neuroscientific view of behavior—as being determined moment-to-moment by innumerable, mostly subconscious factors while our conscious selves stand by as purblind spectators—you start to get a picture of humans as “non-player-character” (NPC) automata in a sort of video game with infinite parallel playthroughs.

To the extent that people see themselves and their lives from this perspective, they are likely to lose a lot of their motivations for doing things—and not just the great and ambitious things but also the ordinary, pro-social behaviors that keep societies from coming unglued. Such behaviors are rooted in concepts of good and bad, meaning and purpose, and MWI erodes all that as completely as would a revelation that we live in a simulation.

MWI defies our traditional self-image so starkly and extensively that it also calls into question the “sapiens sapiens” label we have given ourselves. Perhaps, when compared to other civ-building species in our galaxy, we aren’t very smart at all. Perhaps our simple ape brains are already nearing the limits of what they can do—limits that fall well short of what even the most basic star-faring endeavors require.

Signs of Despair

Again, big changes in our understanding of our place in the cosmos can take generations to sink in, and MWI and other infinite-cosmos notions began seeping into the popular mind only recently. It may be that only children born in this millennium are being—and have been—forced to confront these ideas in a substantial way during the impressionable years when their models of the world and moral structures come together. If so, it may take another decade or two for this particular form of despair to be recognized as a mass phenomenon, distinguishable from all the other forms of despair out there.

In the meantime, despair is undoubtedly prevalent in our materially prosperous civilization, particularly among the young. “Adolescent mental health continues to worsen” reads a recent CDC headline, over a story that notes that in 2023 about 40% of American students had “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness.” A commission set up by Lancet Psychiatry issued a report last summer concluding that “in many countries, the mental health of young people has been declining over the past two decades, signalling a warning that global megatrends and changes in many societies are increasing mental ill health.” Whatever is driving this pandemic of despair and depression seems also to be promoting “nihilism” and “doomerism” among the same youthful demographic.

While this putative trend may be attributable mostly to other social and economic disruptions of recent decades—from electronic media overexposure to the high cost of family formation—perhaps some is being driven by science, which after all has been moving in the same direction, displacing religiously based beliefs and ethics, for centuries now. In any case, despair caused by other factors is treatable in principle, whereas the one served up by science seems incurable.

One of my premises here is that the people who built Western civilization couldn’t have done so without believing, at least subconciously, that there is (or probably is) meaning and purpose in life and the universe. If so, then removing that sense of meaning and purpose would likely remove that civ-building dynamism our ancestors had, and the only way to recover meaning and purpose—perhaps the only way for humans to survive, in the long-term—would be to renounce and suppress most science and technology and revert to more primitive social forms.

One would expect to see this cultural arrest and regress play out first in the Western societies that have been the most diligent in jettisoning religion. And indeed, the essentially post-Christian societies of Northwestern Europe now look pretty moribund in most respects compared to their peers; certainly, they lack the “ad astra” energy of the contemporary USA.

The current hoopla over AI raises the question: Couldn’t we create advanced robots and robotic starships that self-replicate and relentlessly explore outer space, without regard for the apparent pointlessness of the endeavor—in fact, without any emotion at all? Yes, in principle, if we could remain motivated long enough to develop the necessary AI and robotics tech. But autonomous robot exploration is not the same as human exploration. Moreover, it’s not hard to imagine these clever creations eventually finishing off their depressed, listless, impotent creators, in a perfect and final example of a “cure” that kills the patient.

The idea that cosmology and other key branches of science eventually become toxic to a technological society offers a solution to Fermi’s Paradox because it is plausible that not only humans but also other intelligent species that emerge in the cosmos and start venturing into space face this same problem—this fundamental conflict between, on the one hand, the self-delusions needed for basic civilization-building and progress, and on the other, the delusion-bursting science needed to reach the stars.

Incidentally, cosmology’s hint about our relative inferiority as a species suggests another, complementary solution: The few star-faring civs that do exist in our vicinity either do not care about us, or, even if they are curious enough to visit, don’t waste time trying to communicate—firstly because we are too primitive to process what they would have to say, and secondly because almost anything they could convey, particularly regarding the nature of the cosmos, would injure us. 

***

Originally published February 12, 2011

I’d be sitting in a big beach house in Malibu, living the Charlie Harper life, if I had a nickel for every time I read about a celebrity who’s allegedly or admittedly hooked on booze or pills or coke or meth or some such substance. What is it about these people that makes them so inordinately likely to get addicted? If half the stories in the media are true, substance abuse among actors and rock stars is basically pandemic—certainly much more prevalent than the roughly one-in-eight rate recorded among Native Americans, who are the most addiction-prone demographic group identified in official stats (probably because no one has thought to consider celebrities as a separate demographic group).

The more I ponder this question, though, the more I wonder how some actors and other performers resist addiction—considering how many factors there are in their lives that push them into that behavioral trap.

From the most obvious (to me), to the least obvious:

#1. Asynchronous lives

Successful actors rarely have normal working routines. Their schedules bring to mind that saying about the lot of soldiers in war—brief moments of intensity punctuating long stretches of boredom. That boredom has to be endured somehow, and drugs and booze are the classic tools for making time pass swiftly.

#2. Surrounded by enablers

Being rich and famous usually means getting your way ~100% of the time. People just don’t say “no” to a celebrity. So in addition to having a greater need for drugs, they have less trouble getting them. Even when they run up against the law, they tend to get extra slack—not just because they can afford expensive lawyers but because they are who they are.

#3. Capacity for self-control grows weaker.

Self-control, mediated largely through prefrontal cortex (PFC) structures in the brain, is now recognized as one of the keys to resisting addiction. But self-control is like a muscle—you gotta use it or lose it. Living a pampered, empowered celebrity life as an adult means losing it.

#4. Development of adult self-control may be blocked if you were/are a child celebrity.

Childhood and early adulthood comprise the period of life when your basic capacity for self-control is still being formed, via the development of the PFC, the last brain region to mature. If you go through that period with little need to exercise self-control, and frequently hit your brain with alcohol and lots of recreational drugs (which tend to weaken the PFC’s restraining influence on behavior), then by the time you reach adulthood, you and your functionally impaired PFC might be permanently incapable of ever having a normal, modern, adult level of self-control—just as a childhood polio victim with underdeveloped legs will never run a marathon.

#5. Exposure to a hugely powerful gateway drug: fame.

Shortly after Michael Jackson died, I heard someone—Liz Taylor?—quote something he had told her once about being on stage in front of thousands of screaming fans: It had given him a bigger rush than any drug.

I can believe it. But even celebs can’t be on stage, in front of the fans and the paps and getting that intense fame rush, every day. For some of them, the fame-lulls must be hard to endure without artificial stimulation.

I’d guess that the hardest fame-lull of all to endure is the one that comes with the final, permanent slide into obsolescence, when the fame rush can no longer be attained in the normal way, and one’s agent won’t return one’s calls, and drugs (or reality-TV infamy?) are the only options. Drugs are often blamed for ending celebrities’ careers, but I’d guess that in many cases the career slide starts first, prompting more and more drug use, and then the vicious, quickening spiral of personal and money and legal troubles, bad press, rehab, and career oblivion.

#6. Low self-control is probably already in their genes.

The development of a high capacity for self-control is arguably one of the proudest achievements of Western peoples and their culture. Even for small children a high degree of self control is a remarkably strong predictor of future success in the modern world. But there seem to be a few narrow areas of modern life in which low-self-control people still thrive.

I’m referring to performers—actors and musicians, mainly, but also some athletes—and it seems plausible that when they are performing, their innate lack of inhibition or their ability to switch it off at will becomes a bonus. It enables them to access and develop talents that the rest of us can only dream about.

David Foster Wallace touched on this in an essay, “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart:”

It is not an accident that great athletes are often called “naturals” because they can, in performance, be totally present: they can proceed on instinct and muscle-memory and autonomic will such that action and agent are one.

As far as I can tell, there is hardly any empirical evidence for this idea, although that may be only because hardly anyone has formally and rigorously looked into it. This 2004 U-Mass PhD dissertation on football players and impulsivity reported that:

Players’ scores of functional impulsivity related to their athletic success; players who reported that they like to make split-second decisions and take advantage of unexpected opportunities were also more likely to be rated positively by a professional scout, play and start in games, and survive in the NFL.

The idea that people with ADHD—closely related to impulsivity—have an edge in sports has also been bouncing around, although, again, more as a common-sense observation than as an experimentally tested scientific finding.

It may be hard for us ordinary folks to see at first why innate impulsivity could be so important in these public performance contexts. We in the modern West are so used to watching pro ballgames and Hollywood feature films that I think we are largely unaware of the surreal intensity of what is going on, physically and emotionally, on the field and on the screen. It’s just not easy for most of us to operate at that level, though. We would hold back or freeze up.

Here’s Wallace on his own inhibitory issues during minor competitive tennis matches:

Ever try to concentrate on doing something difficult with a crowd of people watching? … worse, with a crowd of spectators maybe all vocally hoping you fail so that their favorite will beat you? In my own comparatively low-level junior matches, before audiences that rarely hit three digits, it used to be all I could do to manage my sphincter. I would drive myself crazy: “…but what if I double-fault here and go down a break with all these folks watching?”…

Now, obviously, some actors and athletes have had to exert a substantial amount of self-control—e.g., in being disciplined enough to practice their skills—to get where they wanted to go, and in that sense they should be less impulsive and more resistant to addiction. Yet there may be something about repeated performance, in which the usual prefrontal restraints are forced to fall away and action becomes efficient and instinctive, that has the opposite effect. Check out this passage from an acting coach’s blog:

If the actor is to allow themselves to follow their impulses without blockages, then the self-editing, self-criticism and self-abuse of self-consciousness must be sidestepped. The actor must respond freely within the truth of the moment.

I.e., just do it, and don’t get all prefrontal and inhibited about it. Logically, if you practice this sort of thing enough, it will, so to speak, come naturally, and you will follow your impulses without blockages, and maybe without being able to get those “blockages” back again, even when you need them.

Stimulant drugs actually force this disinhibitory process in the brain, and in that sense can be a performance-enhancer. That’s probably why cocaine traditionally has been so popular among actors and other performers, particularly those doing live shows. As a kid I used to wonder why top comedians doing stand-up—e.g., Tim Allen, Robin Williams, Steve Martin—so often looked watery-eyed.

The key point here, though, and the sad irony, is that even without practicing impulsivity or forcing it with drugs, an inborn impulsivity, in the right environment and with the right mix of other talents, may lift a person to the realm of fame and fortune—yet leave him or her defenseless against the life-ruining temptations that lie in wait there.

Why isn’t this studied more? Why don’t the researchers who currently study, say, the causes of Native Americans’ high addiction rates, turn their attention to the Hollywood tribe or to former elite athletes? How about substance-use prevalence analyses, and genome-wide association studies, among these celebrities and their offspring? I suspect that if such studies could ever be done, we’d conclude from them that celebrity, at least medically speaking, is something to be feared more than desired.

Originally published 20 January 2011

I was just a kid when Close Encounters came out, but I remember thinking, even then, how cool it would be to have a serious, well-equipped government operation like the one depicted in the film. A bit unusually for its time, Close Encounters created a sort of ideal world in which the Feds were reasonably competent and benign, had good reasons for keeping their secrets, and approached the UFO phenomenon with a wonderfully organized, can-do spirit.

Spielberg’s film also created an ideal top ufologist, the Claude Lacombe character, who was played in the movie by Francois Truffaut. I remember being particularly interested to learn that he was based on a real person, Jacques Vallee, whose writings evidently had impressed Spielberg.

Years later I looked into the burgeoning “alien abduction” scene in America, but concluded that most of what was happening there was happening on the couches of abduction “therapists” and in the fertile imaginations of “abductees.” I never really got into what I considered the more serious and interesting side of ufology, the study of sightings and close encounters: the Jacques Vallee stuff.

Nearly two decades on, I’ve started to delve into the ufology literature again in my spare time, beginning with two of Vallee’s best-known books, Dimensions and Confrontations. I hope soon to read his new one, Wonders in the Sky, which I understand is an updated version of Passport to Magonia, his 1969 classic. But already I have a few critical observations about Vallee and ufology (and even about Spielberg), and if someone else hasn’t raised these points already, maybe some ufologists will find them useful.

1. Beware the lone scientist

The Frenchness of the Close Encounters character Claude Lacombe made him seem a man apart—a lone, heroic scientist. But in the reality of the film, he wasn’t alone; he was surrounded by other scientists as well as by engineers, doctors and other technical people. So it is in real life with normal scientists. They work on teams, in effect, in vast leagues with lots of rules, and just about everything they do can be, and frequently is, questioned by their fellow scientists—in the lab, via e-mail, at conferences, in the peer-review gauntlet before publication, in the commentaries after publication, and in the to-ings and fro-ings of the grant-proposal process. You know that expression, “it takes a village”? Well, modern scientists live in something like a village, where nosy people are always looking over their shoulders, watching for mistakes. In that world, mistakes can bring very serious professional consequences.

Naturally, that intense critical culture tends to keep modern scientists on their toes. But the lone scientist doesn’t have that assistance. The lone scientist often doesn’t even address his writings to fellow scientists, but instead addresses a popular audience. Thus the lone scientist has to rely, for the most part, on his own internalization of scientific culture. And for most of us, over a long stretch, that just isn’t going to be enough.

I think that explains why, as I read Vallee’s writings on UFOs, I was almost immediately reminded of Terence Meaden and ‘crop circles’.

Meaden had been a physics professor at a Canadian university before coming home to the UK and, among other things, taking up his crop circles investigations. He tried to interest other researchers in the circles phenomenon—he reached out to professional atmospheric physicists as far away as Tokyo and Oklahoma. But he was basically on his own, a lone scientist, and we all know what happened: A bit of methodological laxity crept in, a bit of hubris—that “trust me, I’m a scientist” stuff—and before he knew it, he was being led down the proverbial garden path by two old guys with ropes and planks.

And just so it’s clear, I’m not really blaming Meaden. I think that what happened to him might well have happened to any scientist in his shoes—any scientist brave enough to pursue one of these offbeat phenomena with little or no cultural support.

For the same reason, I don’t really blame Vallee for what I see as the shortcomings of his own work. I just think it’s worth pointing out that he was operating in an intellectually hazardous, “lone scientist” situation, especially after the US government officially gave up on its UFO investigations in 1968.

What are the shortcomings of Vallee’s work? I don’t think a full list is necessary, but the gist is pretty much the same as in Meaden’s case: Vallee emphasizes his scientific background and claims to use scientific methods, but then he routinely holds up, as “evidence,” cases that, in my opinion, an ordinary scientist would not even consider—because they rest on very-lightly-confirmed or even unconfirmed testimony, often rendered years after the supposed event. For example:

An Army officer who served during the Korean war has described an even more remarkable incident in which an orange luminous object came over a village that was being shelled by a whole artillery unit in the Iron Triangle area. It hovered at low altitude, apparently unharmed by the powerful explosions…. The next day the entire artillery unit was violently ill and had to be removed from duty, but no formal report was ever submitted to identify the source of the strange illness.

Apparently neither Vallee nor the original investigator thought it necessary to confirm this tale with other members of the unit before publishing it.

And that is an almost random example I have selected by flipping through the pages. Vallee also gives his readers many inherently dubious witness-testimony stories from South America. In fact, the Brazilian case with which Vallee grandly leads off Confrontations comes across not as a likely UFO encounter but as a likely UFO-cult suicide. He spends some pages, too, on the famous Dr. X case in France, which does not seem to have unequivocal evidence of UFO involvement, but seems to belong more in the spirit-possession/shamanic-transformation genre. (Frankly, some of the adventures of Dr. X, to which Dr. X is almost always the sole witness, remind me of the antics of the notorious “UFO abductee” Linda “Cortile”.)

In Dimensions there are quite a few historic accounts, and many are interesting, but again, they don’t always provide much in the way of conclusive or even useful evidence. Vallee for some reason includes such tales as the so-called “miracle of Guadeloupe.” Speaking of which, just consider the “miraculous” image below; does it look like something that was made by UFO beings and thus belongs in the ufological literature? Or does it look like something painted by an all-too-human 16th century artist, presumably with Church support?

This pattern of rather soft thinking seems to continue in Vallee’s writings today, e.g., in his recent musings on the causes of crop circles—next to which, Terence Meaden’s own hypotheses about linearly-sweeping atmospheric plasma vortices seem conservative.

On the whole, I’m glad that Vallee took the trouble to do all his research, much of which is fascinating and thought-provoking. His non-ET hypothesis about the UFO phenomenon certainly seems worth bearing in mind. But it’s important to understand that, though we might wish to believe otherwise (check out this homage to him on Boing-Boing), Vallee never was a Claude-Lacombe-type scientist, and, in his relatively lonely situation, maybe never could have been. If there’s a constructive lesson here it’s that ufology, ideally, should not look to such lone, “heroic” researchers but instead to the development of a society of researchers—a society bound by a fairly strict culture, and by regular interactions that help them maintain that strictness in their work.

2. The TMI problem

By far the largest problem with Vallee’s work, as I see it, is the lack of “editing” of cases. And I think it’s fair to say that that same lack of editing is practiced in the rest of ufology. I’m not channelling Phil Klass here; I’m not suggesting that all UFO cases should be dumped out and that the whole phenomenon’s a crock. I’m saying that there are plenty of very good UFO cases, and that they shouldn’t be crowded out by the weak and dubious ones.

I guess that ufologists will always want to note down almost every UFO-related claim in their databases, and there is nothing wrong with that. But if I could get them to do just one thing differently, it would be to confine their published analyses and the majority of their resources to cases that involve multiple, independent witnesses—and especially independently obtained film, photos or radar records. Otherwise, they run an unacceptably high risk that their conception of the phenomenon will be (and is being) distorted by hoaxes, hallucinations, and so forth—in addition to the fact that promoting weak cases makes ufologists look unserious. (Maybe in another post, I will go over some of the evidence regarding hallucinations, which are much more common in the population than ufologists seem to realize.)

The value of having multiple witnesses is obvious, but the value of having independent witnesses seems to be overlooked much of the time. Years ago, some friends and I went out one night and made a crop circle near Avebury in England. The next day, campers in the area reported having seen “strange lights” over the hill where we made the circle. I have the advantage of knowing that no such lights appeared in connection with the making of the circle, but even without that advantage, ufologists should give little weight to such after-the-fact reports, because they are not independent—they are connected to, and very possibly triggered by, the initial event in question. Unfortunately, Vallee’s caseload, and the UFO lore generally, are full of questionable reports like these.

3. Attempt Less, Achieve More

Vallee’s listed “reasons” for believing in his non-ET hypothesis often read as non-sequiturs, e.g.:

The total number of close encounters far exceeds the requirements for a sophisticated survey of our planet.

Of course, for all we know, UFO sightings could mark the arrivals of millions of distinct, highly developed species, travelling by a variety of modes and with a variety of motives—from surveying to tourism and even joke-playing (hey, let’s have some fun and start a religion among these dumb savages). But I imagine that other ufologists by now have pointed out the obvious flaws in Vallee’s theorizing. And in any case, I doubt that ufologists should even bother with ambitious analyses of their data and the development of grand theories.

The first reason has to do with our limitations as a species. As one of Stanislaw Lem’s characters puts it in Solaris, “Any attempt to understand the motivation of these occurrences is blocked by our own anthropomorphism. Where there are no men, there cannot be motives accessible to men.”

The second reason has to do with ufology’s particular limitations. Ufologists today generally do not have the sophisticated resources needed to collect a lot of data about the nature of alien spacecraft, if that is what these objects are. On the other hand, the scientific community does have these resources. Yet the scientific community has long been scared away from the UFO subject.

Therefore, as I see it, modern, amateur-driven ufology would accomplish a great deal simply by persuading the scientific community to get involved. They could do that by focussing on a few, unimpeachable cases (which in my view, definitely excludes Roswell), and even moreso by gathering new unimpeachable evidence, for example multiple, independent video recordings—preferably fine-grained enough to resolve shapes and structural details. With such evidence, they should simply get in Congress’s face, and in the scientific community’s face, until attention is paid and resources are devoted. Easier said than done, I know! But it seems to me that if this becomes their main focus, they have a greater likelihood of achieving something than they do at present.

4. The Spielberg Effect

One last quick thing I want to mention: Thanks largely to Spielberg, the world of Hollywood movies is one in which politicians and scientists tend to take—and are often abruptly forced to take—the UFO phenomenon seriously. I have seen other writers comment to the effect that Spielberg and other filmmakers have thereby helped the world to accept this phenomenon.

I disagree. In the early part of Close Encounters, and in his later films, Spielberg showed his frustration with the official, government, sweep-the-stuff-under-the-rug attitude towards UFOs. So partly his work has been a reaction to a trend that was already in place at least from the late 1960s. But I think the popular phenomenon he has stoked has also worsened the situation, by making it harder for the scientific community to take UFOs seriously again.

Scientists start out as kids too, and enjoy watching films such as Close Encounters. I suspect that a lot of them would secretly love to do some serious ufology. In the days when UFOs were taken halfway seriously at official levels in the US, ufology might even have been a plausible career choice. As I understand it, ufology then was much more of a “techie” activity, involving lots of aerospace and physics guys with horn-rimmed glasses and slide rules. But since then, thanks largely to Spielberg and others in Hollywood, ufology—or UFO “enthusiasm” anyway—has become surrounded by a less technical, more popular, New Agey, just-gotta-believe culture, which I think is essentially repellent to scientists and other technically trained people.

Thus mainstream science may never pay attention to UFOs, until perhaps, as in so many movies, it is suddenly forced to by the phenomenon itself. If that happens, all the contributions of Vallee and other ufologists could end up being simply ignored, and ultimately forgotten.

Originally published March 12, 2008

Decades ago, at the dawn of the television age, Marshall McLuhan described what was happening as Western society overhauled its 500-year-old nervous system, replacing print with electronic media. “The new electronic interdependence,” he wrote in The Gutenberg Galaxy, “recreates the world in the image of a global village.” McLuhan did not see this as progress; indeed he foresaw Western culture entering “a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence.”

But the fact that our brains are practically hardwired to electronic media these days makes us susceptible to all kinds of social contagion, not just “panic terrors.” One of these contagion phenomena, known to social scientists as “the bandwagon effect,” is particularly relevant in primary-election season.

The bandwagon effect refers to the tendency of voters to be supportive of a candidate purely because he or she is perceived as popular. Thus a small or local success for a candidate – a good outcome in an early primary, or a jump in a local poll – can lead infectiously to a broader popularity, however undeserved by other criteria. After his wins in Iowa and New Hampshire in early 2004, for example, John Kerry moved up sharply in the polls and became the front-runner.

The effect is far from being the only influence on voter decision-making. But its existence has been demonstrated in several well-known social science experiments, and the importance that candidates, journalists and voters now deliberately place on early primary contests.

Perhaps because of the unflattering light it sheds upon the electoral process, the bandwagon effect is seldom called by its right name. George H.W. Bush celebrated it as momentum—“the big Mo”—after unexpectedly winning the Iowa Republican caucuses in the 1980 presidential campaign. Others have called it “the Iowa bounce.” Hillary Clinton’s surging poll numbers a year ago had commentators talking about her newly-perceived “electability.”

If the bandwagon effect is merely about electability, then in a sense it is less worrisome. To the extent that a voter is decidedly partisan, and merely wants to choose the most electable candidate to lead his party to victory in the nationwide contest, his sensitivity to other voter choices during the primaries would be perfectly rational.

But the experimental data tend to contradict the notion of the bandwagon effect as a rational partisan strategy. A study in 1994, by researchers from the University of Southwestern Louisiana and the University of Kentucky, found the effect to be particularly strong among “independent” voters not affiliated with any party. A study in 1996 blamed “particularly unsophisticated independent voters” for the effect in a German election. A UCLA study published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology in 1998 hinted that the effect was rooted in traits similar to suggestibility:

Bandwagon effects were stronger for women compared with men, and for 2 of 3 PAD (pleasantness, arousability, dominance) basic temperament factors; that is, for individuals with more arousable and less dominant temperaments.

All this ought to be unsettling. But should it really surprise us, given that political candidates are sold using some of the same irrational, mood-altering techniques – wavy flags, smiling children, stirring music, flannel shirts – that advertisers use to sell consumer products?

A few weeks ago, reading about Obama’s surge in the polls, I sensed my own inner readjustment: Before, when he’d had only half Hillary Clinton’s poll numbers, Obama had seemed little more than a smooth-talking political queue-jumper. After his post-Oprah surge he seemed … less objectionable somehow. Even Mike Huckabee, as he exploded in the polls, earned a twinge of acceptance. Maybe he’s not as ridiculous as I’d always thought. I should mention that I am not at all partisan, and have not registered as a Republican or Democrat. Neither Obama nor Huckabee fits into any political category that I find appealing. In other words, “electability” is not their only problem, in my eyes. Nevertheless I felt better about them, knowing that others did. This shift in thinking, by the way, felt perfectly normal and natural. But it felt better to recognize it as an instinct and reject it.

Assuming that the bandwagon effect is a basic instinct, we might ask why it exists. Did it have some adaptive function during our early cultural development? Was the tendency to “pick a winner” a necessary survival trait when politics was more brutal than it is today? Or was it merely part of a general mental interdependence that held early human society together? And could it date back further still, to the very basic mammalian instinct to stay safely within the herd?

Whatever the answer turns out to be, there is no shortage of evidence that in modern societies human opinions remain deeply interdependent. Social psychologists have found this even in the romantic market, where “romantic popularity” turns out to be a key factor in people’s mating preferences: In other words, to a person in the mood for love, a prospective mate will seem more attractive than otherwise if it is perceived that the crowd finds her attractive too. (Small wonder that our culture places such high value on celebrity.)

Conceivably, such a trait could have evolved as a way of leveraging one’s individual decision-making with the summed “wisdom of the crowd.” But the wisdom-of-the-crowd effect, described by James Surowiecki in his book of the same name, requires that opinions be relatively independent of each other. The more tightly interwired and interdependent a crowd becomes, the more its opinions amount not to wisdom but to herd-like madness.

One can view this process as a contagion, but arguably it is better seen as a runaway autofeedback phenomenon, in which our collective judgement comes to depend more and more upon itself, thereby becoming less stable, more subject to sudden movements, and less connected to reality — in other words, more “volatile,” as pollsters and pundits now routinely observe of public opinion.

Periodically, it is recognized that Iowa’s caucuses and New Hampshire’s primaries have a disproportionate effect on the presidential race. Typically it is suggested that all the state primaries be held on or near the same day. But Iowa and New Hampshire are only parts of the problem. Literally every revelation of public opinion prior to the national election feeds back into that opinion and distorts it. And because that feedback effect can cause strange, sudden movements, upward or downward, in a candidate’s popularity, the management of political campaigns is now largely about the management of those irrational swings – damping the slumps, boosting the surges, and getting the candidate’s poll numbers to peak at election time.

The logical way to prevent these herdlike movements is not only to condense elections to the fewest possible dates, but to hide poll results from the public, at least until all votes are cast. In the world of commerce, information is routinely kept secret to prevent unwanted feedback effects. But in a society with a bedrock faith in free speech, the censorship of poll results seems unlikely at best.

Even an acknowledgement of this issue is culturally problematic. We humans have a deep need to see not chaos but order, to find patterns and to navigate by them. We are inclined to rationalize the swings of public opinion as if they were driven entirely by real-world events. Thus the opinion bubble that lifted Huckabee from single-digits to the top GOP spot in the space of a few slow-news weeks has been explained as the product of “Huck’s” aw-shucks style, his Christian principles, the weakness of Giuliani and so forth. In a like manner we explain the to-ings and fro-ings of the stock market, sports teams, fads and fashions, the fortunes of celebrities and more or less everything else in life: We are instinctively, irrationally bent on rationalizing what is never fully rational.

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