res0nance

When Societies Hallucinate: Status, Piety, and the Drift Away From Reality

Why do societies sometimes do things that look catastrophically stupid in hindsight? Why would the people of Easter Island cut down the last tree? Why did Norse Greenland starve rather than adopt Inuit techniques that were right in front of them? Why do modern societies drift into symbolic battles that seem detached from the material world?

When material competition is limited and people become insulated from consequences, status competition shifts into symbolic moral purity, and that shift can push entire societies into collective hallucination.

1. Status competition doesn't disappear — it just changes form

Every society has status hierarchies:

Status is always there; what changes is what earns it.

2. When material competition is limited, moral competition takes over

If everyone has roughly the same material baseline — or if material success is no longer a differentiator — status competition shifts into the symbolic realm.

Rentier states like Saudi Arabia are a classic example. When citizens receive guaranteed income and public-sector jobs, economic competition is muted. So status moves into piety; who is more devout, more righteous, more morally strict.

This isn’t unique to religious societies.

The billionaire “redemption arc”

Once someone has more money than they can ever spend, wealth stops being a status marker. So they pivot to philanthropy, virtue, and legacy. The ruthless entrepreneur becomes the benevolent sage. It’s so common that a billionaire who doesn’t do this is treated as deviant.

Among wealthy Western elites, symbolic moral positions become a form of cultural capital. Moral signaling is the only scarce status currency left. They advocate open borders while living in a gated fortress with armed guards. They talk about being compassionate toward criminals while never having to worry about being the victim of crime. They talk about welfare while laying off workers. They don't have to face the consequences of the policies they support to gain moral capital.

The upper-middle-class and state-dependent protesters

Both upper-middle-class protesters and state-dependent protesters share an isolation from material reality. While upper-middle-class protesters are insulated by wealth, education, and social networks, state-dependent protesters rely on government support and social safety nets. Both groups engage in moral grandstanding as a way to gain status within their respective social milieus.

The state-dependent protesters often have a more direct material benefit from their protest activities, such as access to resources, services, or political concessions. This dual incentive — status through moral signaling and tangible benefits — creates a complex dynamic where protest becomes both a symbolic and practical strategy.

In both cases, the detachment from everyday material consequences allows for a feedback loop of escalating moral posturing, further insulating these groups from reality and reinforcing their status competition through symbolic means.

3. The reality bubble: when people stop feeling consequences

A society becomes vulnerable when large groups of people become insulated from the material processes that sustain them.

Cities are the perfect example:

Urban life is a kind of virtual reality where the hard edges of the physical world are hidden.

This creates a "reality bubble": a worldview where tradeoffs disappear and constraints feel optional.

Inside this bubble, beliefs drift toward symbolism because the costs of being wrong are invisible.

4. Societal hallucination: when symbolic reasoning feeds on itself

Modern societies resemble AI systems that hallucinate.

An AI hallucinates when:

Societies do the same thing. When you don’t feel the consequences of your beliefs, your beliefs drift away from reality. In an untethered system, the feedback can lead to strange places as society hallucinates into danger.

When people stop interacting with material constraints, they begin operating in a symbolic world:

The system becomes confident but wrong.

This is exactly what happened on Easter Island. Chiefs competed to build bigger stone statues, and the trees were just fuel for the competition. The society hallucinated its way into collapse.

5. Runaway Piety: when status incentives turn self‑destructive

Once moral purity becomes the main status currency, you get:

And because the people driving the process are insulated from consequences, the signaling becomes more extreme.

Societies drift into policies that feel good but don’t work. You see:

6. Why this pattern is dangerous

A society survives only if its status games reward people who engage with reality. When status rewards competence, contribution, innovation, and adaptation, the society thrives. When status rewards symbolic purity, moral grandstanding, ideological performance, and detachment from consequences, the society drifts into hallucination.

And reality always wins in the end.

7. Real-world example right now

The implicit support of open borders.

While few claim to support "open borders" this is the actual process:

That process is just open-borders by default.

There is no instance in history where (defacto) open-borders made a country better off for the native population. In every case for the natives, the standard of living declines, native culture is destroyed, the crime rate increases, social trust decreases, and society becomes less cohesive and less stable. It is a self-evident, self-harming action. One need only look at the numerous historical and current examples to see it in action.

But having open borders feels good. It's morality based status. The elite love it becuase it gives them cheap labor and more customers, while they live behind walls with armed guards. There is no downside for them in the short term. The very poor love it because they are disaffected and wish to roll the dice and reset the system. If they can appear morally superior at the same time, so much the better. They feel like there is no downside for them and there isn't in the short term. The left-wing government love it because it gains them a new permanent constituancy. They will worry about how to pay for services and deal with conflicts later. Power is what is important in the short term. The upper middle class love it because they don't know any better and it makes them feel morally superior. The elite owned media tells them it's great. The left-wing governments tell them it's great and the people on the street they feel sorry for tell them it's great. Therefore, it must be great so they join the party as an upstanding pious and proper citizen. There is no reality feedback to correct them in the short-term.

The self-sacrifice towards green energy.

Global warming is real in the sense that the Earth has warmed since the Little Ice Age, when it was relatively cool. Has the Earth been much warmer in the past? Yes — the Arctic's mean temperatures were around 12 °C compared to −25 °C today. Has CO2 been much higher in the past? Yes — CO2 levels were about 16 times higher during the time when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. So is the minor warming we have experienced in the last century catastrophic? Not even close. One need only look out the window, go to a park, and 'touch grass' to see this reality. There has been no catastrophe despite 50 years of solid fearmongering that this would come to pass.

Not only did none of these happen, they were not even remotely close to happening. Other than claims of growing natural disasters (which do not survive scrutiny of actual data), there has been no significant difference at all.

But none of this matters in the competition of piety. Countries are committing economic suicide regardless. They are self-flagellating into economic decline while sending their manufacturing to China, which has no issue with building new coal plants to generate power making their self-sacrifice completely pointless.

Covid piety

Covid was a good example of ritual and purity tests to demonstrate one's 'piety'. Unscientific rules became the order of the day. Shopping in small stores - bad. Shopping in big box stores - good. Stand 6 feet apart - completely arbitrary distance unsupported by any studies. People were not allowed to go outdoors, when outdoors was actually the safest place to be. Wear masks - first we were told they didn't work (correct - especially the ubiquitous cloth masks at the time), but when the health authorities saw people were desperate for feel good solutions then they suddenly became mandatory. Willingness to take a barely tested vaccines became a purity test. Good people took the vaccine; bad people didn't. Simple. The vaccine was declared "safe and effective" based on very little real-world testing and no history, when in reality it was not effective and was somewhat unsafe as well (heart inflammation, Bell's palsy, thrombosis, Guillain–Barré syndrome, tinnitus, long-lasting fatigue). The vaccinated were told to fear the unvaccinated (why, if the vaccine worked). Martial law was invoked in Canada to imprison peaceful protesters who were protesting vaccine mandates. It was a religious frenzy and Salem witch trials all in one.

The move towards socialism.

The appeal of stealing from the rich to give to the poor seems without any downsides when divorced from the realities of human motivation and using the bad math of zero-sum economics. No matter how many times this strategy fails, as long as people are not starving to death, they push on, unswayed by failure. When faced with failure but protected from its direct consequences, people do not admit mistakes — they double down. It's only when collapse comes that a correction is finally made and sometimes, not even then.

A great example of doubling down on failure is California's high-speed 'rail to nowhere' debacle. It was meant to be a high-speed rail line from San Francisco to Los Angeles, taking about three hours and costing 35 billion. Over many years and many, many failures, the plan devolved into a tiny segment between relatively unpopulated cities at a projected cost of 135 billion. In reality, it will likely never be completed, and if it is, it will be decades away and will likely cost 500 billion to 1 trillion by then. At no time did politicians or the public decide that they should stop. To stop would be to admit failure and be humiliated (a loss of status). Continuing results in the diffused pain of slightly higher taxes, so they continue.

Forced diversity inclusion and equity (DEI)

Nothing highlights the failure of racist DEI policies like South Africa, which has very strict DEI rules requiring many companies to be 51% Black-owned and giving subsidies and preferential treatment to those that are 51% Black-owned. Other targets required (in practice) to obtain government contracts include: 50% Black, 25% Black women directors; 60% Black, 30% Black women in senior management; 75% Black, 38% Black women in middle management; and 88% Black, 44% Black women in junior management. Such enforced 'equity' ignores experience, skill, knowledge, and competence. As a result, GDP per capita (PPP) has been stagnant or in decline for 20 years (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.KD?locations=ZA), and electricity generation is so poor that there was load shedding almost every day in 2023. People have given up on government electricity and started to set up their own generators, solar panels, and battery backups. While this has improved the situation, it is a very inefficient way to generate electricity.

Then there is the general two-tier justice system and a lax approach to crime (both official and unofficial). Crime is so high that it is no longer counted accurately when it can be avoided. Officially, the national average is 45 murders per 100,000, with some cities and towns as high as 200 per 100,000. At 100 murders per 100,000, one's lifetime risk of being murdered is roughly 8%. Infrastructure is crumbling. Roads are torn up to steal the copper pipes and wiring underneath. Maintenance is a thing of the past as buildings and equipment continually deteriorate.

Despite this, they continue. Why? Because it temporarily improves the relative status of the majority, who are shielded from hard consequences by rising government debts and the momentum of the strong economy and infrastructure that existed before. Slowly society rots all around them, but until it collapses completey then the reality bubble holds, and reality is ignored.