An Imagined Reality Is Not Real, but It’s Also Not a Lie
Or, how stories create empires, cities, religions, companies, and most importantly, order
👋 Hey there! My name is Abhishek. Welcome to a new edition of The Sunday Wisdom! This is the best way to learn new things with the least amount of effort.
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Real knowledge is intrinsic. It’s built from the ground up.
If someone is using a lot of fancy words and a lot of big concepts, they probably don’t know what they’re talking about. You can’t understand trigonometry without understanding arithmetic and geometry.
The smartest people can explain things to a child. It’s a common saying and it’s very true. If you can’t explain it to a child, then you don’t know it.
In Six Easy Pieces, Richard Feynman famously explains mathematics in three pages. He starts from the number line — counting — and then he goes all the way up to precalculus. He just builds it up through an unbroken chain of logic. He doesn’t rely on any definitions.
The really smart thinkers are clear thinkers. They understand the basics at a very, very fundamental level.
You should rather understand the basics really well instead of memorising all kinds of complicated concepts you can’t stitch together and can’t buildup from the basics.
If you can’t buildup concepts from the basics as you need them, you’re lost. You’re just memorising.
The advanced concepts in a field are less proven. We use them to signal insider knowledge, but we’d be better off nailing the basics.
Enough talk! On to this week’s essay. It’s about 2,250 words. The key idea is from Yuval Noah Harari’s flawed but extremely well-written Sapiens.
Q: How do 8 billion people live together without constantly being at each other’s throats?
Sociological research has shown that the maximum “natural” size of a group bonded by mutual trust and friendship is about 150 individuals. Most people can neither intimately know (nor gossip) effectively about more than 150 human beings.
This is popularly known as The Dunbar Number — a concept in social psychology and anthropology that refers to the maximum number of stable social relationships that a human can maintain; named after British anthropologist and psychologist Robin Dunbar-Number. Just kidding, it’s Robin Dunbar — who proposed that the number is around 150 based on studies of primate brain size and social group sizes.
The idea is that humans have a limited capacity for socialising and maintaining relationships, and that beyond a certain point, it becomes difficult to have meaningful relationships with all members of a group.
Even today, a critical threshold in human organisations falls somewhere around this magic number. Below this threshold, communities, businesses, social networks and military units can maintain themselves based mainly on intimate acquaintance (and rumour-mongering). There may not be a need for a strong hierarchical structure of roles, titles, and laws to maintain order.
A platoon of thirty soldiers or even a company of a hundred soldiers can function well on the basis of interpersonal relationships, with a minimum of formal discipline. A small business can survive and flourish without a board of directors, upper management, and an HR department.
But once the threshold of 150 individuals is crossed, things can no longer work that way.
You cannot run a division with thousands of soldiers the same way you run a platoon. Successful businesses usually face a crisis when they grow larger and hire more personnel. If they cannot reinvent the way they work, chaos ensues.
So, the natural question is, how did we manage to cross this critical threshold, eventually founding cities comprising tens of thousands of inhabitants and empires ruling hundreds of millions?
The secret is probably because of storytelling and fiction, which can persuade large numbers of strangers to cooperate successfully by believing in common myths.
Today, let’s talk about storytelling. More precisely, let’s talk about… us, the human beings, the Homo Sapiens who, armed with just the power of a good story, have created empires, waged wars, built cities, ravaged countries, and most importantly, somehow found a way to maintain order among its 8 billion inhabitants. Honestly, it’s a miracle that we are still here and haven’t killed each other already.
About 155 years ago, a man called Jamsetji Tata bought a bankrupt oil mill in Bombay and converted it to a cotton mill — to benefit from the boom in the cotton market caused by the American Civil War.
Today, Tata Group, the company he founded, is India’s largest conglomerate, with products and services in over 150 countries, and operations in 100 countries across six continents, employing 935,000 people, with an annual revenue of $128 billion.
But I have a weird question: In what sense can we say that Tata Group really exists? There are many Tata Motors vehicles, yes. Then there’s Tata salt, tea, and coffee in almost every household in India, no doubt. Then there’s Tata Consultancy Services, Tata Power, Tata Steel, Tata Chemicals, Tata Communications (TCS), and many many more such affiliates — but these are obviously not the company, are they?
Even if, say because of some unfortunate catastrophe, all the physical products and services were to disappear tomorrow, Tata Group itself would not disappear, would it now?
It would still be able to start again and continue manufacturing new cars, chemicals, salt, sugar, jewellery, and TCS would still be able to provide its services — provided it has some cash left or somebody decides to fund it.
This means that the company may have offices, factories, plants, machineries, showrooms, employees, accountants, secretaries, but all these together do not comprise Tata Group.
Okay, time to become a bit more absurd.
Even if Thanos decides to kill (obviously, painlessly) every single one of Tata Groups’s employees with a snap of his fingers, and then go on to destroy all of its assembly lines, and factories, and stores, and offices… the company could theoretically still borrow money, hire new employees, build new factories and buy new machinery — provided somebody is really interested in it even after knowing that Thanos has a thing against the Tata Group for some unknown reason, and might very well snap his fingers again.
The Tata Group has managers and shareholders, but neither do they constitute the company. All the managers could be dismissed and all its shares sold, but the company itself would remain intact. It may not produce anything or make any money, but it would still exist.
But if the opposite were to be true, say if the Supreme Court decides to mandate the dissolution of the company for some stupid reason (I mean who in the right mind would decide to dissolve such a great company that is a century and half old, and that too after Thanos tried and failed), even though its factories would remain standing and its workers, accountants, managers and shareholders would continue to live — Tata Group would immediately vanish.
In short, Tata Group seems to have no essential connection to the physical world. So, does it really exist?
Truth is, Tata Group the company is technically a figment of our collective imagination. Like any company, Tata Group is what lawyers call a ‘legal fiction’. It can’t be pointed at; it is not a physical object — but it exists as a legal entity.
Just like you or me, a legal fiction is bound by the laws of the countries in which it operates. It can open a bank account and own property. It pays taxes, and it can be sued and even prosecuted separately from any of the people who own or work for it.
A popular feature of a legal fiction is that it provides “limited liability” to its founders, owners, employees, etc. And I want to take a moment here and say that the concept of limited liability is among humanity’s most ingenious inventions.
During most of recorded history, property could be owned only by flesh-and-blood humans — the kind that stood on two legs and had big brains. If you were to set up a wagon-manufacturing workshop in the thirteenth century, you yourself were the business.
So, if a wagon you made broke down a week after purchase, the disgruntled buyer could sue you personally. If you had borrowed 1,000 gold coins to set up your workshop and the business failed, you would have had to repay the loan by selling your private property — your house, your cow, your land, and I hope not, even your children.
If you still couldn’t cover the debt, you would be thrown into prison by the state or enslaved by your creditors along with your children. You were fully liable, without limit, for all obligations incurred by your bloody workshop. Maybe you should have listened to your wife and not invested in this goddamn idea. She knew you would screw the whole thing up.
If this wasn’t obvious, this legal situation severely discouraged entrepreneurship. People were naturally afraid to start new businesses and take economic risks. It hardly seemed worth taking the chance that their families could end up utterly destitute.
This is why at some point people began to “collectively” imagine the existence of limited liability companies. Such companies would be legally independent of the people who set them up, or invested money in them, or managed them — so that people can more and more start new businesses and help the economy grow.
Over the last few centuries such companies have become the main players in the economic arena, and we have grown so used to them that we forget they exist only in our imagination.
Another common term for a limited liability company is a “corporation”, which is ironic, because the term derives from corpus (body in Latin) — the one thing these corporations lack.
But, despite their having no real bodies, legal systems treat corporations as legal persons, as if they were flesh-and-blood human beings.
How exactly did Jamsetji Tata, the man, create the Tata Group, the company? In much the same way that priests and sorcerers have created gods and demons throughout history?
It all revolves around telling stories, and convincing people to believe them. In Christianity for example, the crucial story is that of Christ’s life and death as told by the Catholic Church.
According to this story, if a Catholic priest dressed in his sacred garments solemnly said the right words at the right moment, mundane bread and wine turned into God’s flesh and blood.
The priest exclaims, “Hoc est corpus meum!” (Latin for “This is my body!”) and voila, the bread turns into Christ’s flesh. Seeing that the priest had properly and assiduously observed all the procedures, millions of devout Catholics behave as if God really existed in the sacred bread and wine. And don’t you dare question them!
In the case of a business, the crucial story is the country’s legal code, according to which, if a certified lawyer follows all the proper liturgy and rituals, writes all the required spells and oaths on a wonderfully decorated piece of paper, and affixes his ornate signature to the bottom of the document, then voila, a new company is incorporated out of thin air.
When in 1868 Jamshetji Tata wanted to create his company, he must have paid a lawyer to go through all these sacred procedures. Once the lawyer had performed all the right rituals and pronounced all the necessary spells and oaths, millions of upright citizens behaved (and are still behaving) as if the Tata Group really existed. In that sense, it’s not much different from a religion.
Over the years, people have woven an incredibly complex network of stories. Within this network, fictions such as the Tata Group not only exist, but also accumulate immense power.
The kinds of things that people create through this network of stories are known in academic circles as fictions, social constructs, or imagined realities, or my personal favourite, collective delusion.
An imagined reality is not a lie. I lie when I say that there is a lion near the river when I know perfectly well that there is no lion there. There is nothing special about lies.
But an imagined reality, unlike lying, is something that everyone believes in, and as long as this communal belief persists, the imagined reality exerts force in the world.
The sculptor of the Sphinx may sincerely have believed in the existence of the lion-man guardian spirit with wings of an eagle.
Some sorcerers are charlatans, but most of them sincerely believe in the existence of gods and demons.
Most millionaires sincerely believe in the existence of money and limited liability companies.
Just like most human-rights activists sincerely believe in the existence of human rights. No one was lying when, in 2022, the UN demanded that the Iranian government respect the human rights of its citizens, even though the UN, Iran and human rights are all figments of our wild imagination.
Any large-scale human cooperation — whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe — is rooted in common myths that exist only in peoples collective imagination.
Churches are rooted in common religious myths. Two Catholics who have never met can nevertheless go together on crusade or pool funds to build a hospital because they both believe that God was incarnated in human flesh and allowed Himself to be crucified to redeem our sins.
States are rooted in common national myths. Two Indians who have never met might risk their lives to save one another in the battlefield because both believe in the existence of the Indian nation, the Indian motherland, and the Indian flag.
Judicial systems are rooted in common legal myths. Two lawyers who have never met can nevertheless combine efforts to defend a complete stranger because they both believe in the existence of laws, justice, human rights — and the money paid out in fees.
Humans live in a dual reality. On one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations.
As time goes by, the imagined reality becomes more and more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as gods, nations and corporations. All because of the fictional stories we tell ourselves.
But, telling effective stories is no child’s play. The difficulty lies not in telling the story, but in convincing everyone else to believe it.
Much of history revolves around this question: how does one convince millions of people to believe particular stories about gods, or nations, or limited liability companies?
Yet when it succeeds, it gives human beings as a whole immense power, because, unlike chimpanzees with whom we share 99.6% of our DNA, it enables millions of strangers to cooperate and work towards common goals.
Just try to imagine how difficult it would have been to create states, or religions, or legal systems if we could speak only about things that really exist, such as rivers, trees and lions.
Today I Learned
The overarching principle of the fight-or-flight response is assembling resources for immediate needs in lieu of building for the future — act now, ask questions later.
The hormonal rush of epinephrine focuses the body, increasing heart rate and blood pressure and dilating the bronchial tubes of the lungs to carry more oxygen to the muscles.
Epinephrine binds to muscle spindles, and this ratchets up the muscles’ resting tension so they’re ready to explode into action.
Blood vessels in the skin constrict to limit bleeding in the event of a wound. Endorphins are released in the body to blunt pain.
In this scenario, biological imperatives like eating and reproduction are put on the back burner. The digestive system shuts down; the muscles used to contract the bladder relax so as not to waste glucose; and saliva stops flowing.
If you’ve ever faced a nerve-racking public-speaking situation, you’ve experienced this shift in the form of a racing heart and cotton mouth.
Your muscles and your brain get stiff, and you lose all hope of being flexible and engaging. Or, if the processed signal from the cortex to the amygdala breaks up, you can’t think and you freeze.
Technically, the full-blown stress response should be called “freeze or fight or flight.” None of this is particularly helpful when you’re up at the podium, but the body responds in essentially the same way whether you’re staring down a hungry lion or a restless audience.
Two neurotransmitters put the brain on alert: norepinephrine arouses attention, then dopamine sharpens and focuses it.
An imbalance of these neurotransmitters is why some people with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) come across as stress junkies. They have to get stressed to focus.
It’s one of the primary factors in procrastination. People learn to wait until the Sword of Damocles is ready to fall — it’s only then, when stress unleashes norepinephrine and dopamine, that they can sit down and do the work.
A need for stress also explains why ADHD patients sometimes seem to shoot themselves in the foot. When everything is going well, they need to stir up the situation, and they subconsciously find a way to create a crisis.
People with ADHD have trouble keeping relationships, because even if their partner is the most understanding of people, every time things are good, they can’t help but pick a fight.
Timeless Insight
Having no FOMO is one of the most important skill.
Being immune to the siren song of other people’s success — especially when that success is sudden, extreme, and caused by factors outside their control — is so powerful and important that it’s practically impossible to do well over time without it.
FOMO is recklessness masked as ambition.
You see someone else suddenly becoming successful and think, “If they can do it, I can too.” That feels like a good emotion — it feels like you’re learning through observation and following a data-driven path to success.
But what’s actually occurring is that you are getting sucked into a bubble by greed, jealousy, and of course fear.
Someone will always be getting successful faster than you. This is not a tragedy. The idea of caring that someone is getting success faster than you are is one of the deadly sins.
What I’m Reading
To the untrained eye ego-climbing and selfless climbing may appear identical. Both kinds of climbers place one foot in front of the other. Both breathe in and out at the same rate. Both stop when tired. Both go forward when rested. But what a difference! The ego-climber is like an instrument that’s out of adjustment. He puts his foot down an instant too soon or too late. He’s likely to miss a beautiful passage of sunlight through the trees. He goes on when the sloppiness of his step shows he’s tired. He rests at odd times. He looks up the trail trying to see what’s ahead even when he knows what’s ahead because he just looked a second before. He goes too fast or too slow for the conditions and when he talks his talk is forever about somewhere else, something else. He’s here but he’s not here. He rejects the here, is unhappy with it, wants to be farther up the trail but when he gets there will be just as unhappy because then it will be ‘here.’ What he’s looking for, what he wants, is all around him, but he doesn’t want that because it is all around him. Every step’s an effort, both physically and spiritually, because he imagines his goal to be external and distant.
— Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Tiny Thought
There are lots of talented people who never achieve anything, but not that many determined people who don’t.
Before You Go…
Thanks so much for reading! Send me ideas, questions, reading recs. You can write to abhishek@coffeeandjunk.com, reply to this email, or use the comments.
Until next Sunday,
Abhishek 👋