Imagination Is Bullshit

Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash

Some stuff is easy to imagine—a sunset, a car horn, a dead pigeon, the smell of freshly baked bread. We call these things to mind and we think, “mmm” or “ahh” or  “yuck.” 

These sorts of imaginings help us make decisions. If we’re deciding between painting the walls Emerald Green or Robin’s Egg Blue, we imagine the walls in each color, and whichever one looks nicer in our imagination is the one we choose. 

But other things are hard or impossible to imagine—large numbers, vast distances, deep time, the hidden incentive structures guiding our behavior, being dead, not knowing something you currently know, the possibility of having wasted your life on a bullshit ideology or batshit religion, the absence of a white bear, etc. 

These hard-to-imagine things often screw up our thinking. If we struggle to imagine the difference between 4,000 and 8,000 deaths, then we will struggle to feel twice as upset by the latter number as the former number, let alone thousands of times more upset than the death of a single, sympathetic character. The result is that our hearts are innumerate and statistically illiterate, even if our minds are not. Given that the world is complex, and policies are controlled by the hearts—and rarely the minds—of voters, it is no surprise that things are so crappy. Alternative possibilities unfold in the theater of our imaginations, and if that theater fails to put on a good show, we fail to make good decisions. 

Take our supposed fear of death that lurks behind everything we do. I’ve previously written about why this fear is bullshit, but I haven’t yet written about how it is bullshit—the nuts and bolts of it. I think it is born of our inability to imagine death. 

We cannot imagine the state of not imagining, nor can we feel the absence of feeling. We can imagine the world going dark and silent, and our bodies going numb and lifeless. But that is not death. That is vision loss, hearing loss, and paralysis—a terrifying possibility, but not death. When we imagine death, we fail to actually imagine it, and we imagine dark, silent paralysis instead. Because we’re afraid of dark, silent paralysis—and it is a scary thought—we mistakenly think we’re afraid of death. 

Or maybe it’s a different failure of imagination. Maybe we imagine all the beautiful things we’ll miss out on—all the music we’ll never hear and sunsets we’ll never see—and feel FOMO and longing. But that is not death either. That is FOMO and longing.

Or maybe we imagine being forgotten—all our strivings amounting to nothing, all our moments lost like tears in the rain—and feel sad. But sadness is not death either.

When we try to imagine nonexistence, we utterly fail, and in its place, we conjure up a dark, scary FOMO of sadness. And then we talk about the dark, scary FOMO of sadness as if we were talking about death, unaware of the bait-and-switch our minds have pulled on us. The result is a boatload of sensitive bullshit about humanity’s existential struggle with mortality, pop psychology theories about how all of human culture stems from our fear of death, and pop philosophy about the absurdity of being mortal, as if living until the end of time would be less absurd.

Here are some more deaths of insight, inflicted on us by our murderous imaginations: 

Consciousness. We cannot imagine how our subjective experience could just be nerve cells and chemicals. So we assume there must be an unbridgeable gap between mind and matter—a realm of the spirit and a realm of the physical. We assume there is a “hard problem of consciousness,” instead of a “hard problem of imagination.”

Ideologies. We cannot imagine our strongly held political ideologies as mere “collections of ad hoc justifications, rationalizations, moralizations, embellishments, and rhetorical tactics designed to advance the interests of ever-shifting political alliances in competition with their rivals.” They don’t feel that way from the inside. But we can easily imagine them as being correct—and not merely correct, but so blindingly obvious that anyone who doesn’t share them must be crazy or evil.

Suffering. We have a hard time imagining that suffering is good for us—that it helps us deal with bad things, avoid making them worse, and prevent them from happening again in the future. But it’s easy to imagine suffering as an awful substance of intrinsic hellishness.

Happiness. We really struggle to imagine that happiness is bullshit—that no one actually wants to be happy, including ourselves. I know, I can hardly imagine it myself. But it’s easy to imagine that happiness is the purpose of life—the feel-good, empty, circular reason behind everything we do. 

Incentives. It’s hard to imagine a world where complex incentive structures explain everything. But it’s easy to imagine a world where all problems are caused by bad, unlikable people, and all solutions are caused by good, likable people.

Morality. It’s hard to imagine that what we feel is right is wrong, and what we feel is wrong is right. Moral feelings seem infallible, as if they could not possibly be mistaken. This prevents us from seeing the role of moral feelings in driving immoral behavior. 

Now I’m not saying imagination is always unreliable. If your imagination is based on decades of real-world, practical experience, then it’s important to recognize when it fails. Maybe you’re a surgeon and you’ve operated on hundreds of patients. If your current patient has a tumor, and you cannot imagine how to remove it without killing her, then your failure of imagination is telling you something about reality. 

But the human condition is not an ailing body, and we are not surgeons. When we use our feeble imaginations to ponder politics, society, culture, or metaphysics—topics with which we have little or no practical experience—we are dooming ourselves to confusion. We have no patient or prognosis here. We lack decades of real-world, hands-on experience to draw upon. When we fail to imagine how our political opponents could be normal humans, or how consciousness could emerge from mere neurons, or how our moral convictions could possibly be harmful, we think that failure is telling us something about reality. It’s not.  

So in what sense is imagination bullshit? In the sense that it’s crappy. If we had purchased our imaginations from mother nature, we would ask for a refund. Our imaginations are flawed and feeble programs built by natural selection to navigate small tribes and small-to-medium-sized objects—not globalized economies, fractal inequality, neurobiology, or existential risks. Bereft of subtlety, statistical literacy, political impartiality, humility, or insight into the nature of our own minds, our imaginations are faulty equipment with which to understand the human condition in the 21st century. 

Take note of what you fail to imagine, or what you struggle to imagine. These failures are red flags—signs you’re about to delude yourself. Because whenever there’s a gap in your imagination, your mind will surely fill it with bullshit.