We All Live In A Bubble (The Reality Bubble, Tong, 2019)

 Ziya Tong. The Reality Bubble (2019) We all live in a bubble created by our brains. The bubble includes the simulation of physical reality and the social and psychological realities we’ve learned to think of as just the way things are. But these realities have blind spots. Tong begins with the visual blind spot and spends a good deal of time describing what we can’t or don’t see because of our limited sensory and cognitive equipment. Science provides methods for filling in the blind spots, but it’s limited by the social and conceptual environment of its time, and always tentative and incomplete. But it’s the best tool we have.
     Tong builds on this insight to describe the blind spots that make the bubbles dangerously comfortable places to live. The most serious blind spots are in our images of our relation to the non-human world. We see ourselves as different and separate from our environment. But that environment is our life support system. Misconceiving that fact will destroy human life as we know it. It’s already destroyed huge swaths of non-human life: in the last century, about 90% of wildlife has disappeared, partly because we’ve hunted it, but mostly because we’ve converted their habitats into agricultural land.
      Tong’s facts and insights range from exhilarating to depressing. Her final explicit message is that we must see what the blind spots hide from us, else we will continue to make suicidal choices. I don’t see good odds of that change happening. Policy makers are abysmally ignorant of the most basic science, and the rest of us are not much better.
Economics is fatally flawed. The Friedmanites believe that efficiency means converting as many costs as possible into externalities, which don’t show up in profit-and-loss statements. So-called capitalism assumes that profit is the sole purpose of business. Very few economists show any kind of awareness of science and technology other than as a means of increasing profits. The natural world is perceived as a bundle of resources to be converted into cash as efficiently as possible. Not doing so is considered wasteful.
     In general, people believe that a rising GDP and increased productivity are signs of economic health. GDP merely tracks the money, not what it buys. Increasing productivity requires increasing consumption, not to mention that much of what’s produced satisfies mere whim. We believe that having more stuff means a better standard of living. Etc. And ever and again we are told that we must balance economic values against environmental costs, as if the economy were independent of the environment. That particular delusion amounts to insanity.
    Buy or borrow the book and read it. ****