Do We Humans Create Our Own Realities? Yes. And No.

Creating Reality?

People’s fear that their bank is insolvent causes a “run on the bank,” which makes it insolvent.  A teacher’s expectation of a child’s character and abilities affects how he or she treats the child, thereby eliciting behavior that fulfills the expectation.  Racist beliefs that Black’s are less intelligent lead to policies that inhibit opportunities and access to resources, so Blacks score lower on achievement tests.  Sociologist Robert Merton coined the apt term “self-fulfilling prophecy” in 1948 to refer to such processes, but the basic idea has been around for much longer. Here’s a concise definition from Wikipedia:

“A self–fulfilling prophecy is a prediction that directly or indirectly causes itself to become true…due to positive feedback between belief and behavior.”

This is one of the ways that we humans, through the power of ideas based in language and other symbolic abilities that uniquely define human culture, do create our own realities. It’s related to the old idea of “the power of suggestion.” But there are limits to our abilities to “create [our] reality”; and sometimes people—especially, it seems, people in power—seem to forget that, or get confused about where the limits lie.

*   *   *   *

It must be tempting sometimes, especially for persons of power and influence, to try to turn the power of self-fulfilling beliefs to their own advantage.  Is the self-fulfilling belief, then, simply a lie that makes itself true?  No, not exactly.  It seems that to be effective the self-fulfilling belief must be genuine.  It might initially be wrong, but not a conscious deceit.  I suppose it’s possible, but in fact I can’t think of a single case of outright lies turning into truths—into self-fulfilling beliefs.  Outright lies may have real-world effects, but they rarely if ever make themselves true.

Consider these examples. In 1994 tobacco company executives lied to a congressional committee about the addictive and harmful effects of cigarette smoking.  Company executives well knew, and had known for some time, that cigarettes are addictive and dangerous.  They conducted a decades-long campaign to confuse the issue and sow doubt.  Those lies may have resulted in more cigarette sales, but they did not make cigarettes safe.

We can turn to the political arena for other examples of public lying to influence policy.  George W. Bush notoriously lied, among other things, about Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction” leading up to the Iraq war. The lies helped justify the war, but they didn’t bring the claimed weapons into existence.  Nor did they bring about the peaceful Middle-East Bush promised.  Currently, in his bid for the White House, Trump issues more lies (or are they innocently erroneous claims[?]) than truths, according to his Politifact Scorecard.  Either way, the most enthusiastic blind acceptance by Trump supporters won’t make his misstatements true.

*   *   *   *

Similarly, expectations are not necessarily self-fulfilling.  It is possible to make mistakes.  Some mistakes have real consequences, as any child who has touched a hot burner knows.  I remember one morning I stumbled out to the kitchen to make coffee, and hit the switch on the coffee grinder. Nothing happened.  What! I  totally expected it to work, so it should work. In my sleep-blurred state, I was shocked, actually offended, above all surprised.  It woke me up.  It was a reality moment.  I had to think.  And look.  After I plugged the machine into the outlet, it worked.  That simple experience somehow made me realize how important our confrontations with reality are.  Our mistakes, if they don’t kill us, wake us up, teach us, make and keep us real.

It’s true that in many ways the stories we tell ourselves become the lives we live.  But there are limits.  As our technological powers grow, it becomes harder to know or foresee where these limits are.  Simple errors as everyday experience can help remind us that we’re integrally part of larger realities; and that in these larger realities, these living systems in which we evolved and still subsist, we’re susceptible to error in really big and complicated ways as well.  Stubbing a toe, plugging in a coffee grinder, even being more conscious as we breathe, eat, eliminate, can help keep us humble.

*   *   *   *

If beliefs can, within limits, “create reality,” how much more true is that of actions. We humans have the ability to bypass simple physical cause-and-effect.  We can act on the basis of ideas we have that are formulated and expressed through language, and make things happen in the real world that otherwise would not happen.  Sound waves from my voice won’t cause the salt-shaker to move toward me; but if I ask you nicely, “pass the salt, please,” chances are that it will happen.  This kind of thing on the larger scale of culture can be tremendously powerful; but, again, there are limits.

In 2004, Ronald Suskind of the New York Times reported a conversation he had with a top aid to George W. Bush that he (Suskind) said “gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.” It’s been quoted and cited many times, but is worth looking at again in this context.  I quote:

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do." (Emphasis added).

That is frightening, chilling, just because it is partly true but shows no consciousness of real-world limits.  It’s where a certain kind of throw-your-weight-around politics and New-Age rhetoric overlap.  Everything is relative.  There is no such thing as truth—it all depends on your point of view.  We can do anything.  There’s a technical fix for any problem.  And so on.  Real life is much more complicated than that.

There are truths that are independent of what we humans think or say or want or believe.  There are limits to what we can do.  We can create problems with our technical prowess that no technical prowess can fix.  We can damage the social fabric of our increasingly unified world through careless wars and brutal economic relations that take generations, even centuries, to heal, if ever.  Such actions tangibly reduce the quality of life, ultimately, for everyone.

Native American people I worked with sometimes spoke of “respect.” It gradually dawned on me that they meant something deeper and broader than the usual meaning the word had for me or has for most people.  It expresses something more like an ethic, an attitude toward one’s place in the cosmos, a grounded humility.  We need more of this kind of respect in our politics, our technology, our economy.  In our time, it might be expressed as respect for the complexity, interrelatedness, and above all for the reality of the world we live in.