Glass minds in the glass palace
Hermits with minds like shattered mirrors, piecing themselves, and then the world together after social collapse
In my fictional alternative universe, the paranoid person is a sane person trapped inside of an insane world. The insane world struggles with meaning. In this insane world, all of the established institutions are captured by malthusian exploiters. These malthusians understand what they need to do to climb the ladders available to them, which signals are markers of success, and they Goodhart themselves to fit the mold, but nothing more. A few sane people slip through, grit their teeth, and play the game well enough to squeeze a dew drop of an original idea out of a dried encrusted sponge of an institution that once was. And if not, they take existing ideas and extrapolate forward. This kind of work is relatively straightforward, but it’s not the kind of work that can take us from Newton to Einstein. The paranoid sane see the writing on the wall, and retreat to the countryside. In the meantime, society crumbles around them.
Although our poor sane minds may not survive contact with the insane minds of the establishment, but they can survive contact with the natural world. Over the course of generations, these hermits start to find one another. They borrow each other’s eccentric books, they spend time with one other, etc. They decide to build a structure for themselves to get some benefits of scale. You see—it’s much easier to make time for self-study when your meals are brought to you.
Just because they’re sane, it doesn’t mean they don’t struggle. For example, Fred, might have a strain of insanity called delusional self-confidence. But this illness didn’t come all at once. When it came, it was initially embraced as a cure to another problem: lack of confidence. By trusting himself, Fred was able to finally radiate, attract a partner, and fall in love. However, over time, his rigid mind started to cut itself on the edges of reality.
The problem is although he was sane in some sense, his mind was brittle like a mirror, and started to break, and create a picture of reality that only made sense in fragments, and not as an entire picture. Fred’s ideology was driven past the point of usefulness.
When he went into the world, he glittered with reckless abandon. People couldn’t stand him. He was usually entirely dark, but once in a while, and piece in his mind will catch the light and beam into your unsuspecting eye. He would notice some reaction to something he said, and then he would hook his claws into you, and so his tirade would begin.
Well, the insane world cast him out—they didn’t know what to do with him. But the sane world of the hermits took him in. They engaged with the parts that made sense, and could soften the parts that didn’t. Over time, the different shards formed a metaphorical parabola that turned itself toward a single point. Fred was made whole, and his view of the world cohered itself into a singular discovery, which he shared.
This new discovery caused the minds of the other hermits to be blown. The surfaces of their minds were now broken. But because they were sane, they were able to collectively understand what had happened and begin work on each other’s minds.
This pattern of breaking minds and re-healing them continued to happen again and again, and they discovered a problem: minds are flexible, but they can only be broken so many times before becoming permanently defunct.
The hermits held a meeting to figure out a more permanent solution to their recurring problem. One of the hermits piped up and said the kids from the neighboring village might be the answer. His idea was this: the kids have minds like soft sponges. These kids could help the sane continue their tradition of sanity in an insane world. The sane began to teach.
The parents from neighboring villages didn’t like this one bit. Since the village inhabitants were insane, they couldn’t comprehend what the hermits were teaching. The minds of most of these poor villagers were unfortunately too brittle and needed to be protected from the ideas of the hermits. But the kids persisted and found excuses and creative ways of sneaking away into the hermitages to learn the forbidden truths. Some of them even disavowed their own parents and became permanent hermitage residents residents themselves.
Over the centuries, the villagers softened their view of these hermitages. Many of the new ideas coming out turned out to be genuinely useful. The villages most kind to these hermits became more successful than their counterparts.
Sanity slowly made its way through the world. As their success grew, the hermits found increasingly creative ways to scale their operations. Eventually, a magnificent crystal palace of knowledge was erected. And it was at this moment that the villagers looked upon the majesty of this palace which mirrored the image of perfection in their own minds, and their hearts began to burn with envy and want. Everything was laid out. The entire edifice of wisdom and knowledge was now legible to the very people who were once its biggest critics. They all sent their children to the palace to study and learn.
Unfortunately, the villagers were too eager to embrace the palace. To them, it was another ladder to climb. They began to outnumber the natural hermits, and beat the sharp minds with sharp elbows. The hermits continued to be hermits, but they were no longer well-regarded. They were seen as problems to fix, or as leeches on the beautiful system within which they worked.
Though the insane villagers were uncreative, they were able to spot that something was afoot in the palace. They were ill equipped to solve it, but they had to do something. They began to look for the culprits, and discovered that some of the palace inhabitants showed signs of divergent thinking. They felt this threatened the future integrity of the palace, and so these people were sidelined.
The more the villagers tightened their grip on the palace, the more cracks it began to show, and the more cracks it showed, the tighter they grasped—they didn’t know what else to do. They were ladder climbers. The palace eventually seized up. The last of the hermits left. The palace shattered, and there was nothing left to climb. The world plunged into a darkness.
The hermits were blamed were persecuted. In their attempts to understand the social world, they themselves started to manifest signs of insanity. This manifested in at least a two ways: crystals and parabolas. Some of the sane turned mystical in their attempt to mirror the world, and they assigned healing powers to crystals. Others turned the metaphor of the parabolic mind and elevated the idea to the point of rapturous encounter with divine messages.
The hermits tried to make sense of the world, but the war that raged on against the hermits in the outer world began to itself invade their own minds. They began to feel as if their minds were being controlled. But the deeper problem was a factional civil war raging inside their own minds. They had hostile tribes of neurons inside their own minds. These neurons were themselves a consequence of the mind trying to model its surroundings. In an attempt to model the insane, the sane turned insane—schizophrenic, even.
Or maybe the schizophrenic was actually the insane person? Didn’t some minds break in the early hermitages? Could we really blame the world? Maybe the world was sane and it’s the schizophrenic who was insane.
In any case, the hermits were blamed for the collapse. These hermits stood out in the latter stages of the palace’s existence. They were the ones most insistent on changing how things were done. Surely, these hermits were to blame for when the change that came about was the collapse of the very palace that represented all of the knowledge and wisdom of the world.
After the collapse, the natural hermits were hunted out in a misguided attempt to bring sanity back to the world. But as time went on, it was increasingly difficult for the villagers to keep things up. When institutions broke, they tended to stay broken. When bridges fell, they stayed fallen. And this, ironically, is what ultimately saved the last of the hermits.
As state power weakened, it became too uneconomical to root the hermits out of every institution they were blamed for corrupting. Eventually, decay reached a plateau, society grew weary, and the hermits could once again start to come out of hiding, share their forbidden knowledge with one another, and begin the work of building anew.
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feels more like observation of the current state of affairs than a scifi =)