Reality presents us with the most horrific of all crises. Those in touch with it seem often unhappy, even depressed. “Depressive realism” is the theory that depressed people are more in touch with reality than healthy people! Reality, it seems, is fatal to the unprepared. Most of us don’t live in reality. We live in our paracosm, the negation of reality. We defend it with double negatives—not by affirming it, but by negating its negation. We justify it with isolated, ad hoc evidence. We cherish it as part of ourselves but also ascribe it to reality.

A paracosm is an IMAGINARY WORLD we invent to filter reality. It originates in childhood, when the imagination is free and vibrant. With growth, it begins to mature; it aligns itself with reality more closely, but crucially, it NEVER disappears. We simply call it different things, like “opinion” or “interpretation.” The paracosm shapes our emotional relationship with reality; it does not expose us to reality itself.

The paracosm, which serves as a playground for children, becomes security in adults. In a reversal of Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs, it began as everything to us, including life and purpose themselves, and then was reduced to its most basic function into adulthood. Our various (psychological) needs are originally catered for by the paracosm. It’s an extremely resilient buffer. But with maturity, the paracosm aligns itself less with our whims and more with the reality of being a human.

There are degrees by which to do this, and in some people, it’s done too much; in others, too little.

In narcissists, adaptation of the paracosm to the needs of real life is too painful (usually due to abuse or neglect). They therefore go all in on the paracosm, their protection. They retreat into the buffer, which assumes agency in the world instead. It becomes a self—the false self—while the true self remains deeply embedded in the elaborate fantasy, with no agency whatsoever. All children like to imagine themselves as geniuses and heroes at some point. The narcissists never stop believing it.

The paracosm, we see, is protective, but it can be too protective.

The point here is that everyone is literally walking around with a fantasy world in their head. This world originated in childhood and accompanies us throughout life, at times aligning itself with reality more closely, and at others neglecting reality. This world serves as a BUFFER between ourselves—which are raw, vulnerable, and oftentimes weak—and reality, which is abrasive, difficult, and impossible to negotiate with.

We might say it’s the Horos of the psyche, the Limit of the Real, the filter which determines what we accept and reject. It’s the psychological Overton window, except it’s not so much a window as a living, breathing fantasy, shifting with experience. We don’t just accept or reject something according to whether or not we like it; we give it a place (or not) in our personal paracosm, where it interacts with all the preexisting contents.

The paracosm is arranged in reverse to the way you might expect: all of our most fundamental and profound beliefs are on the outside, the perimeter. These are the great firewalls. Nothing that violates these can pass. To maintain our sense of self, we must reject what does not fit with our fundamental beliefs. The further inward we go, the more and more trivial and minute the contents become. Something can violate one of these smaller beliefs with no contradiction being detected or addressed. Contradictions can be accommodated easily.

Things that violate our paracosm are seen as distant, almost literally. We can’t connect with them because the only way we can connect with ANYTHING is via this fantasy world. There’s almost a sense in which we don’t understand it. The paracosm serves a regulatory function (although it does have other reasons for existing as well). It provides our identity with stability.

Whenever we think about the world, we’re really thinking about the parcosm’s representation of it, which is personal, not objective. This representation is made in such a way as not to offend the self, and thus it is FALSIFIED. It’s not real—it only represents something real.

People have difficulty apprehending reality because reality is not even making it intact through their paracosmic defenses. It’s easy to align the paracosm with fantasy rather than reality. Many people today—not just narcissists but individualists as well—seek to retreat into their paracosms and broadcast the fantasy world to others, so that they can IMPOSE their fantasy on reality. This is an individualist instinct, and in its purest form, a narcissistic one.

Two responses

Abstractly speaking, we can have one of two responses to any given reality: RATIONALIZATION or SELF-CORRECTION. Rationalization is a response that preserves the integrity of the paracosm so that it doesn’t need any adjustment; you can therefore keep your behavior and beliefs the same. The reality is explained away or twisted so that the important parts of the paracosm can accommodate it. Self-correction is a response that requires readjustment or refinement of the paracosm, and thus we have to change to suit reality, rather than the other way around. This is the rational response, but it’s the most disfavored, psychologically, because it can compromise the regulatory ability of the paracosm.

So, if rationalization is the most favored response, then it follows that over time, the paracosm would drift out of alignment with reality and eventually bear no resemblance to it at all. This is what we see all too frequently in today’s world—people who seem to be living on Mars, totally out of touch.

Self-correction is all about building a paracosmic representation of the world that is LOGICALLY SOUND and does not lead to the rejection of evidence. Rationalization is all about building a paracosm that comforts and REGULATES the self. Ideally of course, we would have a balance of the two—we would compromise as far as it is rationally acceptable to compromise and as far as needed to maintain the self, accepting the rest as reality. But in a world of damaged people, of emotional people, their paracosms cannot be cold, logical things. They must be soft, fluffy, and replete with self-serving delusions.

The paracosm doesn’t ever go away. People never stop fantasizing. They just do so more maturely, in a way that carries all the drawbacks of bad experiences. The paracosm accompanies us always, and although it may cease to be populated with imaginary friends and fantastical locations, it’s nevertheless still the arena of imagination, despite the fact that we see everything only with reference to it.

This is a delicate balance that’s meant to sustain survival, not seek truth. We evolved to survive horrific and bloody deaths long enough to reproduce and continue the species. Even a paracosm full of primitive tribalism serves that end wonderfully. But without the grounding force of nature and the threat of instant death, the untethered human mind has learned that it can totally ignore reality and populate its paracosm with fantasy characters in place of the real ones—because it doesn’t matter if you’re wrong! There are no immediate, personal consequences for you, and that’s what our survival-oriented brains react strongly to.

A belief, however necessary it may be for the preservation of a species, has nothing to do with truth. The falseness of a judgment is not for us necessarily an objection to a judgment. The question is to what extent it is life-promoting, life-preserving, species preserving, perhaps even species cultivating. To recognize untruth as a condition of life – that certainly means resisting accustomed value feelings in a dangerous way …

Nietzsche

Reality is PAINFUL. It’s difficult, confusing, impersonal, cold, and unquestionably brutal. To help us cope with it, we invent fictions about it—we emotionally regulate ourselves by lying to ourselves. Just because something is false, or even patently ridiculous, that doesn’t mean it isn’t accepted by multitudes, because the primary role of a belief is, as Nietzsche pointed out, to promote and preserve life. It has nothing to do with accuracy or truth.

The reason why a lot of people don’t want to accept the truth and continually perform mental gymnastics to avoid it is because, in accepting it, they would upset the regulatory mechanisms and beliefs that keep them afloat.

People populate their paracosms with childish ideas, moral absolutes, commandments, stories about heroes overcoming evil, rules, and so on because these things provide MAXIMUM COMFORT, which opposes the harshness of real life. The internet, video games, movies, TV shows—they have been so readily accepted precisely because they serve a similar purpose. They furnish us with the raw material from which we might build a regulatory paracosm. And so, we become insulated from reality, layer by layer cutting ourselves off from the source of it all. And we see this as liberating. It’s “liberating” to accept whatever lie you want.

Anything that attempts to orient the paracosm toward reality—and make the individual tend toward self-correction—is almost guaranteed to be extremely unpopular. It doesn’t gel with the emotional self-regulation we all think we need so much.

When a person can regulate themselves without the need to appeal to bullish fantasies, they are no longer the prisoner of those fantasies. That is where true liberation lies. It requires the acquisition of strength and the development of a healthy psyche. Whereas most people want to escape reality to the paracosm, a rare kind of person exists who wants to escape the paracosm to apprehend true reality.

If we possess our why of life we can put up with almost any how.

Nietzsche

The thing you must ask of a person is: What is the WHY that enables him to bear life? What is the reason for his continued existence despite the many, many obstacles and forces that would quite happily see him crushed? What makes him able and willing to endure his own negation in the form of reality? In many cases, the answer is the paracosm. He lives to indulge fantasies, and he can bear life because he almost never faces it or acknowledges what it is.

If you can find a why that empowers you to face up to even the bleakest reality, then you will have little need for fantasy. Humanity is at present a fantasy species, a rationalizing species. It must become a self-correcting reality species.

The shared paracosm?

People will do anything for those who encourage their dreams, justify their failures, allay their fears, confirm their suspicions, and help them throw rocks at their enemies.

Blair Warren

What role do narcissists play in all this? Narcissists are those whose paracosms are necessarily averse to reality due to childhood experiences, and therefore are full of fantasy representations of real things. Because of their need for admiration, they frequently peddle these fantasies to damaged people. Look at cults. A regulatory fantasy is shared by the narcissistic leader. The members love immersing themselves in the cult and all its trappings. The fantasy appears close-by and real, more real than reality.

A narcissist attempts to impose his paracosm on the real world, or at least, whatever small corner of the world he can have meaningful influence in—merely because he can’t bear to live in reality. He amasses a following of dependents who also thrive (at least initially) on the fantasy because they get to believe themselves part of something special.

Thus, both parties achieve external regulation, which is the state of the paracosm being supported by others. Normally unacceptable and unjustifiable ideas become necessary.

Moral absolutism and the dissolution of the luxury state

Moral absolutes can serve a regulatory function. It is precisely this kind of “morals” that do not stand up to stress. When tested in battle, they crumble. Look around. Who is parading virtues that will disappear at the first sign of trouble? These are PARACOSMIC virtues, not actual virtues. This is a luxury that not all of us have … Some of us must live by our battle-tested virtues and eschew all else.

The sickness of the modern condition comes from an excess of luxury and a lack of pressure. Our paracosms have become bloated with nonsense and childish ideas. Sooner or later, the bubble will burst and a time of privation will arrive. People must be pressured into regulating themselves sensibly and realistically. Fantasy must be met with a firm hand.

Excess permits self-indulgent fantasy. But this state is not sustainable. It is ignorant of the very means needed to sustain itself. So, it will inevitably collapse. Nature’s way of crushing the feeble?

Comfort

All those particular, subjective, personal, emotional contents that rage to no end against reality will eventually lead to nothing. And what of ACHIEVED things? Is building any comfort to the builder? Or is it an outcome which he strives and toils for? Is anything useful to be found in comfort? Should we not prefer to be uncomfortable? It’s in discomfort and toil that things of worth are found. So, why do we waste our time indulging in comfort?

This indulgence is psychologically protective—more specifically, it is EMOTIONALLY protective. Evolution itself decided that absolute truth was immaterial to the cause of survival. What’s far more salient is concern over the immediate wellbeing, to which emotions are directly instrumental.

In the excess of luxury and comfort, life becomes self-negating. What formerly kept us alive now drives us to die.

Paracosmic toxicity

In eager fantasists, the paracosm becomes toxic to the wellbeing of its owner and those around him. It’s owed respect, he believes. Not only respect but indulgence. The imposition of the paracosm on society is disastrous because it signals that individuals no longer live in the world. They live in their own paracosms. There is no longer a shared cosmos—there is my cosmos, and your cosmos, and so on, which we carry in our minds. This is a crisis of collective identity. It’s seen today in many individualist movements such as the woke.

Unnecessary regulation

What’s important to understand about regulation is that it should be responsive to its environment. Engaging in regulation for its own sake to maximize comfort is very much an invention of EXCESS. In evolutionary terms, we worry less about survival, so less attention paid to reality is not punished, hence the indulgence of ridiculous fantasies. Regulation doing its job unnecessarily is damaging to our understanding of reality, and we face no immediate pressure to change.

The fallacy

People cling to falsehoods because they think they NEED them in order to regulate their emotions. The truth is that they just haven’t learned how to self-regulate properly. They could self-correct, but they choose not to. They prefer to be comforted rather than face up to the difficulty of reality and the truth, which is potentially hostile to them. They are sickened on this overabundance of coddling lies. What you end up with is a creature lacking all vitality, all instincts for its own growth and prosperity.

The conveyor belt

Humanity is rapidly moving toward the most addictive way to deliver lies: rapidly and in randomized ways. TikTok is a good example. It works like a slot machine, maximizing anticipation by making the rate at which you watch videos much higher than traditional video platforms—and also by removing user choice. It’s all about the infamous ALGORITHM. Thus, you get a “variable reward schedule,” which takes advantage of mechanisms in the brain to create an addictive loop.

By 2050, most humans will be in an almost vegetative state, scrolling and swiping in search of the next amazing lie. The paracosm will be alight with activity 24/7. Many people frequently enter such states today for hours on end. It’s only going to get worse, especially when corporate profit incentives point that way.

In The Matrix, machines farm humans for energy and keep their minds trapped in a simulation. Humans are basically elaborate vegetables in the real world. Isn’t that exactly the kind of world created by addictive social media platforms? They even had the concept of the METAVERSE for a time—a virtual reality simulated world! They predicted that people would jump eagerly on it, loving the escape from reality. They were only wrong because VR is a difficult sell. People engage in fictionalized worlds all the time via social media and games. It’s not that people don’t like the virtual world. It’s that its feasibility isn’t there yet.

Why do they keep selling you fiction, escapism, a way to leave reality? Because they know that people LOVE fiction and HATE reality. Any kind of experience that makes it easier to maintain a fantastical paracosm is sure to go down well with a huge audience.

Robert Nozick asks us to imagine a machine that can simulate any possible desired pleasure, indistinguishable from reality for the rest of your life. The “experience machine.” Nozick thought that most people would refuse to plug in, that people prefer what’s real and true over a false experience that FEELS real. He thought that people had a desire for reality and authenticity.

Perhaps mere pleasures on their own would not be enough, but people love nothing more than a narrative which validates them and comforts them. People derive pleasure from narratives because they believe them to be true. But most people will never accept a narrative that condemns them. That alone would be enough to establish as questionable the idea that people want reality. They want to THINK they are in touch with reality, while also denying its harshest aspects. That’s what the paracosm is for.

In Nozick’s experiment, the act of plugging into the machine constitutes an admission of fantasy—you know it’s not real, and so you derive less psychological regulation from it (because we are of course social creatures). But if you think it’s absolutely real—even if it isn’t—you could easily be convinced. The point here is that it’s not REALITY ITSELF that matters; it’s the PERCEPTION of fantastical ideas as real.

If people wanted reality and truth, they would be able to accept it, no matter what it was. Clearly, that’s not the case. They accept things with zero evidence and zero proof that nevertheless make them feel good. And of course they have to BELIEVE that these things are true, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re not really seeking reality. It’s not reality that people are committed to; it’s the justification for believing, which is cast in very different terms for different people and scarcely involves any realism.

So, if they KNOW that these fake pleasures aren’t real, of course that’s going to detract from the experience (because unreality implies deficiency). If they could be even vaguely convinced of the reality of their pleasure, they wouldn’t spend time trying to falsify it or finding reasons why it’s wrong or flawed. They would quite happily go on believing it’s all real because it regulates their emotional state.

Again, reality itself plays absolutely no part in this. There is no intellectual attempt to understand and verify the experiences being simulated. If the subjects had any reason to believe it was real, why wouldn’t they? It’s the best experience possible.

Everyone who believes in a religion is totally convinced that it is true. That doesn’t mean they are truth seekers. That doesn’t mean there aren’t regulatory reasons for their beliefs. Many of them grew up with religion and keep up the habit because it helps them.

Believing that some regulatory narrative is true is also IN ITSELF a regulatory function. Truth and reality have nothing to do with it.

For evidence enough. ’Tis found,
No doubt: as is your sort of mind,
So is your sort of search — you’ll find
What you desire….

Robert Browning

XIIX