Published on May 31, 2025 4:30 PM GMT
There’s a story — I'm at a conference and cannot access my library, but I believe it comes from Structural Anthropology by Claude Lévi-Strauss — about an anthropologist who took a member of an Amazonian tribe to New York.
The man was overwhelmed by the city, but there were two things that particularly interested him.
One was the bearded woman he saw at a freak show that the anthropologist took him to.
The other was the stair carpet rods in the hotel.
Epistemic collapse does not have to be caused by moving from a simpler society to a more complex one.
It can also result from gradually increasing complexity of your native one. The complexity rises until the point where the subject can no longer make sense of the world. They may have seemed to be a reasonable person for a long time, but suddenly they started believing in chemtrails.
Very much like the tribesman from the first story, they can no longer comprehend the world around them. The cognitive apparatus is freewheeling, clutching at random facts, in this case innocuous condensation trails in the sky, and trying to transform them into a coherent narrative about the world.
Imagine a chimpanzee who somehow ends up in a big city. He finds a park and survives there for a couple of days. His mental model includes, among other things, people. Some of them are kind and feed him, while others have dogs and they are best avoided.
That seems important, but his mental model does not account for what truly matters: the municipal department of animal control.
He will eventually be caught and removed from the park because he’s considered a health threat. But it’s questionable whether he even has a concept of "being a threat," let alone that of a "health threat." Understanding the concept of "health threat" requires awareness of microorganisms, which the chimpanzee lacks.
What’s worse, whether he ends up in a zoo or in an industrial shredder is of utmost importance to him, but the reasons behind why his destiny takes one path or another are far beyond his comprehension.
It may be useful to sometimes think about what your equivalent of a bearded woman is, but it's not clear to me whether that’s a question you can ever truly answer.
Discuss
