Merchants of Belief, Purveyors of Reality
On beliefs, world views, the construction of reality, social technologies, and the role we play in the world’s becoming.
We are responsible for the world of which we are a part, not because it is an arbitrary construction of our choosing but because reality is sedimented out of particular practices that we have a role in shaping and through which we are shaped.
Karen Barad - Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007)
We have entered, largely without realizing it, a unique time when it comes to the unfolding of the world. A quite new form of market has arisen, a market for beliefs, the perverse incentives of which are a challenge to our autonomy, to democracy, and to the future of the global human society. People’s beliefs have become commodified by a new class of merchants, manipulators expert in playing the strings of common human cognition and biases. These are merchants of belief, and their aim is nothing less than shaping reality through people’s beliefs. The world evolves not by “fact” alone, our beliefs and attitudes towards the world are equally co-creative. We all take part in sculpting the world, but through the commodification of beliefs both we and the world are now at the mercy of these purveyors of reality.
To see why and how this is so, an understanding of the construction of reality is required, how reality is, in part, shaped and constituted by our world views. This conception of how reality works goes against many cultural, philosophical and scientific dogmas entrenched in modern world views, and keeping it this way, keeping these dogmas entrenched, works to the benefit of these merchants. We are as such victims of manipulation by occlusion, encultured to see the world a certain way, a way that has as one of its chief effects that it keeps us from seeing the dynamics the world is made by.
The Construction of Reality
By world view I mean the (changing) set of beliefs and assumptions a person has, knowingly or unknowingly, a collection that far more than what ‘belief’ and ‘assumption’ might imply are constitutive of the world as each of us experience it. As proposed by Feyerabend, this collection “involves the whole person, not only the intellect, has some kind of coherence and universality, and imposes itself with a power far greater than the power of facts and fact-related theories.” (See World Views for more on this topic). Our world view can be thought of as the lens we experience reality through, a lens that isn’t passively letting an objective and independent world through to us, but one that actively and bidirectionally shapes both the world and our view of it. This is the resultant view of reality I outlined in phase one, which I have recently found additional support from in the work of Karen Barad. Barad has developed the position agential realism1, where
…an empirically accurate understanding of scientific practice, one that is consonant with the latest scientific research, strongly suggests a fundamental inseparability of epistemological, ontological, and ethical considerations. In particular, I propose "agential realism" as an epistemological-ontological-ethical framework that provides an understanding of the role of human and nonhuman, material and discursive, and natural and cultural factors in scientific and other social-material practices…2
The point is that an understanding of reality is incomplete if we aren’t part of it:
…phenomena constitute reality. That is, reality itself is material-cultural... We are in reality, we must be in our theories.3
Reality is material-cultural, co-created by culture, the “sum” of our world views. The ontology of the world is not objects, but phenomena, wholes, experiences, that processually unfolds with us as parts of them. There is only the present becoming of reality, but this present owes its allegiance to all that came before, physical and non-physical, objective and subjective, natural and cultural. There is no basis to claim that the universe thus operates deterministically, for determinism is a descriptor applicable to our abstractions of reality, the epistemic, and not reality as a whole, the ontic, a whole that can never be reduced without loss.4 In believing we have no agency in the unfolding of the world, or in being confused about how our agency works, we fall prey to reification, of confusing the relationship between our experience and descriptions, models and explanations of it as well as abstractions and objects in it. The world is not made by what we name in it, but by what we name, our naming it, and us, as one whole that precedes its division.
Does our belief that X is the case, make X the case? What distinguishes X being the case and our believing X is the case? Cognitive dissonance opens up the territory for making it irrelevant whether X is the case, for in the face of contrary evidence, people may double down on their beliefs. Isn’t our belief that X is the case falsified when it is shown beyond doubt that X is not the case? Won’t the belief that “God will save me from cancer” meet its limits if the facts are such that you die of cancer? Here we can see a consequence of our belief in facts approximating towards an objective or independent world, for the belief to the one holding it may not change no matter what the facts are, for facts are nothing but the normative sum of other people’s beliefs. It is only from outside the situation we may be able to say that a person was wrong in their belief, because to the person holding the belief there may be no evidence that changes the case (you may die believing God will save you from the cancer that kills you). Our ability to imagine ourselves and contexts from “outside” give the impression that there is a single, objective world of facts that may be viewed from a vantage point of complete clarity, from which “objective” evaluations of the world may be carried out. But any such vantage point can only be constituted by another set of beliefs, and is as such another world view. There is neither a world nor a vantage point disconnected from experience, from a world view.
Our thought might now leap to whether science isn’t this objective vantage point (a “view from nowhere” or God’s eye view) I say doesn’t exist, but this is to fail to conceive of science as an evolving practice:5
Scientific knowledge is not an arbitrary construction independent of "what is out there", since it is not separate from us; and given a particular set of constructed cuts, certain descriptive concepts of science are well-defined and can be used to achieve reproducible results. However, these results cannot be decontextualized. Scientific theories do not tell us about an independent reality; scientific concepts are not simple namings of discoveries of objective attributes of an independent Nature with inherent demarcations. Scientific concepts are not innocent or unique. They are constructs which can be used to describe "the between", rather than some independent reality…6
The boundaries we collectively carve out in reality “are interested instances of power, specific constructions, with real material consequences. There are not only different stakes in drawing different distinctions, there are different ontological implications.”7 We are grounded in what Barad calls material-discursive practices, the becoming of reality is processual, and though we can imagine scenarios that are different than those playing out in the real world, the reality of things are only such as they come to be through the processual material-discursive practices that, through us, make up our experience. Plurality stands in opposition to any God’s eye view. Any and all views of reality are not only embodied, they are at a more primordial level experienced.
The boundaries we carve out make themselves present to us through representation - the epistemic, language, media. The epistemic, furthermore, is holistic, each part being what it is by virtue of all the other parts, the whole. On this view, meaning is context- and use-dependent, and language does not work by providing handles to an objective world, but by their dynamic use in experiential contexts that always change.8 What we mean by a term does not correspond to a crystalline, unchanging and ideal object or concept, but to changing parts of lived contexts that are always in flux. If we get too close to either an object or a concept we will find their boundary to be fuzzy and vague, precisely because by getting too close we interfere with the normal context in which the part (whether object or concept) acquires both its meaning and its reality. Nothing can be both object and subject of the same phenomenon, there is always what Barad calls an agential cut that makes it impossible to simultaneously study the parts of a phenomenon in their natural mode, without interference, and study the parts while interfering, as interference enacts a different agential cut. By its conceptual application this dynamic also translates to language.
This operational aspect of language can be both good and bad. On the good side, language is dynamic so we are able to communicate efficiently about a changing reality. On the bad side, semantic change, i.e. meaning change, can occur without anyone or everyone noticing, leading to a variety of problems. One prevailing cluster of such problems can be found within philosophy, where people have bumped their heads up against the problems of consciousness (the “hard” problem), other minds, and the nature of reality for centuries. Conceptual clarification dissolves all of these (See phase one). Semantic change can furthermore be exploited in order to produce confusion or manipulate world views. We can see that against a background of an objective world, semantic change is apparently harmless, for this objective world suffers no change from our beliefs and talk of it. But against a background of a processually constructed material-cultural world, this conception is a tool that can be used to impact the world.
Keep the people believing the world is separate from them, and we, the merchants of belief, can do our work without resistance. This might read as paranoid and cynical. Is the question whether this is an actual and deliberate motivation people and organizations have, or is the question whether the observed effects are enough to judge the reality of things to be so? This itself becomes an object of inquiry relevant to this discussion, because of many people’s belief that the rationalizations we provide for our actions after carrying them out are the causal reasons for our actions, unaware that rationalization can often be a dissonant practice whereby we fit our actions to a certain narrative about ourselves. Again, given the prevalence of cognitive dissonance, our own reasons for doing this and that is only one story that might fit the “facts”. And again, the facts are nothing but the normative sum of beliefs. Against the (erroneous) model of an objective world, none of this presents an issue, because in this model there is a single independent world, portrayed by the facts, to which our own narrative either fits and is “true”, or does not fit and is “false”. The context-dependence and normativity of “facts”, “truth” and “reality” all drop out of the equation! The objective reality model is arguably far more easy to see the world through (for reasons that are scientific, political, governmental, legal, moral etc.), but does ease in certain contexts weigh up for the potential harm and exploitation in others? Let us review some current cases where exploitation of semantic change and belief manipulation is put to use.
Merchants of Belief
As I argued in The Human Normativity of AI Sentience and Moral Status, “we should be extremely vary of… what role is ultimately afforded the humans and corporations behind AI systems… We cannot allow AI sentience to gain any bearing in the question of AI moral status, for this may serve to lower the evaluative standard of risk, moral and legal responsibility to which the creators (and users) of AI systems are held. Thus, there is both conceptual and moral reasons to treat the question of moral status separate from sentience, and… we should furthermore morally treat these systems like we would any tool or technology: as extensions of ourselves, with the moral implications thereof.”
Talk of AI as “thinking”, “reasoning”, “conscious”, “sentient”, “moral” and the like can be conceived as tools to legitimate AI welfare and moral status as a step towards other ends. This kind of talk exemplifies semantic expansion, as all of these terms acquire their present meaning in human contexts. One possible end towards which this semantic change might be a tool is, as stated above, to manipulate the network of moral and legal responsibility. Another is to anthropomorphize and normalize AI systems to lower barriers and increase use for reasons of market share and profit increase.
As recent research reveals, “Social AI may disproportionately impact human-AI interactions, potentially leading to model monopolies where Social AI impacts human beliefs, behaviour and homogenize the worldviews of its users.”9 As the technology, AI and ethics philosopher Shannon Vallor puts it: “AI won’t enable a sustainable future without reformed political institutions and economic incentives. What’s more, the kinds of AI technologies we’re developing today are undermining and delaying these reforms rather than supporting them, precisely because they mirror the misplaced patterns of judgment and value that led us into our current peril… What AI mirrors do is to extract, amplify, and push forward the dominant powers and most frequently recorded patterns of our documented, datafied past. In doing so they turn our vision away from the newer, rarer, wiser, more mature and humane possibilities that we must embrace for the future.“10 Who stands to gain from continuing the amplification of our past modes of society? In the face of widespread polarization, I would argue social AI will also contribute to heterogenize the world views of its users, but not a heterogenization free from the influences of politics or profit. Who stands to gain from controlling the impacts of AI on human world views?
Another current example is the discourse around the climate crisis, one example of which we see in the dissonance and alienation felt by many due to the quantitative reification of this year’s COP and its focus on climate financing. One doesn’t have to be an activist to sense the despair inherent in putting a number on the price we are willing to pay for the damage wrought by man-made climate change, reducing all of this complexity to numbers that will have large role in deciding the future of the earth. This sum is supposed to pay for damage done, but at the same time it is funded by continued destruction. Quantitative reification in part acts to obstruct the view to the real-world causes and effects of climate change. Who stands to benefit from obfuscating the climate crisis?
On the topic of quantitative reification it is appropriate to point to some other overlapping world view manipulations that all in some way or another relate to the progress narrative (See e.g. The Metacrisis - Analysis). Not only can the progress narrative be seen as a single culture-wide shaping of both world and world view, it also contains several belief-manipulating “subroutines” that act in its service.
One such subroutine is the association between the meaning of life and the good life to happiness (In part due to utilitarian ethics), and how happiness in modernity has been both quantitatively reified and commodified through consumption culture. We measure and report happiness not by qualitative considerations, but by quantitative metrics that are mostly a reflection of our level of resources.11 But happiness fails to account for the growth we achieve through adversity, and to the uncontrollable aspects of resonance that Hartmut Rosa argues should supersede the role that happiness in modernity has in relation to the good life. The great contradiction of modernity is the attempted capture of resonance, which is an impossibility, as resonance requires an approach where control does not figure in.12 How has the world changed in response to the reification and commodification of life, and in whose interest is it to keep this up?
Another discursive phenomenon is the effect that Nordhausian climate economics has had on our response to the climate crisis. William Nordhaus won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2018 for his work on climate economic policy, and as reported in When Idiot Savants Do Climate Economics “[h]is ideas have been adopted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, global risk managers, the financial services industry, and universities worldwide that teach climate economics.” In the interest of keeping it short, based on limited economic models that fail to account for a range of crucial variables and feedback processes13, Nordhaus has successfully convinced large swaths of the international response to the climate crisis that the social cost of climate change is optimal (economically) in a 2.7-3.5C increase scenario. As any climate expert can tell you, a 2.7-3.5C increase will be catastrophic. Not only is there comprehensive evidence of a higher social cost of CO2 than historically modelled,14 Nordhausian models have received ample critique for their disconnect from reality, and as Rockström states in the above piece this “optimum” is really entering the territory where “it’s difficult to see how we could accommodate a billion people or even half of that.” Sure, any balanced future likely requires our numbers to decline, but this cannot be treated as a race. How much damage has been dealt as a consequence of an economic and distorted view of reality? And who stands to gain from the policies implemented as a consequence of these distortions?
The last example I wish to highlight is also the one that is perhaps most quintessential to our times. Social technology now spans the entire globe, with over 5 billion people plugged into digital spheres of discourse. These social media platforms are for the most part not transparent, but algorithmically driven by a media-industrial complex out to capture our attention, our money and our beliefs. This fuels culture wars,15 political polarization, a mental health epidemic among young girls, election interference and the ‘epistemological crisis’, promotion of earth-destroying consumption culture, vapid and vain role models, and much more. This is world (and world view) manipulation on a scale never before seen. Social media itself is of course not the problem, but the context it is embedded in, a landscape of growthism and perverse incentives, serves to promote the values of this context over the potential balanced and wise uses social media could be designed towards.16
Purveyors of Reality
Our time is by no means the first time that the manipulation of beliefs has had a large impact on the world: we need look no further than the effects organized religions have had a part in, and continue to have a part in, when it comes to beliefs, the development of our societies, and the face of the earth since the last ice age. However, through social technologies we have in the last few decades entered an entirely new stage, one where there truly is a market. From a few media titans vying for our custom, social technologies in the internet age have now blasted open the marketplace for our attention and our beliefs, a commodification of our psyche at unprecedented scales and rates. This marketplace has not only been grabbed by the marketing industry (in a sense all marketing is belief manipulation17), tarnishing the internet through ads and cookification, but (in part via these) also by the merchants of belief. In a recent essay, Michael Sacasas speaks of a related phenomenon he calls the enclosure of the human psyche, a comparison to the loss of the commons through its enclosure:
…in my view, the most important task before us is to resist the enclosure of the human psyche, because even our capacity to imagine an alternative way of being in the world, to say nothing of enacting such a vision, depends on it.
[...]
Is there an even more literal form of the commons to which the analogy of enclosure points us? The individual human psyche does not seem like a thing held in common. But, in fact, that presumption may itself be a symptom of the enclosure of the psyche, although there are certainly many other forces leading toward that same conclusion. What if the psyche were a thing held in common? That is to say, what if our purchase on reality and the emergence of the self depended on human relationships and communities? From this perspective, the enclosure of the human psyche deprives us of a common world, which yields an experience of solidarity and belonging.
Enclosure is achieved chiefly by commodification and manipulation. It is by the power of a particular set of beliefs, a particular worldview, grounded in a metaphysics of separability (particularism, as it is designated throughout phase one), where we are independent of reality both ontologically and epistemologically, that we become complacent to what is going on and allow the commodification and enclosure of our psyche. It is on a view of reality where we are independent, where reality is a deterministic container of space, time and matter, separated from life and culture, that our own agency and our own part in the unfolding of reality vanishes. Latour (1993) speaks of the wide-ranging effects of the metaphysics of separability as totalization:
…totalization participates, in devious ways, in what it claims to abolish. It renders its practitioners powerless in the face of the enemy, whom it endows with fantastic properties. A system that is total and sleek does not get divided up. A transcendental and homogeneous nature does not get recombined. A totally systematic technological system cannot be reshuffled by anyone. A Kafkaesque society cannot be renegotiated. A 'deterritorializing' and absolutely schizophrenic capitalism will never be redistributed by anyone. A West radically cut off from other cultures-natures is not open to discussion. Cultures imprisoned for ever in arbitrary, complete and consistent representations cannot be evaluated. A world that has totally forgotten Being will be saved by no one. A past from which we are forever separated by radical epistemological breaks cannot be sorted out again by anyone at all.
The purveyors of reality all serve the escalatory logic of modernity, the engine of dynamic stabilization that Rosa (2019) identifies as the central dynamic at the heart of the failing of modernity. This escalatory logic comes about as a consequence of the incessant stabilization (through new growth) needed to keep up with old growth, a dependence on acceleration “in order to maintain and reproduce its structure.” Envisioning a societal mode that breaks with this logic, Rosa outlines that “the quality of our relationship to the world should become the measuring stick for political and individual action. In turn, not escalation, but the capacity for and possibility of establishing and maintaining axes of resonance should serve as the measure of quality, while alienation (on the side of subjects) and reification (on the side of objects) can function as seismographs of critique… a more resonant form of modernity's institutionalized relationship to the world cannot be realized unless we tame, or rather replace, the "blind" machinery of capitalist exploitation with economically democratic institutions capable of tying decisions about the form, means, and goals of production back to the criteria of successful life.”18 When all spheres of life are appropriated by blind growth there is little wonder we have a hard time seeing past this paradigm to gain a view of other possible worlds, of other possible ways of being.
From my perspective, the foremost task of our time is to break free of this metaphysics and view of the world, a view that now has a hold on all spheres of our culture. We, each and every one of us, have a choice in which merchants we yield our custom to. The metaphysics of separability divorces us from ethics. Everything we do matters. This is what the holistic account attempts to return us to, a fusing of ethics, epistemology and ontology, of doing, knowing and being, to once more echo Barad. I again refer back to a quotation from the first essay I published, one I have pulled from repeatedly throughout this project, but that still holds the essence of what I try to achieve with my work:
…the magical flower of winter is the flower growing out of itself, symbolizing the self-upholding nature of reality, the corresponding holistic philosophy I will outline, as well as the reciprocal relationship between us and reality that this philosophy represents. We cannot at this advanced stage of civilization allow ourselves to do anything, neither politics nor philosophy, without an eye on the whole that we are part of.
We are “sculptors of reality”, co-creative parts of our world, “not because it is an arbitrary construction of our choosing but because reality is sedimented out of particular practices that we have a role in shaping and through which we are shaped.” Just as this essay opens with a quote from Karen Barad, so too will it close:
A delicate tissue of ethicality runs through the marrow of being. There is no getting away from ethics —mattering is an integral part of the ontology of the world in its dynamic presencing. Not even a moment exists on its own. "This" and "that," "here" and "now," don't preexist what happens but come alive with each meeting. The world and its possibilities for becoming are remade with each moment. If we hold on to the belief that the world is made of individual entities, it is hard to see how even our best, most well-intentioned calculations for right action can avoid tearing holes in the delicate tissue structure of entanglements that the lifeblood of the world runs through. Intra-acting responsibly as part of the world means taking account of the entangled phenomena that are intrinsic to the world's vitality and being responsive to the possibilities that might help us flourish. Meeting each moment, being alive to the possibilities of becoming, is an ethical call, an invitation that is written into the very matter of all being and becoming. We need to meet the universe halfway, to take responsibility for the role that we play in the world's differential becoming.19
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References
Barad, K. (1996). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Realism and Social Construction Without Contradiction in Feminism, Science and the Philosophy of Science (Ed. Nelson, L. H. & Nelson, J.). Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press.
Brandtzæg, P. B, Skjuve, M. & Følstad, A. (2024). Understanding Model Power in Social AI. AI & Society: Knowledge, Culture and Communication. ISSN 0951-5666. doi: 10.1007/s00146-024-02053-4
Latour, B. (1993). We Have Never Been Modern. Harvard University Press. [1991]
Rennert, K., Errickson, F., Prest, B.C. et al. (2022). Comprehensive evidence implies a higher social cost of CO2. Nature 610, 687–692 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05224-9
Ripple, W. J. et.al. (2024). The 2024 state of the climate report: Perilous times on planet Earth. BioScience; biae087, https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biae087
Rosa, H. (2019). Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World. Polity Press.
Rosa, H. (2020). The Uncontrollability of the World. Polity Press.
Stein, Z. (2021). Disarm the Pedagogical Weaponry: Make Education not Culture War in Dispatches from a Time Between Worlds: Crisis and Emergency in Metamodernity (Ed. Rowson, J. & Pascal, L.). Perspective Press.
Contrary to my working definition of realism as denoting the belief in a reality independent of us (which Barad, at least in part, views as representationalism), Barad understands realism as the belief that our theories are ‘capable of providing reliable and understandable access to the ontology of the world’. This is not the place to go into whether this is a semantic expansion, 'or whether ‘realism’ now suffers such semantic vagueness that it is no longer meaningful to use as a term.
Barad (2007).
Barad (1996).
For my use of the terms “epistemic” and “ontic”, see The Epistemic and the Ontic and Experience and Immersion. For more on determinism, see The Plurality of Experience.
See also Science and Explanation and World Views.
Barad (1996).
Barad (1996).
Brandtzaeg (2024).
Vallor (2024).
Rosa (2019).
Rosa (2020).
Ripple et.al. (2024): “Because feedback loops are not yet fully integrated into climate models, current emissions reduction plans might fall short in adequately limiting future warming.”
Rennert et.al. (2022).
Stein (2021).
See the section “An Example of Maturity: Design and Use of Social Media” in Development in Progress.
Either through associating a brand or product with some existing desirable quality, or semantically reshaping concepts so as to create new desires and associations. The world we manifest as a consequence is of course shaped by these new desires and associations.
Rosa (2019).
Barad (2007).
It certainly jives with the quantum measurement/observation phenomenon