Views from the Abyss #54: The Comfort Zone

Q. You’ve talked a lot about fantasy bubbles, and how people filter the information they receive to maintain the integrity of the bubble. How is it that a bubble gets formed in the first place, and how does it become so sturdy?

A. All fantasy bubbles, whether they’re political, ideological, religious, or just plain old insane in nature, have the following in common:

1. They are each formed around an emotional core.
2. Facts, truth and knowledge are irrelevant, once the emotional core is established.

The process will vary from person to person, but generally follows a similar pattern:

Establish a Receptive State
Children up to their late teens and even their early twenties frequently have not yet established a robust fantasy bubble. As such, they remain in a receptive state—they are still able to consume new information raw, unfiltered.

A receptive state can also be induced in numerous ways, such as enrolment in a college course that requires one to accept new information unfiltered in order to pass an exam. Personal tragedies or general malaise often end up pushing people towards religious institutions in a similarly receptive state.

Introduce New Information in Bulk
These can be ideological or politically based college course teachings, religious learnings, paranoid whackjobbery, or simply one’s own parents discussing current affairs over breakfast. It doesn’t matter. When the subject is in a receptive state, it will all be taken in unfiltered and unchallenged.

Make it All Make Sense
A bulk of new information swimming around in your head can be daunting. Don’t worry though—if there is any degree of consistency to any of it, any hint of a common thread at all, your brain will find it and internalise it, often without your help or knowledge.

This is how the emotional core is formed. You develop a comfort zone—an intrinsic feeling which makes all the new information seemingly fall into its “rightful” place. In fact, you’ll find yourself surprised that it didn’t make sense in the first place.

Filter Filter Filter
Once a fantasy bubble has been established, new information can no longer be treated equally. New information that supports the fantasy will instinctively feel true, and can be freely added to what is already there. New information that contradicts it will instinctively feel false, and it isn’t hard to find rational sounding reasons to reject it, even if they do sound utterly ludicrous to everybody else.

And it doesn’t matter if you’re a hardcore ideologue, or a self-professed “neutral", your fantasy bubble defines your comfort zone, and it will reject on your behalf any new information deemed likely to cause discomfort.

Facts and reason are no longer welcome in your head.