I can't help but be fascinated by the web of lies that comprises so much of the social fabric: not only cultural notions like "God cares about your sex life" or

I can't help but be fascinated by the web of lies that comprises so much of the social fabric: not only cultural notions like "God cares about your sex life" or "America is the greatest nation", but even fundamentally obvious ideas like "human life has value" or "the truth matters". :P Beliefs, and the deceptions that maintain them, are more properly understood as self-fulfilling prophecies; prescriptive ideas, masquerading as descriptive ideas. I have a serious concern that if we magically evaporated every single lie, and therefore every belief, we would disintegrate back into "nature red in tooth and claw". Our capacity for aspirational imagination and social climbing through deception is as every bit baked into the history of human evolution as our empathy for those like us, or our care for child-rearing. It is, in Stross's term, a wicked problem. "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." - Vonnegut