Do we Live in a Truman Show?

When I was in middle school I was influenced by a movie with Jim Carey as Truman Burbank in The Truman Show. A show where Truman is an oblivious main character in a TV show broadcast to observers unknown to Truman. The show couldn’t exist with a character aware of his predicament so the cast consisted of double agents that acted as friends and family to Truman and tv show characters to the show’s audience. On times, incidents like a light would fall from the ceiling of the movie set, that served as Truman’s entire universe. He would notice peculiarities though usually he was naïve, giving rise to a show that could go on.

Have you ever considered whether we’re living in a Truman Show now? That would be ridiculous! There’s too many people that couldn’t possibly be in on it. What could cause so many people to play a charade on you?

I would argue, in reality we’re all living a Truman Show yet there’s no one Truman Burbank among us. Instead we are both, the oblivious Trumans and his costars. Then what, you might be asking, is the show?

The show we live in is to us as it was to Truman before he found out. The show is everything that you know. The show we live in is a mega network that spans the globe called society. It consists of every custom in our culture, every neighboring culture and every interaction that occurs within this global web.

Since Colombus and the Europeans discovered the Americas in the late 15th and 16th century, the whole world has come under a single world-wide network. Until then, natives of both Americas lived in universes coexisting completely independent of each other. Both worlds struggled and prospered oblivious, independent and completely disconnected of each other. Since then man has plotted every speck of land on this planets surface further bringing it under man’s world knowledge and entering it into a single societal network.

And just as we humans have learned to manipulate nature, our same instincts drive us to position ourselves ahead of our peers, easily visualized the with massive rich & poor divide in our world. It is foolish to think that if we were born rich instead of poor that we would have been morally driven enough to balance out the poverty scale instead of continuing to climb the ladder to more riches. We may donate to charities but never an amount so high that it forces us to give up a leisure. It’s in our human nature to take the easy route, to have our cake and eat it.

What is our show about?

Robert Dunbar defined 150 as the number of roughly the number of people one can maintain meaningful relationships. Beyond that, any more acquaintances require a disproportionately greater sum of time to maintain all of your relationships. In Sapien’s, Yuval Noah Harari argues that 150 is roughly the number that capped forager societies’ sizes in the times before the language and religion. Societies then lacked a shared belief that unified groups of foragers. Until the Discovery of the Americas, Europeans and native Americans held very polarized point-of-views. Imagine the confusion the Aztecs felt when confronted with Spanish conquistador’s greed for gold, since gold to them was simply a shiny malleable material good for jewelry. To gain an equal understanding for the Aztecs and conquistadors, one would have had to grow up in the other’s society to understand its culture’s values.

History has shown it’s usually the more complex society that absorbs the less complex one. Europeans then like Europeans today live in a network founded on the myth of currency. By myth, I’m referring to an abstract concept or system that people can choose to believe for better or worse like Math or Aryanism. Currency helped the East India Company do business with people half way across the globe, all choosing to believe in this abstract concept. Thus our conquistador friend Hernán Cortés equated the Aztec’s gold as a form of value with which he could buy many many things in his home society.

The Show

If you haven’t guessed it, we’re living in a show that has been running for several millennia, evolving generation to generation. Our values are different now then they were for our ancestors that foraged in the rainforests, or worked the field in medieval society. Currency has changed from seashells, to goats, to gold to 1’s and 0’s. The same way that we struggle to imagine how our English language evolved from Old English to modern English, we cannot begin to understand what are early sapien ancestors desired because neither are grand-parents nor our great “times 1⁰²” grand-parents knew anything about their ancestors’ beliefs beyond the myths they created. This show we live in is the single most complex system our species has ever encountered.

The Driver

Here’s a question, what makes our world run? Energy, or money? Technically it’s energy, but from an average human’s point-of-view I’m willing to bet they would argue money because it is easier to comprehend. Even the lowest in our societies’ totem pole understand the base purpose of money. How they idealize it or curse depends on their full understanding of it, yet there’s an understanding that enough of it will get them a loaf of bread and even more will get a Ferrari. It saves the poor uneducated person from having to ponder the ingredients and process of baking a loaf or the mechanical know-how needed to build his own Ferrari. Money equates to the more attainable/realistic route to attaining a new car. Money makes the exchange simple and predictable, yet money is anything but simple, I can only hint at this…

90% of all the money we deal with today exists only as 1’s and 0’s. With this concept of money in mind, it is now possible to live a lavish life with only a plastic card that transfers currency from one digital bank account to another. There’s no physical law demanding the credit card owner must have earned his money legally, fairly or anyhow. If such a plastic card magically appeared in your wallet with a corresponding bank account in a Swiss firm then you could spend that money the same way a sweat shop worker spends their daily earnings on food.

The point I find interesting is when a society switches to value a currency as of higher value than something real. I like to imagine if we had another Great Depression and money lost it’s value. If this happened today what would replace money? What one thing, real or abstract, would people choose to believe in in order to make future transactions easier? How long might we have a barter system before another currency myth takes its place?

In Conclusion

It seems we humans are on the same trajectory as our homo sapien ancestors’ before us. We’re evolving into an evermore complex system that governs over 7 billion humans and counting. It’s getting harder to feed, defend and rule all of us and just like in Truman’s world, the lights are starting to fall from from this film set housing us. With a society dependent on limited resources and new humans coming into a society that values money, Instagram likes and consumerist habits over what is real and sustainable, are we setting a good example? Let’s consider how much we desire because our neighbors, classmates and coworkers tell us we should and let’s take a moment to think about what we really desire. Is that new gadget really going to bring you lasting happiness?