Every human being is a single Universe. It sounds very poetic, doesn’t it? In fact, it feels especially appropriate today, with our fancy relativism and foggy quantum theories. Think of it! It means that each birth is a separate Big Bang.

What if I tell you that this isn’t simply a metaphor but a tangible fact? Would you believe me? Most likely, you won’t. You would tell me that we all live in a common Universe, that we obey the same laws of nature, and that we interact with each other in the same time and space.

I will admit your objections make sense. But I still won’t agree with you. And I’ve got a little story to back up my outrageous claim.

In 2009 I started a project called Mapping Stereotypes. I began to collect prejudices and organize them in satirical maps, each according to a specific group of people.

With this project, I wanted to prove, first to myself, and then to the people who were looking at my maps, that very often national prejudices are fascinatingly ridiculous and are a product of spite, envy, shortsightedness, low self-esteem, and good old human stupidity.

Unlike the case with Isaac Newton and gravity, the idea for the project didn’t come to me in an instant. Nothing hit me on the head. It was a result of a gradual process that is intimately linked to my personal struggle with my own prejudices.

I have been interested in maps from a very early age. As a child in communist Bulgaria I didn’t have comic books to entertain myself, so I used the atlases of my aunt. They were colorful and made me fantasize about places I could never hope to visit.

I don’t know how many of you can imagine this but at the time it was virtually impossible for common people to travel, especially outside the Eastern Bloc. So whenever I wanted to go on an adventure, I used to flip a page of an atlas and travel in my head.

This approach carries some risks, as I found out later. Travelling in one’s head was a common form of tourism during the Middle Ages. Then, a lot of clever people wrote books describing lands far away without ever visiting them.

John Mandeville is the author of the aptly titled medieval smash hit The Travels of John Mandeville. In his book, he claimed that in the Far East there was a type of cotton tree that gave birth to lambs:

There grew a wonderful tree which bore tiny lambs on the endes of its branches. These branches were so pliable that they bent down to allow the lambs to feed when they are hungrie.

Before you ask, there is no evidence that Mandeville smoked pot. He wasn’t a fringe writer either. In fact, his book was so mainstream that it was used by Columbus as a reference.

And Columbus himself was quite a dreamer. Today we erroneously think that he proved beyond doubt that the Earth was round. In reality, everybody in the 15th century was convinced the Earth was round except Columbus. In one letter to the Catholic Monarchs during his third voyage, he insisted our planet was pear-shaped:

I have found that it does not have the kind of sphericity described by the authorities, but that it has the shape of a pear, which is all very round, except at the stem, which is rather prominent, or that it is as if one had a very round ball, on one part of which something like a woman’s teat were placed, this part with the stem being the uppermost and nearest to the sky, lying below the equinoctial line in this ocean sea, at the end of the East… And this fact is greatly supported by the fact that the sun, when Our Lord first created it, was at the first point of the East, and the first light was here in the Orient.

But at least Columbus actually made the effort to go on a voyage.

During Antiquity and the Middle Ages there were two extreme ways of describing the world.

The first, and the most popular, was mythological. That meant people felt free to invent stories and even facts, as long as those facts served a didactic purpose, for example to teach you how to save your soul.

The second was the Epicurean way, which was pedantically materialistic. Many people today think Epicurus was more a party animal than a real philosopher but this is a gross misunderstanding of his legacy. His ideas about the world can be summarized in the maxim What you see is what you get. In other words, he had complete trust in the human senses. Therefore he concluded that the sun was only several centimeters wide. Because he measured it by hand.

Once I saw a map of New York City. I don’t remember its scale, but it didn’t have a lot of details. To my childish eyes, it seemed incredibly uncomplicated. After I studied it for a while in an Epicurean fashion, I told a friend that I knew New York City very well.

At that age, living in a town of 5000 people, I just couldn’t imagine the vastness of a metropolis. So I thought that Manhattan was the size of my own neighbourhood. Hence my absolute certainty that if I ever went to New York City, I wouldn’t need a city guide.

I’ve had many similar experiences looking at maps throughout the years. Of course, the whole purpose of a map is to inspire certainty. However, my example shows that it doesn’t always work as expected.

Growing up in a small town is an unique experience. Because you know everybody and everybody knows you, you get a feeling of completeness. Everything is a little bit too intimate. You get a sense of community that protects you. But just like you are inclined to overemphasize the qualities of your parents, you can also overemphasize the qualities of your community.

For example, I considered my hometown to be the best place on the Bulgarian Black Sea coast. By coincidence, everybody else around me seemed to agree. There were many other places nearby but each one had something that made it less appealing to us. The town to the north had a bus station that was too small. The village to the south had a nightclub that was open only on Saturdays. This made us “objectively” conclude that our own town, with its large bus station, and a nightclub that was open throughout the entire week, was the best place on Earth.

Of course, the world isn’t organized in communities, at least not anymore. The ultimate defining layer in our identity structure was our nationality. We were Bulgarians. Again, by sheer coincidence, we were taught that we were the best nation on Earth. One of the reasons was that, according to my teacher, we invented yoghurt. And not only we invented it, she said, but the bacterium that produces it can be found only in our country.

Regardless of where you come from, you have definitely heard similar stories about your own nation. It is impossible to find a culture, contemporary or ancient, that hasn’t yielded to the temptation of self-aggrandizement.

As we mature as human beings, we reevaluate the things we have learned as children. A good example is the story of Santa Claus. Because I was a communist kid, I never had any illusions about Santa being real. I was told the truth before I asked the question. But that claim about the bacterium that makes yoghurt had to marinate a while in my head. I honestly believed it. Actually, I wanted it to be true because it made me feel special.

Also, it’s a biological phenomenon. A bacterium that has a sense of nationality and never crosses our borders! That’s amazing! And keep in mind that the borders of my country have been fluctuating wildly throughout its history. That means that each time Bulgaria expanded or contracted, or even disappeared for a century or two, the bacterium followed. Mind-blowing!

One day of course, just like those children that never get told directly that Santa is a myth, I became too old to pretend it was all true. I also started to travel around. And as a result of many little encounters with ideas that were strictly outside my comfort zone, the layers of my identity structure started to break one by one, compromising everything — the place of my community in the world, my sense of protection, and of solidarity.

Many people feel horrified by this process and try to reinforce their broken shells like the Three Little Pigs. If hay doesn’t work, those people rebuild their confidence with wood. Then the Big Bad Wolf comes along and blows it all up. So the only choice left is bricks.

Bricks are safe. But they can also represent a trap. And the people who have reinforced their identity with bricks are exactly those who are afraid to outgrow their own Universe. Instead of emerging from it like a chicken from an egg and embarking on a journey into the real world, they choose to remain safe in their embryonic state.

This didn’t matter much in the past because there weren’t so many human beings on this planet. Each society could evolve on its own. What happened in China in the 10th Century barely had an effect on Europe. America was still beyond the horizon for the majority of humans.

Today we are running out of space. The horizons are not simply disappearing, they are completely erased. Unless we learn how to hatch out of our little shells and move on into the real world, we risk being smashed by our collapsing brick walls.

As Joseph Campbell brilliantly summed it up in one of his lectures, titled Myths and Masks of God:

The age has come that Nietzsche called the age of comparisons. There were formerly horizons, within which people lived. There are now no more horizons. Even the orbits of the planets will be surpassed in decades to come. With no more horizons, we are experiencing terrific collisions of ideas, as though you have withdrawn a division between hot and cold air. There’s a rush of these forces together, so we are in an extremely perilous age right now.

I think it is improper to become too hysterical about it. It’s an inevitable natural thing, that when energies that have never met before come into collision, each with its own pride and so forth, there should be terrific turbulence. And that’s what there is, and we’re riding it, and we mustn’t allow ourselves to blame it on somebody else, or on anybody.