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| The Great Dictator leads a most formidable granfalloon |
According to Kurt Vonnegut, a granfalloon is any group of people who have a shared identity and purpose ultimately rooted in a socially fabricated reality. For example, Americans at one point created the idea of State of Indiana, drawing imaginary lines around a specific area and declaring it to be a meaningful political unit. This ultimately lead to the granfalloon now styling themselves as Hoosiers, for reasons which remain shrouded in mystery.
For another example, General Electric is an entity founded on any number of socially constructed realities such as corporate personhood, ownership, and limited liability, not to mention the all-too-pervasive idea that monetary units somehow carry intrinsic value. These fabricated realities help to explain how the same company could be responsible for both designing the Fukushima power plant and (decades later) for broadcasting scathing criticism of that same design, night after night, on MSNBC. The individuals involved weren’t participating in one corporate mind, they were merely participating in various aspects of an extended international granfalloon.
Despite his personal experiences as a General Electric employee, I doubt that Vonnegut would really want us to cease participation in granfalloons altogether, because he often joined associations that supported his personal values and goals. He spoke out in favor of organized secular humanism, for example, and the American Humanist Association in particular. That said, I am confident that he would want us to be ever vigilant for the application of the Granfalloon technique — a method of persuasion which shortcuts skepticism and rationality by strengthening and appealing to our emotional bonds within a specific social group.
I’m no psychologist, but I see this happening all around me every day. Football fans think it is obvious that a close call was good when it goes for their team, bogus when it goes against them (Note to international readers: I am thinking of American football, but feel free to substitute your own idea of what the word ‘football’ should be taken to mean). Left-wing and right-wing commenters reflexively defend their own political parties. Americans tend to assume that our own bombs are for the greater good, while the other side’s bombs are merely an attempt to terrorize. Israeli children tend to assume that genocidal conquest is justified when committed by in-group soldiers in the name of their God, but not when committed between out-groups (recounted in The God Delusion, pp. 289-292).
Even atheist and skeptic groups are not immune to the allure of granfalloonacy. I’ve seen people attacked and defended based on their association with various groups, blog networks, internet forums, and the like. I’ve seen those who tried to stand firmly on middle ground attacked from all sides. I’ve seen people openly celebrate when someone from the ‘other side’ takes an emotional hit. I’ve often been tempted myself to takes sides and go in for a round or two hardcore othering, and I cannot honestly say that I’ve never done so.
Whenever I do succumb to such temptation, it is because I’m thinking of myself as an insider to some given granfalloon and an outsider to others. In truth, though, we are all members of the same skeptical movement, striving to bring the blessings of rationality and scientific thinking to the entire human family. It’s well past time that we started acting like it.
