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Half this town was just laid off. “It’s going to be a ghost town.”

Morricone conducts Morricone: The Mission (Gabriel's Oboe)

Tl;dr: Useful fictions—pragmatic assumptions treated “as if” true—shape cognition, language, myths, and society, liberating when voluntary but oppressing when imposed. This essay explores their epistemological roots, historical patterns, and praxeological truth: hierarchies crumble under emergent freedom, as individuals consistently choose liberty over coercion. The Labyrinth of Useful Fictions: From Illusory Maps to Emergent Freedom In the swirling vortex of human cognition, where perception dances with invention, the concept of “useful fiction” stands as a beacon illuminating the fragility and ingenuity of our grasp on reality. Far from being confined to novels or myths, useful fictions permeate every facet of existence, serving as pragmatic tools to navigate an inherently chaotic world. As articulated by Hans Vaihinger in his 1911 opus, The Philosophy of ‘As If’, these are conscious falsehoods—assumptions we treat as true not because they mirror reality perfectly, but because they enable action and understanding. Scientific models, ethical codes, even the self, are fictions we adopt “as if” they were absolute, yielding results that propel us forward. This exploration begins epistemologically but inevitably extends to ethics and politics, as fictions shape not just thought but human action—revealing how voluntary constructs liberate while coercive ones collapse, a pattern observed across history. Extending to the temporal: all thoughts beyond the present moment—memories reconstructed through biased lenses or futures imagined in uncertainty—are fictions, subjective narratives shaped by perspective. Eastern echoes resound here, with Nagarjuna’s Madhyamaka Buddhism positing phenomena as “empty” constructs, devoid of inherent essence, while David Hume’s empiricism anticipates this by viewing causality as a “real fiction” born from psychological necessity. Modern cognitive science aligns here neatly: our brains are prediction engines, constantly fabricating models to minimize surprise in an unpredictable environment. Language itself embodies this fictionality, approximating truth without capturing it. Alfred Korzybski’s dictum—“the map is not the territory”—warns against conflating words with the world they describe. Axioms like “fire is hot” are useful shorthands, replicable through observation yet provisional, evolving as knowledge deepens. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s language games reveal meanings as contextual and slippery, while Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction exposes them as endless deferrals. Proverbs such as “where there’s smoke, there’s fire” shift from literal causation to metaphor, reflecting crowd-sourced refinements. Of course, factories belch smoke without a flame. Incomplete combustion or chemical reactions, like lime roasting in cement, produce no open fire but plenty of haze. Or decomposition, think rot in a damp forest—fungi, bacteria break down dead stuff, release volatile gases, looks hazy like smoke. No heat, no flame, just chemical breakdown. Or dry ice: sublimating carbon dioxide curls up white, no burn at all. Point being, our eyes tag anything puffy as ‘fire-signal’, even when the engine’s cold—yet the saying still earns its keep. Smoke drifts from a source; the lesson isn’t literal but probabilistic: real cause, real effect, just not always visible. Same spine as ‘if it quacks like a duck’ or ‘birds of a feather’: pattern over pixel. Perception grows with knowledge gained, proving even old axioms bend with new facts. While pragmatic fictions (e.g., scientific models) differ from ethical or political ones, all share praxeological roots: usefulness in the present, refined by observation. Black markets, for instance, emerge not as universals but as consistent responses to coercion, from Soviet samizdat to Venezuelan crypto trades, demonstrating individual agency over imposed scarcity. Shared illusions offer value through critical analysis, often changing with the beholder. A dynamic described by Kant’s subjective universals, where aesthetic judgments or perceptual categories render experiences intersubjective yet individually shaped. It’s how we impose structures on phenomena. The provisional nature of every observation demands vigilance; what endures is tethered to praxeological truth—what works in the present, aligning with reality’s unforgiving editor. Scaling up, useful fictions manifest in myths and stories, layered vessels of wisdom passed through history. Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey archetypes smuggle psychological truths across cultures, while Claude Lévi-Strauss views myths as logical resolutions to societal contradictions. Carl Jung’s collective unconscious frames them as inherited blueprints, primal fears encoded in symbols like dragons or totems. Northrop Frye describes myths as “displacements” of raw experience, repackaging fear, wonder, death, and chaos into forms we can grasp. Friedrich Nietzsche dubs metaphors “necessary illusions,” truths as forgotten fictions essential for sanity. These narratives, from Aesop’s fables to Grimm’s tales, hide axioms—“don’t cry wolf” as trust’s caution—within nested fictions, evading censorship and adapting to audiences: adventure for the young, mortality for the wise. Philosophers have long woven ideas into fiction itself, blending mediums for intrigue—Plato’s dialogues as dramatic plays, Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea novelizing absurdity, Albert Camus’s The Stranger mythologizing alienation, Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra as prose poetry, Simone de Beauvoir’s She Came to Stay exploring ethics through dilemmas. This tradition underscores fiction’s power to transmit philosophy viscerally, engaging empathy where abstractions falter. Yet, this potency invites distortion. Yuval Noah Harari, in Sapiens, posits myths as intersubjective realities enabling mass cooperation—nations, money, corporations as collective imaginations binding humanity. While intriguing, his view veers into ethical peril, framing myths as tools elites wield over controllable masses, justifying hierarchies and trivializing human agency. Rooted in subversive ideologies from medieval kings’ divine right propaganda to 20th-century totalitarian myths, it echoes age-old efforts to manufacture reality for control. Ironically, individual critical thought dismantles these assertions by exposing the harms of top-down rule: consistent rejection when harm becomes evident, as in democide—where governments have killed more citizens than wars, often benefiting elites rather than individuals. This contrasts sharply with myths’ emancipatory potential, regressively endorsing illusion as control rather than empowerment. Enter Plato’s Allegory of the Cave: shadows as imposed fictions, not elite tricks but invitations to liberation. Robert Breedlove picks up Plato's torch, describing useful fictions as chains only when imposed. When chosen, they’re sovereignty amplifiers: launchpads for human rights, liberty, democracy. Not Harari’s crowd-control scripts, but Breedlove’s voluntary catalysts. The difference is consent. Critics might invoke a ‘middle ground’ where fictions blend voluntary and coercive elements, but history shows coercion erodes usefulness—e.g., property rights thrive when protected voluntarily through mutual defense pacts and common law, rather than imposed by states, which breed democide and manifest as theft via arbitrary rules like eminent domain—as Rothbard argued in For a New Liberty, all taxation is theft, extending to such seizures that prioritize elite projects over individual sovereignty. Even ‘greater good’ claims collapse: incentives beat force. Upstream farmer poisons the river? Neighbors starve him—no buyers. Downwind crew buys him out, or a whisper campaign, reputation guts his name—no state gun required. The distinction is crucial: the farmer faces consequences, not coercion. No authority forces the outcome; each neighbor independently chooses whether to trade based on their own interests and information. The farmer can relocate, adapt his practices, or negotiate compensation. These options are unavailable under state fiat, where eminent domain or regulatory mandates impose outcomes regardless of individual consent or exit possibilities. Harm creates natural feedback; when responses emerge from voluntary individual choices rather than centralized mandates, incentives align toward resolution rather than entrenchment. Markets enforce harmony better, faster, and cleaner. The only lasting harm is taxes—and the rigged rules that let the upstream baron lobby away his guilt while the rest pay for it. The same ability to impose fleeting and often negligible rules on the baron is always used by the most powerful for their benefit to the detriment of society. The asymmetry isn’t nature; it’s the system. This extends to social ills like homelessness, fortified by state involvement in the “greater good” fallacy and central planning’s inherent biases. Charities bloated by tax-breaks, paid to keep tents up not tents down—as Rothbard noted in his critiques of welfare statism, such systems perpetuate dependency to justify their existence. Housing funds vanish into ‘studies’ while sidewalks sleep. Private roads and bathrooms, as Stossel showed, get built quick, clean, cheap—proving the commons rot when no one owns them, while owners stop the rot. Same rule, every sector, where voluntary incentives align efforts far more effectively than coerced “solutions” that mask elite entrenchment. Enforcement arises from consent, not authority; absent that, resistance follows. History arcs toward progress against hierarchies, humans wielding stories to protect and advance despite imposed fictions. The Scientific Revolution—Galileo’s telescope shattering Church dogma—exemplifies this, as does abolitionism: Harriet Tubman’s underground narratives defying slave codes. Technological leaps, from Gutenberg’s press to the internet, democratize information, countering capture. What emerges is usefulness tethered to truth: fictions enduring through voluntary adoption, praxeologically axiomatic, while coercive ones—via force or delusion—crumble, yielding to reality’s bite. This dynamic exposes propaganda’s dark side, age-old tools of centralization to manufacture reality and perpetuate power. Operations like the CIA’s Project Mockingbird manipulated media for control, revealing underlying authoritarian regimes. These operations expose hidden structures, critical in non-authoritarian facades (like the US). Communism, socialism, and fascism thrive on suppressed truth, enforcing consequences for free thought—Stalin’s show trials, Mao’s Great Leap propaganda, Goebbels’ radio loops, Pol Pot’s Year Zero fantasy. Cults like Jonestown distill this: Jim Jones scripted a false world, leading to mass tragedy. In China, Russia, Germany, South Africa, the Middle East, such systems breed suffering, sparking inevitable resistance—samizdat in the USSR, VPNs in Tehran, fax machines in Tiananmen. In today’s refined cages, corporations and states fuse: social-credit scoreboards in China, algorithmic censorship in Russia, ultra-processed garbage sold as ‘food’ worldwide—walls disguised as apps and aisles. Surveillance has always worn two faces—state and private—always adapting to modernity. Governments and the wealthiest have always been one and the same: royals and other elites, Blackstone, global banks, large corporations, and industries—they own the rails and the regulators. Power looks decentralized, yet it is seamless: boardrooms, investment funds, and NGOs align entrenched interests with shared incentives. Still, the leash tightens the same way—through code you can’t see and contracts you can’t break, enabling control without accountability. As Carlin quipped, ‘It’s one big club, and you ain’t in it’—yet the promise rings: give them more power, and you’ll be better off. Even as costs soar, progress halts, safety erodes, society crumbles, and chaos with war endures—as it must in a debt-based fiat money system, where deception, oppression, and divide-and-conquer tactics are essential to sustain it. As is the case throughout history, in America this pattern has its roots in banking monopolies—even prior to its founding, colonial real estate-backed notes already funneled power to elites (e.g., Pennsylvania’s land bank schemes favoring large landowners and sparking debt crises for smallholders). Hamilton’s First Bank and the War of 1812’s financial manipulations—through debt financing and currency interventions—led to chaos exacerbated by the most powerful who relentlessly pushed to control the United States monetary system. Jefferson called central banking a serpent and ended it. Jackson ended the Second Bank. But each corpse birthed tireless attempts. Wildcat banks flooded the frontier—paper promises backed by nothing but greed. Morgan, Rothschild, Rockefeller—they weren’t rivals, they were ringmasters. They wanted rails, oil, steel, votes, all locked under one vault. Each crash, each panic—1837, 1873, 1907, every time, the fix was: “Give us a central bank" from the same groups causing turmoil. The public screamed “thief,” but influence grew deeper and the whispers louder: “trust us, we’ll stabilize" until 1913. The snake got its current head. This pattern shows less accident, more design—a consistent playbook of crisis-driven consolidation. History reveals a consistent, discreetly subversive elite capture of monetary systems. Further evidenced by the U.S. dollar’s over 97% value loss since the central bank establishment in 1913 amid endless inflation cycles that erode savings, fund perpetual wars from WWI (the Federal Reserve’s creation in 1913 directly preceded WWI, which led to WWII), Vietnam to modern proxy conflicts, and justify expansions of central power through crises like economic downturns while incentivizing manufactured emergencies like the 2008 bailout or COVID responses, where crises justify power grabs. Under central banking, there is no incentive for central powers to end wars or end other systemic corruption but rather to perpetuate them. These aren’t conspiracies but emergent outcomes of aligned incentives, as Rothbard detailed in Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy. Structural incentives operate through networks that transcend nominal national allegiances. Historical patterns reveal elites on opposing sides of conflicts—financial dynasties, industrialists, aristocracies—often emerging enriched while populations bear catastrophic costs. The Warburg brothers advising opposing central banks during WWI, Paul advising the US Federal Reserve, Max heading Germany’s central bank. Both families maintained wealth regardless of which “side” won. Major banks (JP Morgan, Deutsche Bank, various Swiss institutions) financed multiple sides and profited from reconstruction regardless of outcomes. European royal families remained intermarried across “enemy” nations through both World Wars. British and German royals were cousins during WWI. Many Nazi industrialists (Krupp, IG Farben executives) received light sentences and resumed business operations. Operation Paperclip brought Nazi scientists to the US with minimal consequence. One who was directly responsible for mass crimes against humanity became the head of NASA. Former Nazi officials and collaborators entered postwar institutions including one as the head of NATO and others in various international organizations. Americans did business in Germany during WWII. Nazi industrialists resumed operations post-WWII. World banks objectively wreaking havoc on impoverished world countries since their inception when their stated core mission is the opposite. World Bank policies—from structural adjustment programs to conditional lending—consistently producing outcomes contrary to stated poverty-reduction missions, as documented by critics from both left (Stiglitz in Globalization and Its Discontents) and right (Easterly in The White Man’s Burden). The IMF and World Bank push conditions that lock poor countries into cycles of debt and dependency, crushing the very people they claim to help. The banks consistently endorse leaders with poor humanitarian records, highly questionable loans for specific projects (like a relatively negligible bridge or building) in impoverished countries who are then forced to pay back the loan in dollars. The only way to get dollars is to export goods that countries with dollars want to buy ie rare earth minerals, rubber, coffee etc. Essentially they force people in impoverished countries into endless debt and slave labor. No third world country has ever truly paid off their debt to the World Bank. The cycle of debt refinancing ensures countries do not achieve true independence from World Bank obligations, with loan payoffs always requiring new loans. These are just a few examples that demonstrate how war’s devastation stratifies by class rather than nation. This evidence shows coordination need not be conspiratorial in the traditional sense but rather emerges from aligned incentives: debt structures, reconstruction contracts, and monetary reorganizations consistently benefit creditor classes regardless of which national flag prevails. The beneficiaries aren't sitting in a room plotting together. Those with incentives that align emerge to act as if coordinated, producing systematic outcomes that benefit their interests at the expense of populations. This results in a class of perpetual wealth and power reinforced by the system itself. Yet voluntary cooperation, and technological advancements, though hampered, persist under the boot of oppression. VPNs still slip through, underground kitchens still roast real bread, and Bitcoin still whispers across firewalls. Same war, newer tools. Hannah Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism highlights propaganda’s role in atomizing societies, yet resistance persists, as in WWII: Dutch non-cooperation, Danish slowdowns, Norwegian teachers’ defiance undermining Nazi legitimacy, alongside underground presses printing forbidden literature and partisan networks smuggling intelligence across borders. George Orwell’s 1984 warns of language as control, “two plus two is five” as enforced fiction. Those with the most power capture technology to perpetuate their wealth, not for the benefit of the masses, repeatedly harming individuals and leading to emergent efforts for liberation. Black markets embody emergent freedom, human desire evading capture. They persist as peer-to-peer networks—underground monasteries preserving texts, Sufi caravans spreading algebra—defying censorship. Black markets and money itself always emerge from the individual’s desire to exchange goods efficiently, regardless of the imposed story from on high. Gold became money not by decree but utility: durable, divisible, resistant to inflation, slipping tyrants’ grasp. #Bitcoin exemplifies this technologically—censorship-resistant value transfer emerging from voluntary adoption, echoing how Jesus’s parables slipped past Roman censors: both are examples of world changing, uncensorable information that authorities cannot erase once distributed. From WikiLeaks surviving banking blockades to individuals fleeing war zones, financial collapse and remittances bypassing authoritarian capital controls, it demonstrates how decentralized systems evade capture. Nation-state bans (China’s mining prohibition), coordinated attacks, competing forks, energy criticisms, regulatory pressure. The network continues operating, the ledger remains uncensored, adoption continues expanding. That’s a documented pattern over 17+ years. Through remembering 12 words, bitcoin offers a free, borderless savings account and money that no group can alter, censor, or otherwise steal. Equal and accurate weights and measures open to all, no rulers. Voluntary fictions don’t ask permission. Ideas—tools that offer survival endure. Highland evasions, tribal flights from invaders, underscore this: freedom as biological imperative, antibodies against viral control. While cultures define freedom variably (e.g., Confucian hierarchies vs. Western individualism), human action reveals universals: suffering under coercion sparks resistance, amplified by technology—from Roman roads, built for armies and sanctioned merchants, enabling the dispersion of censored ideas like the gospel; to railways facilitating exodus; and the internet fostering global mobility. Even without perfect options, individuals innovate exits, as in North Korean jangmadang markets defying state fictions. The arc toward truth endures; humans desire absolute freedom and liberty, any other imposition is inevitably futile. Information/trade restriction ultimately harms the restrictor—Chinese trade/travel restrictions amidst gunpowder advancements, Ottoman printing restrictions, Soviet technology gaps, North Korean isolation. Coercive systems persist only through continuous force and information control; the moment exit options emerge—whether through technology, geography, or awareness—individuals consistently pursue them. History shows not the impossibility of oppression, but its dependence on constraint: whenever humans gain choice, they choose liberty. Modern observed patterns—Arab Spring uprisings, #MeToo revelations, whistleblower leaks—illustrate this drive, not as ideology but praxeological reality: Coercive fictions fail when harm accumulates, yielding to voluntary alternatives. Tying to democide—government-sponsored mass murder—and all majority impositions, truth-seeking individuals prevail. Central planning exemplifies bias: impossible to granularly know desires, values, or innovations, relying on arbitrary harm—as seen in failed Soviet five-year plans that caused famines or U.S. housing policies that inflate bubbles while excluding the poor through zoning monopolies. Ludwig von Mises’ calculation problem exposes this—planners can’t aggregate scattered knowledge. Friedrich Hayek emphasizes local, dynamic information; Frédéric Bastiat’s “seen and unseen” reveals hidden costs. Milton Friedman advocated for school vouchers to decentralize. His idea was to give parents cash or tax credits directly, let them shop for the school they want: public, private, whatever they choose. The idea was to bust the government monopoly on education, forcing schools to compete on quality rather than coast on taxes. In 1957, he argued it would pull kids from failing systems and empower parental choice. Statists often resist it because it shrinks their control, yet it works well where tried—like Chile’s or Sweden’s versions. The logic is broader: wherever the state owns the supply chain, quality dies and coercion grows. Vouchers aren’t a magic bullet; they’re proof of principle. The same applies to healthcare, welfare, even money: give credits directly, bypassing bureaucracies, and the parasite shrinks as competition drives down costs. Decentralize and empower—let success and failure flow from individual choice. Institutions and regulations breed monopolies, offering temporary benefits to the masses while entrenching power in walled gardens: no competition means no consequences, no incentives for quality, just self-preservation at public expense—like telecom cartels stifling innovation until deregulation unleashed mobile revolutions. Murray Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe decry democracy as soft tyranny, favoring voluntary trade. Voltaire’s defense of speech, John Locke’s consent-based governance, Lao Tzu’s unnoticed ruler—all affirm: no one decides for another. Markets as billion biases negotiating yield cleaner outcomes than one bias amplified. Jeremy Bentham critiqued legal fictions as exploitable abstractions. Karl Popper’s open society contrasts with closed authoritarianism, where falsifiability refines fictions. Curiosity ignites this: innate spark, firewall against imposition, water eroding walls. Critical thinking—questioning maps—reroutes code, refusing others’ words, drawing from real-world, unadulterated feedback that offers invaluable insight. Freedom isn’t chaos but the default, empires merely dressing it up. Occam’s razor slices to simplicity: “you do you” endures. In 2026, amid surveillance and rollbacks, black markets for housing in San Francisco or illicit goods on Snapchat persist, whispers in kitchens becoming revolutions. Useful fictions, when voluntary and truth-tethered, liberate; coerced, they bind. Humanity’s labyrinth leads not to minotaurs of control, but emergent light of individual sovereignty. These are not mere assertions but emergent truths from human action; cultural variations enrich, but the arc bends toward liberty as technology and awareness dismantle imposed illusions. The pattern admits no exceptions. From Spartacus’s revolt to modern refugees risking Mediterranean crossings, humans consistently choose freedom over stability when the choice becomes real. Conditioning delays awareness; it doesn’t eliminate the preference. No institution has ever successfully convinced populations that captivity beats liberty when viable exits appear. Coercive systems collapse not through persuasion but through exhaustion—of resources, of legitimacy, of the capacity to prevent escape. Skeptics may label this ‘ideology’, yet the documented patterns are consistent across cultures and centuries—from feudal dissidents smuggling manuscripts to digital whistleblowers exposing corporate-state collusions—revealing not bias but praxeological regularity, fortifying against dismissals rooted in statist conditioning.

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