Societies struggling to feed themselves have remarkably little patience for fashionable absurdities.
When every day is occupied by finding food, earning enough to survive, repairing what is broken, or protecting what little you possess, there is precious little time left to invent elaborate theories about imaginary crises. Reality has a brutal way of disciplining the mind.
Only when a society reaches a substantial level of material comfort do peculiar ideas begin to flourish.
Prosperity does many wonderful things. It extends life, reduces suffering, creates leisure and opportunity. It also removes countless daily encounters with hard reality. Once survival no longer occupies the mind, the mind looks for something else to occupy itself with.
Nature abhors a vacuum.
So does the human brain.
I know an old man who illustrates this remarkably well.
He lives with his wife in a modest apartment. I knew him decades ago, when he was healthy, active and constantly engaged with the world. He had ordinary concerns, ordinary opinions and an ordinary sense of proportion. Nothing about him stood out as eccentric.
Today he is approaching eighty.
His health has deteriorated to the point where leaving the apartment requires careful planning and often outside assistance. Doctor’s appointments have become military operations. Most days he remains inside the same few rooms, seeing almost nobody except his wife, who is exhausted herself. Conversation has become sparse. The outside world arrives mainly through a television screen and endless hours of solitary thought.
His body is failing.
His mind is not.
The result is fascinating.
Without regular contact with reality, without new experiences, without ordinary conversations and the constant correction that everyday life provides, his imagination has begun to wander into extraordinary places. He constructs intricate theories, bizarre explanations and increasingly implausible ideas. Each one seems perfectly logical to him because almost nothing from the outside interrupts the chain of reasoning before it hardens into certainty.
He is not becoming more intelligent.
He is becoming less calibrated.
Boredom is a surprisingly fertile breeding ground.
The mind was not designed to remain idle. Give it enough time, enough comfort and enough isolation, and it begins manufacturing problems to solve whether real ones exist or not. It starts assembling elaborate castles from scattered pebbles. Every coincidence becomes a pattern. Every passing thought deserves a grand theory.
Reality normally corrects this process.
Other people challenge us. Work humbles us. Unexpected problems demand attention. Bills arrive. Roofs leak. Children get sick. The car refuses to start. Life repeatedly interrupts our philosophical masterpieces with practical inconveniences.
Remove those interruptions for long enough and strange things begin to grow.
Civilizations are not immune to this process.
The wealthier and safer a society becomes, the easier it is for entire classes of people to spend their lives insulated from immediate reality. Material security replaces necessity. Endless discussion replaces direct experience. Abstract theories begin to outrank observable facts. Problems that previous generations would barely have noticed become existential emergencies demanding immediate salvation.
The less contact people have with consequences, the more confidence they develop in ideas that have never encountered them.
That is the danger of the bubble.
Whether it forms around ageing individuals, academic institutions, bureaucracies or activist movements, the mechanism remains remarkably similar. Isolation removes friction. Comfort removes urgency. Reality stops interrupting fantasy.
Eventually the manufactured problem becomes more emotionally important than the real world itself.
Perhaps that explains why so many modern movements seem disconnected from ordinary life. It is not necessarily malice. It is not always stupidity.
Sometimes it is simply what happens when a comfortable mind spends too many years talking mostly to itself.
Reality has stopped knocking.
And once that happens, almost any idea can sound profound inside the echo chamber.