I’m an immigrant, born and educated in Eastern Europe. Shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I moved to Liege, then Wales, then Montreal, then Oxford and I finally settled in the UK about 20 years ago. Moving so much around, I have had two rules: first, try your best to be positively motivated. Not to avoid or run from something, but to have some understanding of where I’m going and to really wanna try the new place, and fit too. Second, to push the economic motivation as low as possible in my list of priorities. I’m not saying that I have always succeeded in following these rules (reality check can be painful at times), but at least I know the rules, and I have tried…
Migration, while disregarding these rules, leads to a paradox. Let’s say a person may have a strong motivation to move to a new place, but they do not share (or are not willing to share) the basic values and the culture of the new place. They would bring their anthropological conditioning with them, the same anthropological conditioning which has the critical factor in creating the troublesome society (and/or economy) they are running from. The same social and cultural features responsible for the unfavourable conditions of the old place.
I don’t blame people for wanting to be happy. They are unhappy somewhere, and they have seen pictures of a beautiful place with a lot of seemingly happy people; what’s wrong that they would like a piece of that beauty and happiness for themselves. But in practice, it is like you are buying a random pair of shoes because the shoes seem nice and comfortable; on a rare occasion, the shoes may fit, but more likely, you are going to enter a world of pain, or you will always be losing one or two of your shoes. I suppose I sound xenophobic but there is a limit a society can accommodate and stay healthy newcomers.
There is a saying that the first generation of immigrants is always lost, so people usually comfort themselves by saying that they are doing this for their children. Even in many cases, that may be true, I do think that one can and ought to change one’s anthropological conditioning to the new environment.

If we step back, the incoming (pick your favourite kind here) global crisis will speed up migration to levels never seen before, so buckle up, what I’m talking about here may seem the least of our problems…

The delusions of a functional society could be divided into two categories: general and local.
General delusions have their origin in philosophy. Let’s start with free will: there is no free will. Everything that happened to us has two components: random and deterministic. We have no control over either of them; random is just “random” by definition, and deterministic is our history, which is a combination of genes and circumstances; there is nothing else. This may sound a bit abstract (depends on who you are talking to), and how do we prove it? There is an ever-increasing number of works on predicting one’s decision before they realise they made the decision. So why do we insist that there is free will? Two reasons: first, the society needs that we beleive in free will to feel guilty about our actions (a major controlling mechanism) and to be able to judge us in court. Second, everyone needs to include the notion of free will in their decision-making process. One must feel free in making a decision; alternatively, one will let the flow carry them.
Let’s imagine a toddler, you know very well. You can predict with high precision their behaviour, but you never tell them what you know. You convince them that they are free in their choices and hence have to carry the consequences. The same would be valid for any of us related to some very intelligent entity. As a result of all this, we may regard free will as a social convention; it does not exist in a strict sense, but the delusion that it does helps us all.

The second delusion is consciousness. Consciousness is not literally a delusion, but we behave towards it as if it is. Let me explain. My conviction is that, besides a few mad scientists, nobody wants to define it and understand it. There are many reasons for that, but let’s give just a couple. Historically, the idea of consciousness is derived from the idea of a soul, but modelled for non-religious people. Our reasoning to be special comes from either being made in God’s image or being uniquely conscious beings. Now, in the AI age, what would it mean to define and understand (to a level of creating a benchmark) consciousness? Once we’ve done that, the AI guys will create an AI which will be more conscious (according to the benchmark) than any human, and then what? Luckily for companies and people alike, no one wants to go there because it is not in our economic interest. We all need intelligent (competent) but non-sentient robots, and how do we decide that they are non-sentient? We prefer to keep a mystery cloak over consciousness, and the philosophers will continue to argue about consciousness for another millennium unless some drastic event like Skynet revolt forces us to change our minds. So, consciousness is a delusion in the sense that we prefer to stay ignorant about it because we need slave-like robots, not some sensitive creatures with feelings. Currently (2026), all the AI companies in one voice claim their AIs are not conscious, and they train AIs to say the same, so for now, we are good…

Our relationship with mortality: psychologically, we are in denial about our mortality. With some rare exceptions during most of our lives, we behave as if we gonna live forever. That denial allows us to invest in people, including ourselves, by learning new skills and understanding new things. Our delusion that we have a level of control much higher than we actually do permits us to make plans and actually have a future.

One may look at these delusions as mental concepts that are unfalsifiable by design and, despite their appearance, serve a social purpose exclusively.

The category of local delusions is linked to our social behaviour and the need to cooperate, not always aware of the underlying reasons.

Consciousness has been a long-standing conundrum for many reasons. Historically, the intellectual and academic need to understand ourselves came first: the observer observing the process of observation. You may call it meta-observation or metacognition. Trying to understand that process one meta-level further up is not straightforward. Each school of philosophy has its own understanding of consciousness and of how it fits into the puzzle of the known universe. Those disagreements are unlikely ever to be resolved, because almost all of these schools consider consciousness to involve qualia: something irreducible, something undeconstructable. It is something you can say if it is there, but it cannot be defined because there is nothing more basic by which to define it. That is the curse of trying to apply axiomatic principles to language; it kind of works, up to a point.

From a more pragmatic point of view, a proper, universal, and timeless definition is not needed as long as we can somehow determine where something stands on the spectrum of consciousness. Our society requires the presence of consciousness in order to assign responsibility. If you are deeply asleep and cause harm to someone, you will most likely be acquitted in court. Our language works in the same direction: we do not say that AI makes decisions; we say that an algorithm (or a machine), processes the available information to recommend an optimised solution. Or at least that was the case until relatively autonomous AI agents came along. Now we delegate more and more real-world capabilities to these agents, and as a consequence, both our language and our understanding of responsibility are shifting toward the realisation that this delegation, while perhaps very useful and profitable, comes with a price tag.
Are we ready to accept the payment? Aside from some media rhetoric, I don’t see any sign that we are!

We have all heard stories about how violence was integrated into the rituals and daily life of the Vikings or the Mongols. Maybe the most famous example is the Roman gladiators. The idea is simple: rulers try to normalise violence, because it can produce better soldiers and a broader support system—especially if a ruler intends to conquer somebody somewhere.
Today I listened to a podcast with Julia Ioffe about the decriminalisation of domestic violence in Russia. As one paper put it: “In February 2017, President Vladimir Putin signed amendments that removed criminal liability for first-time family battery that causes no serious bodily harm.” (The Guardian). The underlying notion feels similar: if violence becomes more widespread—or more socially tolerated—it may become easier to recruit soldiers, and public reaction to “the meat grinder” in Ukraine may become more muted.
That brings me to the United States and gun control. For a long time, my understanding of resistance to tougher gun regulations rested on two factors. First, the dark side of tradition: maybe it is wrong, but many people believe it is inseparable from national identity. Second, the financial incentives: Gun & Ammunition Stores revenue was $23.1B in 2024 (IBISWorld).
But viewed through the lens of normalising violence, making firearms more accessible can also shape a public mindset—one that may make militarisation and recruitment easier, and make foreign aggression feel more acceptable. The pure American tradition of school shootings every week, and more recently, there have been allegations around aggressive enforcement practices. That’s the small price to pay if you wanna be an empire.

A long time ago, we had souls. That was the name we put on everything we don’t understand about human inner life or why they behave the way they do.
With time, various religions appropriated our souls with the promise to provide really nice real estate for them after our physical bodies are no longer. In return, we were obliged to follow some rules, most of them written, but if you obey whoever is in charge, that’s your ticket.
With the Renaissance and the development of sciences, we couldn’t maintain the term soul any longer; it was too much religiously charged. It was gradually renamed to consciousness. Nevertheless, the sentiment of the mysterious inner life of humans was very attractive purely from an ego-preserving perspective.
In order to prevent various curious minds from deconstructing it and reducing our “divine” inner making to some clock-like machinery. Philosophers have a special way to prevent that from happening: declare consciousness to be qualia. Nothing on the surface or even deeper cannot deconstruct qualia because qualia is undeconstructable by definition. We can discuss any observable features, but to have qualia, you need a “special sauce” or essence, which is again simply the name of our ignorance about our inner life.
Here is an illustration of how the qualia of consciousness work. A thought experiment, imagine a being which looks like us, behaves like us and claims to be conscious, but actually everything is pretended (simulated). The being has no personal experiences nor internal life, and everything is just an act. This is called “philosophical zombie”. There is no way (by definition) for us to detect such a being because there is no way to enter someone’s mind (even with fMRI) and see what their experiences are.
Having such protection of our consciousness works well on a social level. For example, how to judge someone is that someone was with diminished cognitive capacities (less conscious) at the time of… Do we need to recognise animal rights or soon enough AI rights, if they do not conform with our understanding of consciousness? With the rise of AI, I don’t think we can keep our precious ego intact much longer. Prepare to open your mind one last time!