Reality is Not a Collection of Facts & Certainty is the Real Delusion
We assume that reality is something firm, something objective—out there, waiting for us to correctly perceive it. And yet, history tells us that humans have been wildly wrong about reality for as long as we’ve been conscious enough to question it. In Why We Are Wrong About Nearly Everything, Bobby Duffy lays out a compelling case that human misunderstanding is not an exception but the rule.1 Our perception of the world is shaped less by facts and more by cognitive biases, cultural narratives, and the psychological shortcuts our brains take to make sense of overwhelming complexity. And that leaves me with a more unsettling question:
How do we define reality and delusion? And is there ever a clear line between the two?
It’s tempting to think that we can define delusion as simply “getting the facts wrong”—but Duffy himself proves, again and again, that even when we are given accurate information, we tend to distort it. We don’t see things as they are. We see them as we are. So what if reality isn’t about knowing all the right things? What if it’s about learning how to hold the unknown?
The Problem with Fixing Reality
I’ve read enough about cognitive biases to know that they’re not something we can outthink. Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow2 already laid out how our minds prioritize efficiency over accuracy—how our fast, intuitive thinking (System 1) overrides our slow, rational thinking (System 2) in almost every decision we make. Duffy extends this beyond the individual, showing how entire cultures create blind spots around crime, economics, happiness, and history. It’s not just that individuals are misinformed—it’s that societies create reinforced realities that persist, even when the facts contradict them.3 This raises another question:
If we cannot “fix” our perception of reality through better information, then what are we actually trying to fix?
At what point do we stop trying to correct misunderstandings and start trying to live meaningfully within them? This is where I start to wonder if delusion is not just an issue of falsehood, but of attachment. Perhaps it’s not that people believe the wrong things, but that they hold onto them too tightly. Maybe reality is not about discovering an ultimate truth but about learning to let go of the need for one.
Reality as Probability, Delusion as Certainty
There’s a strange parallel here between how we think about reality and how physics describes it. At a quantum level, everything exists in a state of probability and potentiality. Electrons don’t occupy one fixed place until they are observed; their location exists only as a range of possibilities. Light behaves as both a wave and a particle, depending on how we measure it. What if our perception of reality operates in the same way? What if reality is always a field of possibilities, and delusion is what happens when we collapse it too soon?
Duffy’s book seems to suggest that we live in a world where people consistently get things wrong. But what if the issue is not that we get things wrong—but that we insist we are right? Every ideology, every belief system, every strongly held conviction is, in some sense, a wave function collapsed—a world of probabilities reduced to a single, fixed outcome. But what if truth is something wider than that? What if reality is something that can only be lived into, rather than definitively grasped?
Surrendering to the Mystery
Oliver Burkeman, in Four Thousand Weeks, argues that our obsession with productivity and control is a direct resistance to our own finitude.4 We want to master time, to maximize our lives, to make the “right” choices—but in doing so, we miss the reality of our limited, fragile existence. I wonder if our obsession with fixing delusion is the same thing. We want certainty. We want to be right. We want to find a version of reality that we can hold onto, one that won’t slip through our fingers. But maybe the most real thing we can do is let go. Burkeman suggests that meaning is found not in control, but in surrender. That the deepest peace comes not from solving the problem of time, but from accepting its limits. And maybe the same is true for truth. Maybe meaning isn’t found in fixing all our misperceptions but in accepting that we will always be limited in our ability to perceive. So perhaps the work is not about getting all the answers right. Perhaps the work is about learning how to sit in the uncertainty of not knowing.
The Only Real Question Left
If I walk away from Duffy’s book with anything, it’s this: The line between reality and delusion is not as clear as we want it to be. Maybe reality is a series of shifting probabilities rather than a fixed set of facts. Maybe delusion is not about being wrong but about being too certain we are right. And maybe the only way forward is to live in the tension—to hold reality lightly, to sit in the unknowing, and to walk through the fog with open hands rather than clenched fists.
Because if reality is a mystery, then certainty is the only real illusion.
- Duffy, Bobby. Why We Are Wrong About Nearly Everything: A Theory of Human Misunderstanding. Basic Books, 2019.
- Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.
- Duffy, Why We Are Wrong About Nearly Everything.
- Burkeman, Oliver. Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021.
About the Author
Christian Swails
Christian is the founder of CoCreation - a Startup Hub for social entrepreneurs in Savannah, Ga. He serves as the Spiritual Director for Wesley Gardens Retreat Center and Wesley Monumental United Methodist Church.9 responses to “Reality is Not a Collection of Facts & Certainty is the Real Delusion”
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Christian,
You have a beautiful mind, and I enjoy the small glimpses I get into it. Do you see the human desire for a fixed reality of which the full understanding (grasping) is forever slightly beyond our fingertips as an innate characteristic in mankind from the beginning or a set of more current social pressures to exercise control? (Hope that makes sense.)
Darren, that is one of the kindest things you could say to me. Thank you.
This is a great question: Has humanity always been this way? Has there always been a built in desire, to grasp beyond our understanding and demand a fixed reality? Or is this a modern problem?
When you say “fixed” reality, I hope I am interpreting that the way you intend. Fixed as in certain of when and where we come from, how things work, what things mean, and what will happen next?
The first thing that comes to mind are the myths and stories from every culture across the sands of time trying to hold, depict, and articulate these answers. I think we have always had a deep need to know.
The stars, the weather, ancestors, geological features of nature, patterns in nature (sacred geometry), medicinal plants, the depths of the ocean, the origins of man, the formation of the world, suffering, death, protons, the future….and so on
I think the desire for knowing and being known by the Divine through the unexplainable things of reality has been a gift in us since always. It’s that desire that leads us to eventually surrender that desire and be held by the benevolent Mystery of it all.
Christian –
Your “what if” questions are a great invitation and a helpful way to process these concepts more deeply. Thank you!
I was struck by how you articulate the need to be right, and was reminded of an article I came across several years ago that posits being RIGHT often comes at the expense of being HAPPY; the author there says “the need to be right, and by extension, to control people, situations, and outcomes, regularly obstructs the ability to be happy—insofar as happiness is a function of contentment and peace of mind.” [1]
Given this week’s reading (and your great treatment of it), how do you process the idea that there is a kind of binary between “right” and “happy?”
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[1] Majer, Dan. “Would You Rather Be Right or Would You Rather Be Happy?” Some Assembly Required, Psychology Today, July 24, 2014. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/some-assembly-required/201407/would-you-rather-be-right-or-would-you-rather-be-happy
This is well asked, Jeremiah. Tactful, and honorable as always.
I just want to make one nuance on your question. Your quote from Majer sets up the binary as happiness and (the need to be ) right. And I think that is the crux of the argument. I don’t belief being “right” (whatever that means, however we are defining it – facts, fruit, love, bets, morality) means being unhappy.
I agree with the quote – it’s the need to be right that robs the joy. The need to prove drains joy.
As soon as Jesus comes out of the water with his identity bestowed upon him as the beloved……..He walks into the eremos (desert) and the “devil” says to him “prove it”. And he doesn’t. And he is right.
Christian-
I’ll start by saying this exchange of perspectives is why I signed up for the program. We read the same book. I end up contemplating taxes. You connect with scanning electron microscope images. I would have never found your perspective on my own, but now I cannot unsee it.
The quest for certainty and a desire to be right shoves me toward the irony that Duffy shows about the Dunning-Kruger effect. He calls the trend showing confidence and being wrong “incredibly satisfying.”[1] Now that you have encouraged me to sit in uncertainty, I am recognizing the folly of overconfidence and the uncomfortable correlation that I am wrong even more than I’d like to accept.
Entrepreneurs are known for their confidence. Otherwise, why would one believe that they can successfully change the world? How does this blog post alter your interactions with those who you seek to support?
[1] Duffy, 217.
Great wrestling here Rich. Thank you for the challenging and insightful question.
You are spot on: Confidence is absolutely key to entrepreneurship. Probably top 2 traits – neck and neck with long-suffering.
So, how do I hold the tension of reality as uncertainty with the need for confidence in those I would want to serve. My short answer is, “don’t fight against Mystery, ride the wave (quick nod to quantum) of it’s momentum.”
Confidence does not need to come from certainty. Confidence comes from knowing how to show up and trust yourself and that Mystery, no matter what the situation is you walk into. There lies the apparent contradiction. Because you could respond to that “well, isn’t that certainty that you will be taken care of by God, or some type of pseudo certainty in yourself.” To which I would reply….maybe.
But the difference is a certainty in external variables vs internal variables. If I need my exterior world to respond in a certain way (a decent definition of what most entrepreneurs mean by right) for me to have confidence, then I will be constantly disappointed, and as we explored in Jeremiah’s post above, unhappy.
However, as I go through reality with all it’s many failures, and losses, and lucks, and favor – I’m beginning to become aware of the unknowables and uncontrollables of life – and they are many.
Confidence comes from Commiting to something when you are not confident you can do it but because you must – from that commitment you face the fear of your insecurity with courage and you get used to that feeling. You act anyway and in that liminal space your mind, body, heart, and God pair together to create a moment of personal innovation that would not have happened without committing to the unknown. From that showing up, a new capability is birthed. And that new capability is to show up scared and not be overcome, even if your wrong. You faced it and you didn’t die. A part of you that needed to might have, but you are ok. – That capability is what creates confidence. Confidence to be able to do it again and again and again.
So, I believe it’s a shift in confidence from being right, to being ok. I don’t think there is a danger in having overconfidence there.
Christian,
You are always enjoyable to listen to and read. I appreciate that you bring your curiosity and deep thinking to the table!
How do you reconcile ideas that certainty is the only illusion with the nature of making such a statement? Is the statement itself also subject to its own logic, or is it objectively true?
Instead, is it possible that some things are objectively true and we do have a good, but incomplete, grasp of them? Do we have to abandon objective truth in order to love and embrace that which remains mysterious? Surely the belief that things have the possibility of being objectively true is what drives our curiosity in the first place?
Nice catch, Joff! That is a contradiction, or at least a paradox. I’ll have to admit, apologetics is not my lane.
The question is “do we have to abandon objective truth in order to love and embrace that which remains mysterious?”
My answer is a resounding NO.
It’s the certainty in our understanding of objective truth that must be abandoned.
“”Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?”
“Who marked off its dimensions?”
“Have you ever in your days commanded the morning light?”
“Can you loosen Orion’s belt?”
“Do you know the laws of the heavens?”
I’m with you, Joff. I have no problem with Objective truth. I’m content with my subjective understanding of it that doesn’t need to prove it’s objectivity.
Great scriptural quotations, Christian. I think those are very relevant to a discussion of the extent of our knowledge. I appreciate your response!