In our upcoming August gathering, we will discuss Jorge Luis Borges's masterpiece, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," which details a secret society of scholars inventing a fictional planet until its conceptual weight physically overwrites our reality. As groundwork for that discussion, it is useful to examine the history of how human belief consistently and eagerly yields to neat, coherent lies over messy, complicated truth.
In 1704, a man arrived in London calling himself George Psalmanazar. He claimed to be the first native of the island of Formosa (modern Taiwan) to visit Europe. To satisfy the curiosity of London's intellectual elite, Psalmanazar did not merely tell stories; he constructed a comprehensive reality. He invented a complex Formosan grammar and alphabet, formulated a calendar, designed a religion that required the sacrifice of thousands of young boys annually, and published a bestselling book complete with maps and illustrations of Formosan architecture. London society—including members of the Royal Society and the Bishop of London—eagerly accepted his claims. When critics pointed out geographical inconsistencies, Psalmanazar simply adjusted his grammar and history to explain them away. The sheer internal symmetry and coherence of his system made it feel more real than the distant, unmapped reality of East Asia.
Psalmanazar’s Formosa was a precursor to Borges’s Orbis Tertius: a conceptual world built by a single mind that captured the imagination of a culture. Human beings have an evolutionary vulnerability to symmetry and order. We find the entropic, unpredictable chaos of real life exhausting. When a system of thought offers a neat, comprehensive explanation for our isolation, our fears, or our political struggles, we do not inspect the details too closely. We adjust our behavior and our language to fit the system, and in doing so, we begin to materialize the fiction. The lie becomes our environment.
This dynamic will be the focus of our gathering in August. We will look at how digital networks act as modern engines of Orbis Tertius, constructing insular realities that slowly spill out of screens to restructure our cities, our relationships, and our minds. In a world that is easily colonized by coherent systems of nonsense, our task is to look directly at the messy friction of what is real.