Too Big to Comprehend
but not too big to feel
For many years, my husband Peter was a volunteer firefighter in Connecticut and later, in New York. Here’s a snapshot from any one of those years:
He comes home in the evening from a monthly meeting, hangs up his baseball cap in the hallway, and stands there, rubbing his forehead in that way he does when frustration has hijacked him. “Oh my GOD.”
“That bad, eh?” I say. “What was it this time?”
“Gutter replacement,” he says.
He is speaking of the assembled group of fellow firefighters, seated on folding chairs, drinking muddy coffee under florescent lights at the fire station, debating the relative merits of this contractor (“this guy is great, he showed up on time”) versus that contractor (“rock-bottom price, I’m telling you”) versus yet another (“him being my brother-in-law isn’t part of this”).
Endless, circular discussions stretch long past the time allotted and get put on the agenda for the following month, where the same impassioned conversation takes place again: the same remarks, the same comebacks, the same gridlock.
It’s a hamster wheel of argumentation in service of a job that’s going to cost, oh, somewhere in the neighborhood of twelve hundred bucks.
“Well, that’s consensus,” you might say.
As Peter exfoliates his forehead, I say that to myself. I’m a big fan of consensus as a decision-making model, having spent years learning how to build consensus in Waldorf settings — where consensus IS the decision-making model.
It’s wildly time-consuming, often excruciatingly so. Yet it’s also the only way I’ve ever seen a group agree to a plan of action that leaves no one behind, no one muttering as the plan commences, no one secretly trying to derail it down the road.
Yes, the fire department is taking multiple months to decide whom to hire for the gutter job. To Pete, I say out loud what I’m thinking: “I guess that’s the price you pay to get everyone on board.”
To which my husband quickly points out, “Actually, no. Those are the same guys who talked for less than an hour before they unanimously agreed to buy a brand new fire engine that cost six hundred THOUSAND dollars.”
I’m stunned, but even as Peter continues his oration, I know I shouldn’t be.
“Why?” he says, “Because 600K is funny money for a fire department. It’s not real. No one can fully grasp it. ‘Sure, yeah, 600K! I’m in! Sounds great!’” He shakes his head, sighs the mother of all exhales, and I nod in solidarity. We move on to less-exasperating topics.
This phenomenon, which I’m calling the “Too Big to Comprehend” (TBTC) effect, shows up all the time in human decision-making. You’ve probably experienced some version of it yourself.
Congress deals with this all the time, but that’s not the focus of this essay.
We human beings simply cannot comprehend big stuff. Not because it’s complicated, or hard to understand in a nuts-and-bolts kind of way, but because it’s just literally too big.
We can’t grasp the depth of The Mariana Trench (36,000 feet), or the size of the national debt (36 trillion at the time of writing, and increasing 1 million every 31 seconds), or the distance from the Earth to the sun (93 million miles) because understanding the colossal is not an evolutionary necessity.
Early hominids didn’t need to know how many antelope existed in the world, just how many were in the nearby herd.
And actually, they might not have needed to know the herd’s exact number. There exists in the far reaches of the Amazon River an ancient indigenous culture called the Piraha, whose language has no words for numbers. They have words for abstract quantities like “some” and “more,” but no finite numbers like “two” or “three,” and clearly not 1.2 million.
Apparently, counting itself is not necessary for our survival. Anthropologists know that the Piraha tribe amounts to approximately 400 people, but the Piraha themselves don’t know that. In their world, it doesn’t matter.
In our world, it matters deeply. We measure everything. We want to know how much money is in our checking account, what was the score on the exam, and of course, the recent, all-important answer to: who received the most votes?
And yet, when any number gets too big, we fall mute, incapacitated by its enormity. That’s become an increasingly dire problem as our population has ballooned and the world has webbed up. We are hamstrung by this human cognition blind-spot.
We are also subject to serious manipulation through this blind spot. Huge, incomprehensible-due-to-their-size problems can be weaponized to create fear. A hole in the ozone, for example, or peak oil: something none of us can see that threatens our livelihoods, or even our lives.
Governments just keep getting better and better at this. Does anyone remember the red, orange, and yellow alert system after 9/11? What, exactly, were we supposed to do with their rating for the day?
The not-so-great news is that TBTC is not the only human cognition blind spot.
published this recently:
Gato talks about “normalcy bias,” an illusory sense of security stemming from the preconceived belief that since something hasn't happened before, it couldn’t possibly occur in the future:
somewhere embedded deeply, even atavistically in human cognition lies a vast set of macros that we use to “see” the world around us.
we cannot take in all the data or process it. mostly, we focus on a few things and expect other things to be mostly the same.
If you’re a Piraha, that works beautifully. Within their culture and environment, things ARE mostly the same, every single day, so noticing only the few outliers — the events that are different — keeps them safe.
But for those of us attempting to survive this crushingly over-produced technological arms race, this whiplash-inducing proliferation of NEW that we call modern society, it doesn’t work at all. Nothing stays the same from one moment to the next.
According to Gato, we reject the craziness we’re perceiving within tsunamis of change and say instead, “things like that don’t happen.”
I agree; I’ve done it myself. I can’t tell you how many times I have looked up stuff that seemed impossible and false only to find it was 100% true. Not to keep harping on 9/11, but it happens to be the one that initiated my trust-fall. In particular, Building 7 of WTC.
The possibility that the official 9/11 story is filled with lies is not just difficult to understand, it’s literally incomprehensible for many, because craziness is as hard to see as the colossal is hard to grasp.
Within Gato’s category of too crazy to see (TCTS?) are acts that are too heinous to be believed (THTBB?). Since most of us are decent human beings, the individuals who aren’t (I’m looking at you, CEOs) can get away with atrocities.
Now, if you combine our predisposed disbelief in the outlandish/psychopathic with our inability to grok the colossal, you’ll see how we’re effed. in a highly vulnerable place.
We’re sitting ducks, really, for massive propaganda campaigns, widespread malfeasance, and large-scale sociopathy.
The great masses of the people . . . will more easily fall victims to a great lie than to a small one.
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
If you didn’t already, now you know why we are so easily manipulated by gargantuan lies: our evolutionary safeguards have evolved into downsides. (They’ve also been hacked by the unscrupulous.) But don’t be discouraged; there’s always a flip side to a downside.
Before I get to those upsides, allow me to make one suggestion I’ve offered before in other contexts, but in this loud loud loud loud world, it bears repeating: question everything.
With apologies and gratitude to don Miguel Luis for his profound OG Four Agreements, I’ve adapted his model to create my “Citizen’s Version” of The Four Agreements:
Citizen’s Version of The Four Agreements:
Understand that Almost No One is Impeccable With Their Word; Be Impeccable With Yours Anyway.
Take Nothing at Face Value OR Personally.
Make No Assumptions; Question Everything.
Always Do Your Best.*
*This agreement is perfect as-is, for both his purpose and mine. Thanks, don Miguel.
To be clear: no one would want to live by these agreements all the time. That’s why they’re the “Citizen’s Version;” they’re essential when dealing with powerful people and powerful organizations, less so with trusted friends and family. If I say “I love you” to my kids, I don’t expect they will grill me on my authenticity. But if their government says it, I hope to God they’ll get out the barbeque tools.
When I step back for a moment to survey the landscape of human cognition, when I slow down and soften my gaze, the potential upsides of our evolutionary biases reveal themselves.
Here’s a quick one that emerges:
“Normalcy bias” is what leads people to disbelieve or minimize threat warnings, which is not so good when the threat is real, but can be helpful in the face of manufactured or over-exaggerated threats.
We saw this during covid; a substantial portion of the world’s population followed Citizen’s Agreement #2 and didn’t take at face value what governments and their media mouthpieces were saying. This was one case where our bias came in clutch.
Here’s another upside:
I think we can all agree that the velocity of technological (and thus societal) change is accelerating. If change is the new normal, then isn’t it possible that our new normalcy bias will be to spot the few things that aren’t changing — because those will be the outliers?
That would make us more and more capable of detecting things like love, authenticity, and nature’s ability to heal us. Certainly, those immutable elements alone will not save us, but quickly locating them could prove foundational in the rebuilding of a broken culture.
And finally, the biggest upside of all:
In pondering TBTC, TCTS, and THTBB, I realize: if our cognitive biases prevent us from comprehending, seeing, or believing the bad stuff (big, crazy, and heinous), doesn’t that mean it prevents us from taking in the good stuff, too?
By that logic, our inadequate little brains simply aren’t comprehending any big, crazy, magnificent things that might be happening right now in the world. Vast forces of love, massive movements of goodness, tremendous tides of awakening — they’re all potentially detonating and crashing in the silent forest of our limited five-sense awareness.
All too big to comprehend, but not too big to feel.
Yes, we modern human beings can’t intellectually grasp the colossal, but fortunately for us (thanks, God!) we have other ways of perceiving. We are spiritual beings, gifted with intuition and visceral feelings that supercede mere intellect — though we have, as a species, been largely conditioned to forget those gifts.
We’ve been cut off and we’ve cut ourselves off from the deeper knowing we each brought with us. Therefore, our task on planet Earth, the job we signed up for during this time around, is to cultivate the tiny, neglected seedling of our innate capacity to feel, especially to feel the expansive, shining-forever totality of the Infinite.
My hunch is that human beings long ago were innately attuned to Source because they lived in almost-constant connection with Nature. Their survival didn’t necessitate overstuffing their brains with millions upon millions of bits of ultimately useless data, and their pineal gland, the organ that René Descartes referred to as the “seat of the soul,” hadn’t become the calcified nub it is today.
Remember the Piraha? They have no words for numbers, colors, or even past and future tense, because they have no need for them.
Nor do we, not really. We’re told we do, and schooling has evolved to make us think we do, but in terms of pure survival… we don’t. To be clear, I’m not advocating for the complete fall of civilization; I enjoy reading as much as the next person.
But the other extreme we seem to be hurtling toward doesn’t thrill me either. “Smart” phones now have all the answers, don’t they, and advocates of transhumanism seem giddy as they march us toward melding with technology to make us “better.”
Accessing infinite data will not make us the most powerful version of humanity the world has ever seen; it will make us the most controllable version. True power comes from accessing the Infinite directly, without interference or “assistance.”
Like it or not, evolution keeps on happening, pressed eternally forward by our developing environment — which at this point in time happens to be a spinning, chaotic, ersatz, morally bankrupt world — and if we view this world as the perfect opportunity to evolve as a species, then we have no choice but to begin that evolution individually, opening from the inside to welcome progress of a different sort. Soul progress.
What the internet has become, what AI is becoming, is beyond us. As is the possibility of nuclear war. As is the insidious obliteration of attention-spans, empathy, and creativity in our children by the blue flickering master.
So we shrug, turning our attention to something we can grok: a stupid comment by a presidential candidate; a news anchor’s questionable motive; the brutal nastiness of family members who disagree with one another. Yes, let’s all thrash around on those.
Let’s fixate on gutter replacement.
Or not.
Cognitive hiccups do not define us; soul-expansion does. We can feel the colossal for the simplest of reasons: we are the colossal.
And big, crazy, magnificent things like fire engines are just waiting for us.
I regularly see this crap at work. Penny Wise and pound foolish.
They won't buy replacement parts that are relatively cheap.
Or they'll refuse to update to less problematic equipment.
Instead, they wait until the equipment is failing and then act like we suck cause we can't fix it without the parts.
Then, they sign an expensive contract to fix the failing system instead of spending the money before on prevention of failures.
Sigh.....
Like the DOGE government efficiency thing, they'll likely not address the biggest spending in the Pentagon who fails audits over and over. Instead they'll save pennies by screwing over people.
There are so many insightful, funny, and worthy quotes I want to pull out from here. Just when you think Substack has talked about most topics to death, you come across one that has hardly been touched; one that you are writing about so relatably and poignantly.
Btw, I see “trust-fall” and I’m immediately taken back to theatre school and doing those exercises, you know, THOSE exercises where we fall and blindly trust our classmates will catch us- the meaning of trust fall being the opposite of how the world understands that phrase and how you use it here.
Fantastic piece!!