You have long known about how we don’t know if an electron is a particle or a wave until after we OBSERVE it. That is called the observation effect. God knows what happens to the unobserved electrons, but anyway … How we look or the very fact that we look impacts what “is.” So that’s wild, but we think of it as something that happens at the sub-atomic level. Let’s apply it to things bigger than electrons. Let’s apply it to politicians and institutional leaders. We no longer see them – well, at least half of them – as “legit.” If that’s what more and more of us observe, that’s what they are. Our observation makes it so. We had a rare opportunity this week to observe the official Brits knowing precisely what to do when a monarch dies. How did they know? More than half of them were not even born the last time it happened. Have they been practicing for 70 years? Practicing in those big black fur hats? Civilization as a collective agreement, is such an ephemeral thing.

We think that when we leave our homes to go for a walk that our couch remains our couch but maybe not. What if Van Gogh is in there looking at it?
~ image from JPVideo