home
PUBLICATION
The Museum of Delusions
How much of what we call common sense is collective delusion?
Humanity has an extraordinary ability to recognise contradictions and an equally remarkable capacity to preserve them.
We create rules that defeat their own purpose, invent solutions to problems of our own making, mistake popularity for truth and call established conventions common sense. We celebrate individuality through mass-produced symbols, optimise systems until they become dysfunctional and defend arrangements whose original justification has long disappeared.
And the recurring pattern might be more disturbing than the individual absurdities. A belief can become socially accepted simply because enough people believe that everyone else accepts it. Once established, it acquires authority through repetition, institutional endorsement and familiarity. Its underlying logic may never be examined again.
Social psychology has documented several mechanisms behind this. Conformity makes agreement socially consequential while pluralistic ignorance allows people to maintain conventions they privately question. System justification helps explain why people sometimes defend arrangements that disadvantage them and social norms become self-reinforcing because people adjust their behaviour to what they believe others do and expect.
The Museum of Delusions investigates these mechanisms through the objects, practices, inventions and certainties of our time.
Why do we reject the unfamiliar for being unreasonable while accepting the familiar without demanding a reason? And how many of today’s perfectly normal ideas would collapse under the same scrutiny we apply to the absurdities of the past?
Coming soon: The Collection
The Museum of Delusions will assemble a growing collection of “artifacts” from 2026, documenting the absurdities, contradictions and collective beliefs that humans accepted as normal, rational and self-evident. Each artifact reveals something about how societies construct common sense, preserve questionable conventions and turn collective agreement into perceived truth.
©2026 Carolin Vedder
Hear the text
contact
For commissions, talks, and collaborations.