The Rise of Granfalloon Politics
Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut, is my favorite novel. It’s a strange book, laced with playful, but profound insights. One example is the distinction that Vonnegut draws between what he calls a granfalloon and a karass, made up terminology for a fictional religion called Bokononism—founded by an invented island prophet named Bokonon.
Vonnegut’s whimsical distinction offers a useful framework for understanding modern social life—and the political dysfunction that we so often lazily group under the one-size-fits-all umbrella term: polarization.
A karass is a group of people brought together, often by chance, but stuck together by choice because they are truly like-minded souls. As Vonnegut writes: “If you find your life tangled up with somebody else's life for no very logical reason, that person may be a member of your karass.”
But crucially, these groupings are based on individuals as our authentic selves, the people we really are, the things we really care about, not necessarily the groupings that so often dominate our social lives. A true karass, Vonnegut writes “ignores national, institutional, occupational, familial, and class boundaries. It is as free form as an amoeba.”
By contrast, much of modern life is organized according to a “false karass, of a seeming team that was meaningless…a textbook example of what Bokonon calls a granfalloon. Other examples are the Communist party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company, the International Order of Odd Fellows - and any nation, anytime, anywhere.”
The crucial component of a granfalloon is that its members think that the association between people means something, but in reality, it’s a meaningless group, driven by the absurdities of tribalism rather than anything deep, profound, or significant.
Now, consider modern politics through the lens of the karass and the granfalloon. Do we arrange ourselves according to our true passions with like-minded souls? Or do we use shortcuts and labels to put ourselves onto invented, angry teams that hate each other…?
