The Theory of Reality shows that we don’t live reality as it is, but a filtered version of it: the mind selects, simplifies, and orders what happens. But there is a second filter, a larger one, that we notice even less. We don’t filter reality alone, in a vacuum: we filter it inside a world of meanings that already existed before us.
To this shared field I give the name Intersubjective Mental Matrix.
We are the only animal able to cooperate in very large numbers around things that exist only in shared imagination: money, states, laws, markets, religions, institutions. None of this exists in nature the way wind or gravity do. It exists because a great many people believe in it together and act accordingly. It is one of the intuitions I share with the historian Yuval Noah Harari, when he calls the imagined order “intersubjective”: not subjective, because it isn’t in any single person’s head, but shared by millions of minds at once.
What the Intersubjective Mental Matrix is
I use this expression with caution, because the word “matrix” lends itself to misunderstanding. It does not point to a single omnipotent director hidden behind every aspect of life, nor does it reduce history, culture, economics, and politics to one center of control. To think there is a single puppeteer moving everything would be a caricature.
But there is also the opposite error, just as serious: denying that systems of power, organized interests, economic strategies, institutional dynamics, and media conditioning exist. That would be naive. These powers exist, act, and steer. The Intersubjective Mental Matrix can include them, but is not exhausted by them.
It is, more precisely, the set of narratives, symbols, institutions, values, fears, desires, and criteria of normality through which a culture teaches individuals to interpret the world, themselves, and life. It is the symbolic world that precedes us: the normality we breathe before we are even able to question it. We don’t only live inside an individually filtered reality; we also live inside a shared, collective one.
Natural order and intersubjective order
To understand this step, it helps to distinguish two kinds of order.
A natural order does not depend on our belief in order to exist. If we stopped believing in the wind tomorrow, the wind would keep blowing. If we stopped believing in the waves, the waves would keep forming. If we stopped believing in gravity, gravity would keep acting. It needs no consent from us.
An intersubjective order has a different nature: it exists because many people recognize its validity and act accordingly. Money, social roles, status, prestige, institutions, hierarchies, borders, debt all belong to this order. If everyone, starting tomorrow, stopped attaching value to a banknote, that banknote would stop having any.
Be careful, though: “constructed” does not mean “unreal.” On the contrary. Precisely because many people recognize them and behave in accordance with them, these orders produce entirely real effects. They steer choices, distribute power, generate expectations, create belonging or exclusion, establish what is rewarded or punished. They aren’t biological, but they shape a life story. Psychological research on “shared reality” shows exactly this: when we experience that others share our inner states about the world, what is subjective begins to be lived as objective and real (Echterhoff, Higgins, and Levine, 2009). It is a mechanism the same authors recognize at work, in amplified form, in political and religious ideologies.
Sociology had grasped this long ago. In a 1966 classic, Berger and Luckmann describe how the shared knowledge of many people becomes, through habit and institutions, an “objective” reality passed on to later generations — to the point that a child, at first, cannot tell the objectivity of nature from that of social constructions (Berger and Luckmann, 1966). A banknote, to that child, is as real as the rain.
When the collective enters identity
As long as all of this stays “outside,” it is sociology. It becomes psychology — and here Primordial Psychology comes in — when the collective field is internalized: when what belongs to everyone begins to speak inside us as if it were our own voice.
A social norm can turn into guilt. A cultural model can enter one’s self-image. A shared hierarchy can become the measure of one’s worth. A collective desire can become personal ambition. A social fear can become an inner limit. This is why the Matrix does not act only through imposition or censorship: it acts above all through recognition, imitation, desire, belonging, and the fear of being excluded.
It is a subtle movement. A person may no longer feel a social pressure, but live it as a personal obligation. They may no longer see a cultural model, but use it as the measure of their own worth. Many people don’t conflict only with their own history: they conflict with the way they have learned to measure their life. They compare their existence with models they never chose, chase desires whose origin they have never questioned, call “failure” a misalignment from a normality that isn’t their own. This is what I mean when I say that acquired identity, at the heart of Primordial Psychology, organizes itself not only around individual wounds, but also around collective narratives absorbed without examination.
The inherited cage
One of the possible outcomes of this process is captured well by an image: the inherited cage.
Not every inherited rule is a cage — many traditions safeguard real knowledge, bonds, and forms of protection. The problem concerns rules that keep being defended as necessary even when their original context and function have vanished. A rule is born at a certain moment; perhaps it had a purpose, perhaps it protected against a real fear. Then the context changes, the original reason fades, but the rule remains: it is repeated, defended, taught, handed down. At some point no one knows precisely why it exists anymore, yet many keep observing it. And whoever tries to question it is stopped not by those who created it, but by those who inherited it.
It is one of the subtlest forms of mental imprisonment: the limit no longer needs a visible external authority, because it has been internalized by the group. I have dedicated a separate article to this mechanism, starting from a famous experiment on conformity: you’ll find it in Mental Manipulation and Propaganda.
And here you can see how the Matrix really works, without any need for a conspiracy: a single director isn’t always required. A collective construction can hold itself together through the interaction of many people, interests, institutions, and practices that reinforce one another without sharing a single conscious plan. It can be steered by powers and interests — it would be naive to deny it — but it is also maintained every day by those who simply repeat: those who call “common sense” what is habit, “reality” what is a dominant narrative, “identity” what is adaptation.
Not leaving the world, but seeing the field
None of this means that every tradition is wrong, that every norm is a prison, or that every shared value should be destroyed. That would be naive. Human beings need shared realities: without common languages, common symbols, and common agreements, we could neither cooperate nor live in complex societies.
The problem is not the existence of the Matrix, nor even recognizing that powers and interests act within it. The problem arises when a person coincides so completely with the field they received that they can no longer tell what they see from what they were taught to see: between real need and induced desire, between their own direction and a social model, between personal worth and collective approval.
This is why Primordial Psychology does not propose an antisocial escape, nor the idea of recovering a “pure” mind, uncontaminated by culture: no such mind exists. Its first phase, cleaning the mind, does not mean emptying it, but making interrogable the collective schemas that previously looked like nature. It is what I call returning to the Original Mind: not becoming pure, but seeing better — recognizing some shared stories as stories, and not as absolute truths.
It is worth being precise, so as not to promise too much. This “seeing” opens a margin, but does not by itself accomplish the transformation. A person can recognize an automatism and keep repeating it; seeing an inherited limit is not enough to dissolve it. Seeing is the first step: the concrete work of transforming the programs belongs to Mental Reprogramming. And the one who sees, chooses, and acts is not a hidden “true self”: it is the person.
It is the ancient image of Plato’s cave, but without contempt for those inside it. There are no awake and asleep: there are fields of meaning that we all inhabit and that almost no one sees. Seeing the field does not automatically free us from every pressure, nor does it make every choice available. But within the margin each of us has, it allows us to begin asking which values to take on, which norms to uphold, which responses not to keep repeating.
The Intersubjective Mental Matrix, ultimately, widens the question of all Primordial Psychology. It is not enough to ask what I think, desire, or fear. We must also ask within what world of meanings that thought, that desire, or that fear became plausible. Who taught me to think this way? What images made precisely this life desirable? What alternatives were made invisible before I could even consider them?
These are questions that hand over no ready answer. They serve another purpose: to make the field visible. And what becomes visible, even when we can’t change it right away, at least stops commanding us in secret.
