I learned a new term last week: cultural fiction, which is basically all the human knowledge that is not empirically derived. So the value of gold, silver, currency, and anything you can't eat, wear, shelter in, or use as a tool, is cultural fiction. Religion, governments, and politics are all cultural fiction, created devices that work for a society only so long as the majority of people agree to abide by or believe in them. Chaos and American government coming apart at the seams are the products of deliberate and maybe some unintended efforts to undermine trust in government and institutions (like NIH and CDC) that Americans have long believed in. Quite interesting to me that societies and entire civilizations function only because populations have come to believe in or at least abide by, a variety of cultural fictions.