We’ve normalised the idea that a stranger’s 30-second video can diagnose our personality, heal our trauma, or sell us peace of mind in a bottle. When enough people repeat it, it stops feeling ridiculous. It becomes a trend, which is just a delusion with good PR.
I’ve started noticing something interesting in a few novels lately: little acronyms like SAD and MAD popping up in unexpected ways. Not the usual meanings, of course. SAD becomes Socially Accepted Delusion. MAD turns into Mutually Accepted Delusion.
Writers love this device. Technically they’re acronyms, but when an author redefines them for a deeper or ironic purpose, it’s called a backronym, a phrase built around existing letters to create new meaning. It’s a small linguistic trick that can hold a big mirror up to society.
One of my favourite examples comes from The Detective by Matthew Reilly. His character muses that if a woman believes aliens live in her head, she’s sent to a mental institution, but if she believes Jesus lives in her head, she’s considered a person of deep faith. Both beliefs are invisible, yet one is sanctioned and the other condemned.
That’s the essence of a Socially Accepted Delusion: a belief that survives scrutiny because enough people share it.
Social norms can uplift, kindness as a default, recycling without being asked. But they can also disguise absurdities: buying things we don’t need to prove success, glorifying burnout as dedication, mistaking outrage for virtue. The line between belief and delusion isn’t always logic, it’s popularity.
We don’t have to look far to find new socially accepted delusions. Scroll through TikTok and you’ll see thousands of people declaring the latest miracle cure, wealth hack, or personality quiz that “changes everything.” We call it “content,” but it’s really crowdsourced conviction.
We’ve normalised the idea that a stranger’s 30-second video can diagnose our personality, heal our trauma, or sell us peace of mind in a bottle. When enough people repeat it, it stops feeling ridiculous. It becomes a trend, which is just a delusion with good PR.
Social media has turned SAD and MAD into a feedback loop: Socially Amplified Delusions and Massively Accelerated Denial. We don’t need facts, we need followers. And the algorithm happily feeds our favourite fantasies back to us. The more confident the lie, the faster it spreads.
The technology isn’t evil. The danger lies in what we stop questioning once something feels familiar, popular, or profitable.
Maybe the real test of sanity in the 21st century isn’t what we believe. It’s how often we pause to ask why.
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