Why Those Who Escape the Foma Recognize Each Other Instantly

Classification: High-Order Social Foma - Perceptual, Economic, Aesthetic

Status: Persistent. Ubiquitously misinterpreted.

The Core Foma

Society tells a simple story:

“The wealthy appreciate art because they have money, leisure, and status to display.”

This is a foma - a comforting, contemptuous explanation that protects people from seeing the truth:

Great wealth and great art arise from the same perceptual mutation: the ability to see through the scaffolding of reality while others still mistake it for stone.

There is no paradox. The wealthy aren’t buying art to signal refinement. They are recognizing a worldview they already inhabit.

I. The Scaffolding-Seers

To create extraordinary wealth in a world built on shared illusions, a person must:

  • ignore the limits others believe in
  • perceive value as constructed, not intrinsic
  • spot seams in systems
  • distrust consensus reality
  • treat narratives as tools, not truths
  • act in the blank spaces others never notice

This is not luck. This is not privilege. This is foma invisibility - the rare ability to see the hidden architecture behind the social interface.

Artists live in the same perceptual space.

They don’t believe in categories, scripts, or inherited meaning. They walk sideways through walls that stop everyone else.

Of course the two groups recognize each other. They speak the same unspoken language.

II. Why Those Embedded in Foma Distrust Art (and Wealth)

For most people, stability depends on believing that:

  • categories are real
  • rules are fixed
  • narratives are truths
  • the map is the territory
  • the world is solid

Anyone who demonstrates otherwise - whether through art or entrepreneurship — becomes suspicious, dangerous, even offensive.

Those trapped in foma reject what they cannot metabolize.

Their hostility to art is not aesthetic. Their hostility to wealth is not economic. It is existential.

They fear the perceptual freedom they have not allowed themselves.

III. Foma Density as an Explanation for Status Anxiety

People deeply embedded in foma don’t resent money. They resent the freedom that money symbolizes:

  • freedom from inherited narratives
  • freedom from institutional scripts
  • freedom from the illusion of inevitability

Likewise, they don’t resent art. They resent the epistemic threat art poses: that the world might be optional, subjective, alterable.

The wealthy and the artist both expose that the world is negotiable.

This is intolerable to those who need it to be fixed.

IV. How Wealth and Art Reflect Each Other

Both require:

  • imagination (to see what isn’t yet visible)
  • nonconformity (to act before the world agrees)
  • intuition over consensus
  • risk appetite for collapse
  • comfort with ambiguity and irony
  • agency carved from uncertainty

These traits are perceptual, not economic.

This is why artists feel alienated. This is why entrepreneurs feel alienated. And this is why both gravitate toward each other:

They inhabit the same reality, the one behind the foma.

V. The Real Paradox:

The Society That Depends on Foma Needs Those Who Can See Through It

Civilizations need stability. But innovation comes only from those who see through stability. Art evolves perception. Wealth evolves systems. Both challenge foma - which is why both are simultaneously needed and distrusted.

A society cannot update itself without people who resist the illusion of inevitability.

These people are almost always:

  • artists
  • founders
  • misfits
  • the unusually wealthy
  • the unusually perceptive

They are not rebels. They are seers.

VI. The Agentic Foma Stance

From the outside, it may look like the wealthy appreciate art because:

  • it’s expensive
  • it’s fashionable
  • it looks sophisticated

But this is projection from people who cannot yet perceive the deeper link.

The real reason is simple:

Those who learned to break the foma recognize their own kind. Art feels like home because it operates on the same physics as agency.

Or, stated more sharply:

You cannot build great art or great wealth without breaking the foma first.

Closing Line

Wealth and art are two expressions of the same act: seeing through the world that others merely inherit.