The Moral Metabolism and Mechanism Delusions: How Adaptive Psychological Machinery Prevents Reality Repair

This paper examines a pervasive pattern in human cognition: the persistent belief in causal mechanisms that demonstrably fail to produce their claimed outcomes. Building on Reality Repair Theory's concept of the "moral metabolism" (Sergent, 2024), we demonstrate how societies systematically ingest delusional beliefs about social mechanisms and excrete delay in addressing suffering. Through cross-domain analysis, we identify systematic discrepancies between stated cause-and-effect beliefs and observable reality across social, political, economic, and psychological domains. We propose that this represents not mere cognitive error, but adaptive psychological machinery that historically enabled survival through unavoidable suffering but now prevents effective problem-solving despite available technology. The Universal Assumption Problem (Sergent, 2024) provides the epistemological foundation for understanding how mechanism delusions emerge from the assumption trap of positing unprovable external realities. This analysis reveals why humanity maintains obviously false beliefs about causation: the moral metabolism prioritizes psychological endurance over empirical accuracy, creating what we term "aspirational mechanism conflation."