From Many Worlds to Many Realities: The Everett Interpretation as a Lens for Understanding Contemporary Geopolitical Psychology

1. Introduction

The Many-Worlds Interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics is perhaps the most ontologically radical of all interpretations: it asserts that every quantum event results in a branching of the universe, wherein each possible outcome is realized in its own, non-communicating branch [1]. Long dismissed by many as metaphysical extravagance, MWI has gained increasing attention –not only for its explanatory power in quantum computing and cosmology, but also for its unique conceptual structure, which challenges classical ideas of causality, identity, and observation [2].

In this paper, we explore the provocative hypothesis that the logic of MWI is not only a feature of quantum systems, but also a useful lens through which to understand macroscopic socio-political phenomena –particularly those emerging in the early 21st century. We propose that contemporary political reality, especially in the era of social media and algorithmically segmented information, behaves in ways analogous to MWI’s branching structure.

We focus our attention on a figure emblematic of this new landscape: Donald J. Trump. Trump’s political behavior defies traditional categories of consistency, truthfulness, or strategic continuity. His simultaneous occupation of multiple, conflicting narrative positions –often in the same speech or over short time intervals– can be interpreted not as incoherence, but as intentional superposition across multiple semi-autonomous cognitive or media “branches.” In this view, the public no longer “measures” and collapses a political wavefunction into a coherent outcome, but rather splits into incompatible interpretive realities, much like observers in MWI.

This analogy is not merely metaphorical. A growing body of work in quantum cognition [3], narrative logic [4], and political psychology suggests that non-classical logic may be useful in modeling human behavior in conditions of ambiguity, contradiction, and uncertainty. Furthermore, recent studies in epistemic decoherence and quantum decision theory offer mathematical tools to formalize branching choice structures and fragmented belief spaces.

We aim to make three contributions:

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To propose a correspondence between the branching logic of MWI and the cognitive and communicative strategies of post-truth political leaders;

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To suggest how this correspondence may help reframe epistemological challenges in public discourse, especially in geopolitics;

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To reflect on how this analogy could inform discussions on the interpretation of quantum theory itself, particularly concerning the nature of observerhood, narrative coherence, and truth.

While speculative in scope, we believe that opening this dialogue between quantum foundational theory and contemporary political behavior is not only philosophically intriguing but may also help clarify the conceptual challenges of both domains, particularly as society faces the systemic consequences of fragmented realities and conflicting truths.

2. Background: From Quantum Superposition to Narrative Multiplicity

To draw a meaningful parallel between the Everettian framework and modern political discourse, we first revisit the core concepts of MWI. A brief mathematical introduction is in Appendix A. In Everett’s formalism, the quantum state of the universe evolves unitarily according to the Schrödinger equation, and measurements do not cause collapse but entangle the observer with the system, resulting in branching worlds [1,5].

Each branch is equally real and evolves independently, though inaccessible from the others. This has profound implications for ontology and epistemology. In the standard Copenhagen view, the observer plays a decisive role in collapsing probabilities into a single reality. In contrast, in MWI, the observer is duplicated into multiple versions, each correlating with a distinct outcome.

In contemporary information societies, a similar phenomenon occurs: narratives propagate in parallel across fragmented networks. Media ecosystems function as decohering environments, splitting the public into non-overlapping interpretive communities [6]. The multiplicity of truths, often considered a failure of democratic discourse, can thus be seen through an Everettian lens as the natural branching of a cognitively entangled society.

3. Trump and the Many-Worlds Political Style

Donald Trump’s communication style exemplifies the emergence of a new form of political agency –one that transcends linear narrative logic. He is able to assert contradictory claims, engage in recursive self-reinvention, and activate disparate audience segments without regard for consistency. These behaviors are often described as chaotic or populist, but they may be better understood as intentional exploitation of an Everettian condition.

We analyze key cases where Trump maintained mutually exclusive claims and how these were sustained within distinct cognitive “branches”. In particular:

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In November 2020, shortly after the U.S. presidential election, Trump simultaneously tweeted that the election was“a landslide victory” for him, while also claiming it had been “rigged” and “stolen". These two narratives –victory and victimhood– should logically exclude each other, yet both were mobilized concurrently to different audiences: one for reaffirming his legitimacy, the other for delegitimizing the outcome.

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On January 6, 2021, during the Capitol insurrection, Trump told his followers: “We love you, you’re very special” while later denouncing the violence and claiming to stand for “law and order” This duality –both inciting and distancing himself from the event– allowed different branches of his base and political allies to perceive him either as a patriot or a peacemaker.

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Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump oscillated between calling the virus a “hoax” promoting unverified treatments like hydroxychloroquine, and simultaneously praising vaccine development as one of his greatest achievements. Again, the same individual, at different times, embodied denialism, recklessness, and scientific leadership –all of which resonated with particular interpretive bubbles.

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Regarding the war in Ukraine, Trump has maintained conflicting positions: on the one hand, claiming that the war “would never have happened” under his leadership and that he could end it “in 24 hours, ” suggesting a role of dominant peacemaker; on the other hand, refusing to explicitly condemn Vladimir Putin, calling him “smart” and praising his strategic cunning. Simultaneously, he has criticized U.S. aid to Ukraine as wasteful, while hinting at a strong deterrent posture had he been in office. This creates multiple coexisting narratives: Trump the isolationist, Trump the peacemaker, Trump the realist ally, and Trump the admirer of strength –each tailored to different geopolitical branches.

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In international tax and trade policy, Trump has frequently proposed sweeping unilateral changes while also portraying himself as a proponent of bilateral deals. For example, he has threatened to impose universal tariffs on all imports (a protectionist global tax), while also demanding individual renegotiations with countries like France, Germany, or Canada over what he terms “unfair digital taxes” This oscillation between global uniformity and extreme bilateralism reflects an Everettian fragmentation: each version of the policy exists depending on the context, audience, or negotiation leverage.

Each of these examples illustrates what might be called a form of narrative superposition: rather than resolving contradictions, Trump permits them to coexist, deferring the need for narrative collapse. Media ecosystems –especially algorithm-driven platforms – function as decoherence environments that stabilize each storyline within its own epistemic branch. Within such a system, political measurement no longer collapses a narrative into consensus, but splits the observer community into mutually exclusive realities.

This Everettian political style is not merely opportunistic; it is structurally adaptive in an age where truth is mediated by fragmented information flows. Rather than persuading a unified public, the strategy sustains multiple partial publics –each entangled with a different branch of the leader’s identity.

4. Toward a Theory of Political Decoherence

If Everettian branching provides a structural analogy, what then corresponds to decoherence in the political realm? We propose that political decoherence occurs when narratives become insulated –through repetition, affective reinforcement, or algorithmic filtering –to the point that no interaction with competing narratives is possible.

Just as environmental decoherence suppresses quantum interference, political decoherence suppresses dialogical interference, hardening realities into separate worldlines. The public sphere thus becomes a space of irreversible branching, where attempts at rational debate are overwhelmed by the inertial mass of divergent truth-structures [7,8].

In quantum mechanics, decoherence is the process by which quantum superpositions are suppressed due to interactions with an environment, leading to the emergence of classical behavior. Interference terms disappear, and different branches of the wavefunction cease to affect one another. By analogy, in political discourse, "dialogical interference" is suppressed when audiences are so segmented by ideology, media consumption, and social identity that they no longer engage with alternative viewpoints. What results is a landscape of parallel belief systems, each internally coherent, but epistemically isolated.

Political decoherence is particularly visible in the structure of media consumption today. Recommendation algorithms and filter bubbles act as the political equivalent of environmental noise: they reinforce local coherence at the expense of global interaction. As a result, different segments of the population evolve their own narratives, memories, and even factual universes.

This phenomenon is not limited to Donald Trump. Other political figures exploit or amplify decoherence as a strategy:

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Vladimir Putin and Russian Diplomacy. Russian officials frequently deploy contradictory narratives at the international level: justifying the invasion of Ukraine as a "defensive operation," denying war crimes while simultaneously glorifying military actions, and portraying Ukraine as both Nazi-infiltrated and a brotherly nation. These contradictions serve not to persuade, but to overwhelm and fragment interpretive frameworks. Ambassadorial statements often operate at cross-purposes intentionally, multiplying realities until no stable narrative consensus can form in the West.

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Jair Bolsonaro. During his presidency in Brazil, Bolsonaro denied the severity of COVID-19 while also defending his pandemic response. He discredited vaccines while claiming credit for their distribution. These competing statements, presented to different audiences, allowed him to inhabit multiple political identities: anti-establishment outsider, patriotic protector, and pragmatic administrator.

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Viktor Orbán. In Hungary, Orbán alternates between framing the European Union as a threat to national sovereignty and a source of economic support. He uses domestic propaganda to construct a reality of Hungary under siege, while maintaining diplomatic engagement with Brussels. Each version of Hungary –fortress or partner– coexists, depending on the target audience.

In all these cases, political decoherence ensures that these narratives do not destructively interfere with one another. Each narrative is protected by its own media environment, emotional reinforcement, and selective facts. The goal is not to eliminate contradiction, but to weaponize it –by ensuring that each version of reality survives and mobilizes a portion of the population.

Ultimately, political decoherence is not merely a symptom of fragmentation, but a technique of governance. It replaces traditional persuasion and deliberation with narrative isolation, and it forces democratic societies to operate without a common measurement basis. In such a regime, the fundamental question becomes: can democracy survive without a shared state vector?

If we take the observer seriously in quantum theory, we must also take seriously the observers in the political realm: their beliefs, their entanglements, their cognitive ecosystems. To understand contemporary politics may thus require not only new tools of sociology or psychology, but a willingness to rethink what it means to share a world.

5. Discussion: Toward a Politics of Recoherence

The Everettian framework, as applied to politics, reveals a sobering diagnosis: our institutions, discourses, and epistemologies are ill-prepared to function in a world where interpretive decoherence is no longer an anomaly but a structural feature. If we accept this diagnosis, what paths forward are available?

Restoring Interference: Is Recoherence Possible?

One of the open questions is whether political recoherence –analogous to quantum interference– is achievable. In quantum physics, recoherence is generally considered improbable due to entropic increase and environmental entanglement. In political life, however, the situation may be more hopeful. Through deliberate institutional designs, civic education, and dialogical practices, it may be possible to reintroduce moments of contact between divergent narratives.

Examples might include:

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Deliberative citizen assemblies that bring together individuals from ideologically isolated communities, creating structured environments for exposure to incompatible beliefs.

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Cross-platform public media initiatives that challenge algorithmic segmentation by intentionally curating exposure to multiple viewpoints.

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Epistemic bridging tools in education and journalism that frame contradiction not as a threat but as an occasion for interpretive labor.

These efforts would not eliminate branching but could slow the rate of decoherence and enable points of convergence. Political recoherence, in this sense, is not a return to consensus but the construction of shared frames that allow contestation to be meaningful.

Limits and Risks of the Everettian Analogy

The MWI metaphor is powerful, but it also presents limits. In quantum theory, all branches are equally real, but in politics, the asymmetries of power, media control, and institutional legitimacy matter profoundly. Not all narratives are equally resourced or dangerous. Some political world-branches justify violence, erode civil rights, or promote disinformation with devastating consequences.

Furthermore, framing political divergence as a form of quantum branching risks naturalizing what is, in many cases, the result of deliberate strategy. Leaders like Trump or Putin do not merely emerge from epistemic complexity –they actively engineer it. The metaphor must not obscure agency and responsibility.

The Need for Ethical Observerhood

Finally, this analysis suggests a new imperative: the cultivation of ethical observers. If reality is now interpreted through multiple lenses, then the quality of those observers –their capacity for critical thinking, reflexivity, and empathetic imagination –becomes the cornerstone of political life.

An Everettian politics does not mean surrendering to relativism, but rather embracing the challenge of navigating multiplicity without dissolving truth. It means designing systems where observers are empowered to encounter difference, to question their own entanglements, and to contribute to the fragile project of a shared world.

Further examples of the explicit or implicit position of world leaders with respect to MWI is described in Appendix B.

The challenge, then, is no longer to find the one true narrative, but to maintain the delicate coherence of a democratic multiverse.

6. Conclusion: Observers, Truth, and the Fate of a Shared World

The Many-Worlds Interpretation was once criticized for its metaphysical excess. Yet its descriptive power has grown alongside our understanding of quantum computation, cosmology, and now, perhaps, society itself. The uncanny resemblance between Everettian branching and the fragmentation of political reality invites us to consider a deeper connection: not as a literal physical claim, but as a way to model the complex dynamics of narrative, identity, and truth in a disoriented age.

The Everettian metaphor helps illuminate a fundamental transition: from a world where truth is contested but ultimately negotiable, to a world where truth is branched, compartmentalized, and no longer collapsible into a consensus. The implication is not simply that we disagree more than before, but that we no longer disagree about the same things. We inhabit separate interpretive universes –each epistemically stable, emotionally reinforced, and often algorithmically curated.

This shift has profound philosophical implications. The Enlightenment ideal of a public sphere where rational individuals engage in shared deliberation presupposes a classical epistemology: a common world observed and debated by many. Everettian politics replaces that with a multiplicity of worlds, each inhabited by different observers, with no guarantee of reconnection.

As we have seen with figures like Trump, Putin, Bolsonaro, and Orbán, this fragmentation can be harnessed as a tool of power. Political decoherence –through media bubbles, contradictory narratives, and affective polarization –creates an environment where contradiction is not a weakness, but a source of resilience. Truth becomes context-dependent; leadership becomes a function of narrative control rather than factual consistency.

This raises a stark challenge for democratic theory: how to design institutions, educational systems, and information architectures that can cope with Everettian conditions. Can democracy be maintained if it no longer operates in a single, shared epistemic space? Or must we develop a new model –call it quantum democracy– that acknowledges superposition, entanglement, and decoherence as features of the civic condition?

If we take the observer seriously in quantum theory, we must also take seriously the observers in the political realm: their beliefs, their entanglements, their cognitive ecosystems. The question is no longer how to reach the truth, but how to build bridges across realities. Understanding politics as a form of many-worlds navigation may be unsettling –but it may also be necessary, if we are to preserve any meaningful sense of a shared world.

Appendix A. A Concise Mathematical Introduction to the Many Worlds Interpretation

1. Historical Genesis

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Hugh Everett III (1957). In his landmark paper[1], Everett proposed the Relative State Formulation, rejecting wave function collapse and asserting that the universal state $|\Psi \rangle$ evolves solely under the Schrödinger equation.

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DeWitt & Graham (1973). Popularised the term Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI) and compiled foundational essays[5].

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Subsequent milestones: Deutsch’s decision theoretic Born rule derivation[9]; Zurek’s decoherence programme[10]; Tegmark’s multiverse taxonomy[11]; the Saunders-Wallace probability analysis[12,13].

2. Core Formalism

Consider a system S observed by O. Prior to measurement,

$$|{\Psi }_0\rangle =\left(\sum _i{c}_i|s_i\rangle \right)\otimes |o_0\rangle .$$

A unitary interaction U entangles them:

$$|{\Psi }_1\rangle =U|{\Psi }_0\rangle =\sum _i{c}_i|s_i\rangle \otimes |o_i\rangle .$$

Everett’s postulate: each branch $|s_i\rangle \otimes |o_i\rangle$ is real. Observers within a branch perceive a definite outcome with weight $|c_i{|}^2$ (recoverable via decision theoretic or envariance arguments).

3. Decoherence and Branching

Environment induced decoherence[10] suppresses interference:

$${\rho }_S={\mathrm{Tr}}_O\left[|{\Psi }_1\rangle \langle {\Psi }_1|\right]\stackrel{\mathrm{env}}{\to }\sum _i{\left|c_i\right|}^2|s_i\rangle \langle s_i|.$$

Classical reality thus emerges inside each branch without non unitary dynamics.

4. Open Issues

a)

Probability. Justifying the Born rule in a deterministic multiverse (Deutsch-Wallace programme).

b)

Ontology. Are branches fundamental or emergent [2].

c)

Empirical status. Direct tests distinguishing no collapse theories remain elusive.