The Fantasy–Reality Continuum: Science, Religion, Politics, Culture – Opening Remarks University of Warsaw, 8–10 December 2022 Stephen Mennell University College Dublin As some of you may know, when I was younger I was quite active in British politics. Norbert Elias did not entirely approve. But soon as I began to read his work, I recognised that his thinking has political relevance; 1 and I think he was fully aware of that himself, although he was reluctant to talk much about it. Nothing is more relevant than his idea of the fantasy– reality continuum. That was why I suggested the title of this conference. There are so many alarming symptoms of the unleashing of fantasy in recent political events – Brexit, Trump, Q- Anon, ‘anti-vaxers’, climate change denial, Putin’s vision of a restored Russian empire, and now the Reichsbürger in Germany – to mention only a few. Yet the role of fantasy in social life cannot be understood purely in political terms, which is why I added to the conference title the words ‘Science, Religion, Politics, Culture’. Elias on the necessity of fantasy It is important to recognise that we are here dealing with a continuum and with balances between fantasy and reality. Elias did not think simplistically that fantasy was bad and realism good. He recognised the human necessity of fantasy, but, as he often said, he met his own need for fantasy by writing poetry. In a sense, fantasy where we all begin. For children everywhere, the distinction between fantasy and reality is more blurred than for adults. In the course of the ‘lifetime civilising process’, we have to learn the distinction between fantasy and reality, in accordance with the public standard reached in our society. One might say that reality is ‘socially constructed. People construct their own reality but, to adapt a famous remark of Marx’s, ‘they do not [construct] it just as they please … they [construct] it under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past’. In many areas of scientific–industrial society, this public standard is very clear and rigid – or so we have tended to think until this age of social media and supposed ‘fake news’. But in any case, fantasy – or what Elias also