The Collapse of Consensus Reality

The Problem of Deliberately Induced Delusion (and Confusion)

When my eldest brother was killed on November 23, 2018 by his own son, who it turns out was living in a terrifying parallel reality brought on by schizophrenia, I became more interested in extreme forms of mental illness than I had been before. Jarring life events of this kind have a way of cracking things open in unexpected ways, including intellectual curiosity. Soon thereafter I learned that “consensus reality” was a term of art in psychiatry. It refers to the perception of the world that most people—the majority of us who might be described as “sane”—broadly share. A tree is a tree, not a ghoulish ghost. A table is a table, not a booby trap. Other people are other people, not evil spirits trying to worm themselves into your brain and direct you to do unspeakable things. And yes, your father is your father, not a murderous monster responsible for the agony and death by cancer of several loved ones. So you better stop him before he kills again.

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One symptom of the most extreme kinds of mental illness (of which schizophrenia is king) is a gradual or sudden psychotic “break” away from consensus reality, a state of radical, all-enveloping, impenetrable delusion. The sufferer falls into a parallel reality so deep and far-reaching that it cannot be refuted with reference to ordinary objects in the outside world or by pointing out “obvious” facts of consensus reality. Just as a person in the throes of psychosis will be unable to convince you of the “truth” of their own private reality or hallucination, you will be unable to convince them of the truth of yours; i.e., ours, the so-called consensus. Why? Because they live in a separate reality, loosed from shared perceptual moorings, launched into a nearby but deeply alien orbit. It is important to note that their delusion is more real to them than anything else, as real as our consensus version of reality is to us; in a concrete sense, it is (for them) “reality”.

“Can’t you see that this is a cat, not a fire-breathing monster?”

“Can’t you see that we are in a California beach town, not a Gulag in Russia?”

“Can’t you see that your father is worried about your well-being, not plotting your murder?”

Answer: “You’re scaring me. Why can’t you see what I so clearly know to be true? Who are you trying to fool? Why? There’s nothing the matter with me, what’s the matter with you? Do I need to be scared?”

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Politics and Delusion

In his 1985 book Delusion: Internal Dimensions of Political Life, the University of Maryland political scientist emeritus James Glass compared the delusions of people suffering from extreme forms of schizophrenia to the “mass delusions” of those who lived in totalitarian states such as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. To boil down his elaborate findings to the central idea, the lived realities of both groups of people shared a similar deep “logic” and structure. A quality of estrangement and impenetrability, of oppression by higher seen and unseen forces, of government monitoring, of walls closing in. People with schizophrenia can resemble political prisoners in solitary confinement in police states in that way, cut off from their peers by harsh barriers and impenetrable walls. But in the case of the psychiatric inmates the walls are invisible and, while no less severe or forbidding, strictly perceptual.

Beyond that, those suffering from extreme forms of this insidious disease tend to experience delusions that are adjacent to consensus reality rather than splintered off in random directions. An intriguing vein of psychiatric inquiry I discovered while trying to make sense of the seemingly senseless suggests that culture and nationality play a role in the nature and kind of psychotic symptoms sufferers tend to experience. That is, “themes of delusions have been found to be related to patients’ social background, cultural beliefs, and expectations”.¹ In that sense, the psychotic patterns that predominate among the delusions of mentally ill patients in, say, South Korea have markedly distinctive and different shared characteristics than those of Indians or Nigerians or Brazilians. This explains familiar delusions involving surveillance by the NSA, CIA, or FBI among Americans. My nephew, for example, among other things believed he was in Russia, his every move monitored by thousands of microscopic cameras that he sensed all around him but could not see, and that his father had triggered his mother’s cancer (since overcome) and his aunt’s agonizing death by a horribly disfiguring strain of the disease. As such, however fragmentary and individuated, the content and quality of the delusions are not arbitrary or abstracted from the individual’s ambient circumstances. Instead, they sprout from those circumstances, shooting off at an oblique angle, close by and far away at the same time.

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The Consensus Hallucination

I have thought a lot about the concept of “consensus reality” over the past several years—acutely so since the shocking death of my brother: The fragility of human consciousness, how easily the delicate mechanism that gives rise to it might be damaged or break, how tentative and conditional the nature of our fragile consensus. What a thin reed we depend on to make our way in this world! In many ways, our brain is the mother and father, the author, the lord of all creation. What happens when it goes slightly off kilter? To this point, philosopher and neuroscientist Anil Seth describes consciousness as a kind of “controlled hallucination”.² Sensual inputs from the outside world collide with our body and are translated into electrical impulses that are sent via neurons to our brain, which produces the moving, multi-sense picture we call “reality”. The fundamentally “neurological” basis of consciousness—our private “controlled hallucination”—explains why the delusions of the severely mentally ill are literally as “real” a reality to them as so-called consensus reality is to us. Even if the objective correlative is out of alignment, their perceptual reality is constituted by the same raw material of firing neurons. This means that even the “natural” world of physical things with an objective existence—waves crashing on a beach, telephone poles, other people—are mental constructions conjured by the brain. And that’s just the start.

Our perception of social and political reality is a more tenuous creation still. For one, human institutions, norms, and agreements (tacit and explicit) have no “natural” or objective existence. In a very real sense, they don’t exist at all. Rather, they are creations, inventions, social constructions. As Yuval Noah Harari argued in his masterful bestseller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, the quality that sets the human species apart from all other animals is precisely this gift for creation and invention. That, and an uncanny ability to wield the products of our wildly creative imaginations to practical ends. In short, we make things up, pretend our inventions are real, and then act on the basis of the agreed upon “reality” of our inventions. Religion, mythology, science. Money, banks, LLCs. Democracy, rule of law, separation of powers. The list is endless. If this gift for cooperation based on “make-believe” reality is truly magical, it is also enormously precarious and fragile. Moreover, most of what we “know” about such abstruse and abstract things as politics, foreign policy, and international affairs comes not from our own experience (which is microscopically narrow) but from the packaging and repackaging of reports from trusted sources who are not always trustworthy.

For a whole bunch of reasons the edifice of our consensus reality is intrinsically fragile.

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And these days, that consensus is under serious attack from almost every direction. We no longer agree about what’s what, what is true, what is fact. We no longer agree on whom or what to trust in piecing together our (fragile and tentative) perception of the world. And the carefully woven agreements we thought we had made about how we live together—in our American democracy, for example, the idea of free and open debate, compromise and give and take, separation of powers, rule of law, the authority of electoral or scientific or health institutions over elections, science, and health matters, to name a few—have unraveled and come undone. How has this come to pass?

Journalist and public intellectual Jonathan Rauch confronted this problem head on in his brilliant book The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth. Perhaps the most consequential political challenge we face today for underlying and (at least partially) explaining all others, he details the ways in which the consensus surrounding the established rules, institutions, and processes that channel inputs and define how we come to constitute “knowledge” and agree as to what is “true”—starting with the scientific method and empirical testing as a way to prove or disprove a given theory or assertion, all the way to systematic fact checking in professional journalism—has frayed and come apart. The very idea of expertise, from scientists and academics to journalists and public officials, has imploded in a free fall of public distrust.

With no consensus on who or what to believe, one is “free” to believe just about anyone who makes a claim (no matter how outlandish) and just about anything that gains psychological purchase for whatever reason (particularly if it stimulates the “hot” parts of the brain). As a result, we live in a kind of perpetual orgy of opinion posing as fact, a free-for-all creative invention of reality with few norms and fewer rules as to its inception or value. A simulated “authenticity” and staged reality have replaced what used to be called (however tentatively and conditionally) “truth”, with sometimes deadly real world consequences. To take one salient example, the losing candidate of the 2020 presidential election—without credible evidence and against a cascade of contradictory proof provided by scores of local and state institutions, including local and state electoral authorities with first-hand knowledge and concrete information, confirmed and reconfirmed by multiple court decisions—alleged that the election was stolen. And on January 6, 2021 our capital was attacked by thousands of people who believed the patently false allegation was true.

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Our controlled hallucination has spun out of control, for good or ill depending on your intentions. The consensus has collapsed, leaving a vacuum ripe for exploitation.

Rushing in to fill that vacuum are the Invisible Rulers that internet researcher Renee DiResta describes in her eponymous book, subtitled The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality. Instead of a broad, overarching consensus reality—with its different shades, currents, and variations—we now face countless smaller semi-public, even private, so-called “bespoke” realities, with little overlap between them. No norms, rules, or processes exist to determine the relative “truth” of any given assertion or to confirm (or falsify) the “reality” of any alternative facts. Now our opinions and perceptions are shaped largely by the interest of the purveyor of “information” to go viral and to monetize their virality. Or by the interest of the candidate to get elected by any means necessary, including outright lying. In this sense, many of us live in a state of deliberately induced delusion, inhabiting different degrees of incompatible bespoke realities, detached from any overarching consensus.

The challenge of governing democratically, difficult in the best of circumstances, has become all but impossible.

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In a confused information environment that blends truth with fiction and vice versa, certain kinds of political “leaders” tend to prosper. These are the kind who trade in blurring lines between entertainment and politics, between staged reality and real events, between outright lies and trying to level with the people. Indeed, the best bullshit artist in the business (if not of all time) has been elected president of our country at least twice (he claims three times, a “fact” with which everyone serving in his administration must reportedly attest to in a signed affidavit.) In this neo-Orwellian world, he (or anyone) can claim that true is false and false is true and be no worse for the wear: that Ukraine invaded Russia and not vice-versa, that the European Union was formed to “screw America” rather than at our behest as part of a successful plan to stabilize the continent after the last world war, that most undocumented immigrants in the United States are dangerous criminals from prisons and mental institutions rather than ordinary economic migrants and political refugees, or—for that matter—that he won an election which he demonstrably lost… and have so many people believe him.

While I consider myself a member of what some mainstream observers have called the “reality-based community,” I am aware that those who partake of certain separate delusions disagree. Indeed, they believe I’m the one who’s deluded. At least one former friend has accused me of being duped by the deeply discredited “establishment” delusion; among other things, for failing to see that Hillary Clinton continued to pull the strings behind the scenes in the Democratic Party; for wrongly believing that Kamala Harris was constitutionally eligible to be Vice President and to run for President; for not appreciating the self-evident fact that the unconstitutional encroachments of the Democratic Party-supported administrative state, not Donald Trump and his plan to clean up government corruption and make American great again, represented a clear and present danger to the survival of American democracy. In short, standard alt-right, libertarian, parallel-reality fare (in my humble opinion). But most frightening to me was the cult-like certainty with which that extreme—and, to say the least, debatable—perspective was expressed. The uncontrolled hallucination brooked no dissent. I was not only wrong. I was foolishly, idiotically, willfully wrong. This was no mere political disagreement on the margins, this was a matter of competing and incompatible delusions.

This was a fracture down the middle of consensus reality.

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You Can’t Go Home Again

I returned to the United States in summer 2016 after serving more than 15 straight years abroad as an American diplomat. That is, just in time for the first election of Donald Trump. It’s possible that, in acquiring the multi-lens perspective one gets from living and working in several foreign countries (and traveling for work and personal reasons in many others), I lost the day-to-day thread of cultural and political developments at home. (All things, even positive experiences, have opportunity costs). The impacts of the terrorist attacks of September 11; the endless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; the devastating 2008-9 financial crisis; the surge of idealism and hope with the election of our first Black president; the depth and ferocity of the cultural response to that election and the ensuing retrenchment. All that coupled with radical changes in the configuration and production of news, the dominance of Fox on Cable and the dizzying effects of the digital revolution on the dissemination of “information” more broadly. And while I remember watching the inaugural season of “Survivor” in the summer of 2000 with my wife (who was then pregnant with our eldest, now 24) before we left for Malaysia, I missed out altogether on the rise of Reality TV as a full-on cultural phenomenon and the media resurrection of the shady, thrice-bankrupted Donald Trump in the hit reality TV show The Apprentice, where he played a staged version of the kind of successful business figure he could never quite cut in the “real” world.

For whatever combination of factors, on my return home I, like so many others, failed to appreciate the depth and degree to which our fragile consensus had broken apart.

In a different way than I thought, my mind was clouded and I was mistaken. I believed we Americans were comparatively lucky to live where we did, and was puzzled by our political divisions, which felt manufactured. Given our relative good fortune, it made no sense that we would go out of our way to tear ourselves apart. Even the problem of immigration didn’t resonate for me politically (and here, I’m not claiming to be right). Instead, it underscored how much better things were in the United States than in many other countries, including most of the places I had lived. Otherwise, why would so many tens of thousands of people brave such dangers to claw and scratch their way to our borders?

As for our functional if flawed democratic institutions, it made no sense to tear them down. I knew first-hand that our government was far from perfect, but I also knew it provided more structure and order—behind the scenes and with reasonable competence—than many people realized. Even our impatient billionaire class, strangely disgruntled with democracy and hungering for some more technologically “efficient” form of government, had to agree with that. It made no sense to kill the goose, even if the golden eggs needed to be distributed more fairly. The United States did not face an existential challenge requiring an historical overhaul of our domestic political structures and a radical reversal of our role in the international system. We faced something eminently more manageable. We needed a scalpel, not a sledgehammer to get the job done. In real estate terms, we owned a renovation home with “good bones”, not a tear down.

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It Doesn’t Matter

As I watched President Trump’s (non) State of the Union address some days back, I was struck by the palpable enthusiasm of the Republicans in Congress. It looked authentic, not staged. If any of those representatives and senators felt privately queasy and uncomfortable about what was going on, then they were damn good actors. This meant that, notwithstanding press reports of softening poll numbers and raucous town hall meetings in Republican districts demanding clarification of the administration’s intentions, the president enjoyed continued broad support from the American people and continued supercharged enthusiasm from the Republican base. Unlike his napping predecessor, he was busy at work getting shit done! He was making progress across the board on all his promises! He was doing great things on behalf of the American people!

Indeed, if the elections were to take place again now, he would probably win by a larger margin.

It didn’t matter that he had perversely assailed Canada—our closest ally, our neighbor, our best friend in the world—and reiterated his intention to absorb it (against the will of 90% of its people) as our “cherished 51st state”. It didn’t matter that he had grotesquely mistreated on live television the besieged president of Ukraine, which had spent the last 3 years fighting to defend its very survival against Russian aggression, its cities crouched in fear of the next drone attack. It didn’t matter that he had blamed the war on the victim, and not the aggressor. It didn’t matter that he was slapping tariffs on free trade agreement partners and economic competitors alike, and then removing them again. It didn’t matter that an unelected billionaire “special government representative” with massive conflicts of interest was busy ransacking the government, plunging into the guts of its IT and personnel systems and pulling plugs out of sockets at random to see what might happen—usurping congressional authority every step of the way. It didn’t matter that air travel seemed suddenly risky for the first time in decades while air traffic controllers, along with tens of thousands of other public servants across different government agencies, were being unceremoniously yanked out of their jobs (and sometimes invited back days later before being fired again). It didn’t matter that he had defied Congress by firing a dozen taxpayer watchdogs from across the federal government without advance warning and gone against long established precedent by clearing out existing apolitical military leadership to be replaced by loyalists. It didn’t even matter that the stock market was falling and that the price of eggs was going up… If that didn’t matter, then what did?

Not only did it not matter, these were all good, welcome, positive things—each one a step on the stairway to making America great again. Meanwhile, I was wondering about my own sanity. Was I the deluded one? Was I the one living in a fake news reality? Was I the one who was and is wrong? It wouldn’t be the first time.

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Delusion is only one symptom of schizophrenia. Another is, quite literally, confusion; that is, the inability to differentiate and prioritize among competing outside stimuli to make sense of the world and navigate through it. The brain of a “sane” person is constantly filtering countless competing stimuli, giving precedence to those that are relevant and useful for the purposes at hand, enabling them to rise to the surface and dominate attention, while blocking out those that don’t serve any immediate purpose or function. For example, in conversing with a friend over dinner at a crowded restaurant, you are able to filter out ambient noise, kitchen clatter, the sound of other people’s voices, to focus on the meaning of the words being spoken. Imagine that you suddenly couldn’t. Imagine that every outside signal suddenly had the same valence, that nothing stood out, that everything was lost in an undifferentiated jumble. The screech of traffic outside, the sound of plates being set on tables, and the roar of other voices all around you, each and all competing on equal grounds for your attention. You struggle not just with the meaning of the words being spoken, you struggle with hearing the words in isolation. You can’t even begin to assign meaning. You can’t even begin to make sense of it. It’s all a big giant mess. All you can do is throw up your hands, become immobile, hide, grow catatonic.

That state of mind and affairs sounds weirdly familiar. It sounds like the relentless flooding of the zone in Donald Trump’s America.

1. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3662125/ This is just one example of a rich vein of inquiry.

2. https://www.ted.com/talks/anil_seth_your_brain_hallucinates_your_conscious_reality?language=en