Consensus Reality

In my post about Obama, written a little while ago, I said that perhaps, as a New Zealander, it wasn't my place to talk about American politics. But, after this last week, how can anyone in the world think about anything else? My local paper is full of columnists expressing shock and anxiety about what a future with Donald Trump as 'leader of the free world' might hold. The 'Muslim ban', promised during the campaign and now made manifest, was instituted only yesterday or the day before but this is not what I want to talk about in this post. I want to talk about the mismatch between Trump's view of reality and the views expressed by almost the entirety of the media.

The gap between Trump's assertions about the world and the facts as reported by journalists has been received with something like incredulity by the journalists themselves. Commentators, such as Seth Meyers, can't decide whether Trump is a compulsive liar or is certifiably delusional – this stunned incomprehension being a natural reaction of honest intelligent people to someone who seems completely blind to all inconvenient truths. Is it really possible that Trump genuinely believes that there were five million illegal votes cast in the election all for Hillary Clinton? It appears, appalling as this conclusion seems, that the answer is 'yes'.

How can Trump and his advisors justify Trump's unbelievable claims? Kellanne Conway has coined a term that provides wriggle room for the President and his supporters. Journalists may have facts – but the President has 'alternative facts'. The tactic here is risible but it seems the only one they can employ. Surely the term 'alternative fact' is a kind of oxymoron? Either a proposition or statement is a fact, is true, or else it is false and thus not a fact. You can't have 'alternative facts'. In one of his shows, Seth Meyers expressed his astonishment that Trump could so completely disregard 'consensus reality'. (Hopefully this is on Youtube somewhere.) But this is not the right tactic. I want, in this post, to argue that the term 'consensus reality' is almost as much of an oxymoron as the term 'alternative fact'.

We can define 'consensus reality' as 'an understanding of the world that everyone agrees on'. Consensus reality, for instance, might include such propositions as 'La La Land won the Golden Globe for Best Musical or Comedy' or 'terrorism is a bad thing'. However in the U.S., on many issues, people are divided and there is no consensus. How then can we speak of 'consensus reality'? A big chunk of the population believes that Obama was a Muslim who wasn't born in the United States; the same chunk believes illegal immigration from Mexico  is a serious problem even though over at least the last number of years net migration has gone the other way; the same chunk doesn't think God would permit global warming to happen; the same chunk seriously believes that Hillary Clinton is a criminal and are disappointed in Trump only to the extent that he has not followed through on his campaign pledge to 'lock her up'. It seems that there are two Americas living side by side, one America that gets its news from newspapers and late night political satire shows and another America that gets its news solely from right-wing talk back hosts and Fox News. It doesn't matter how righteous Trevor Noah is, it doesn't matter how passionately and indignantly he points out that Trump is all surface and no substance, it doesn't matter how surgically precise his satire is, the people who support Trump won't be moved because people who support Trump don't watch The Daily Show. And even if a Trump supporter chances upon it accidentally, he won't get the jokes, will feel condescended to, and will only end up hating the 'liberal elite' even more.

It seems apparent that Donald Trump has lived all his life in the second America. Okay, he's a rich New Yorker, not a Kentucky trailer-park resident, but his opinions and even his policy all seem to come straight from talk-back radio and Fox News. And what is scary is that, even as President, with an enormous information gathering apparatus at his disposal, he still gets all his opinions and policy from Fox News. Some people think Vladimir Putin effectively annexed the U.S. by orchestrating Trump's election but I think the true eminence grise, the person really pulling the strings, is Rupert Murdoch.

So the idea of 'consensus reality' falls apart because there is no such thing as a consensus on the issues that underly all political debate in America. However even if there were a consensus about an issue, even if everyone believed the same thing about something, that doesn't make it reality. Up until Copernicus formulated his heliocentric theory of the solar system, everyone believed that the sun orbited the Earth. The geocentric model was accepted as 'consensus reality' even though it was false. This makes the idea of 'consensus reality' highly problematic. Simply put, something can be true even even if only a very few people believe it, or no one at all. I am not, by the way, giving Trump an escape hatch by pointing this out. I don't believe Trump would know the truth if it kicked him up the arse.

This issue is important to me because sometimes in this blog I have asserted ideas which very few people indeed believe. I have argued in "The Myth of the Repressed Homosexual" and indirectly elsewhere that homosexuals are made not born. I have argued that Oscar Wilde was straight. I proposed, rather diffidently or cautiously, that there might be a logical flaw in the Theory of Evolution as it is generally understood. Most importantly I think, I have argued, in "The Big Con", that the idea that anti-psychotic medication is at all efficacious is false. Like Fox News viewers, most psychiatrists only read research that confirms their existing worldviews. If antipsychotics don't work, what are they left with in terms of treatment? Nothing – unless they maybe consider a better kind of couch therapy than was used in the past. On all these issues – sexuality, genetics and psychiatry – I find myself opposed to consensus reality. This may make me seem a screwball. But I don't want people to think that I am presenting 'alternative facts'. I may be on an island by myself in believing what I do and sometimes my beliefs evolve (this blog being a process rather than a conclusion) but I stand by much of what I have said.

As I often do, I would like to furnish this argument with an anecdote. 2009 was probably not quite the worst year in my life but it was definitely my maddest. I believed that I could communicate telepathically with others, that my glasses were bugged, that I was world-famous. Towards the end of the year I climbed Mt. Hobson, a hill near my home, and at the summit asked the voices what I could do to save myself, how I could escape my madness. A voice said, "Accept consensus reality." I replied (in my head of course) "Okay." What followed was the intense episode involving Jess and Jon that I have described in earlier posts and then three years when I was quite well. I was well but, in a way, I wasn't. I had accepted consensus reality. I had an organic illness, it was caused by a dopamine imbalance, I needed medication for the rest of my life to stay sane. I had been bullied into believing bullshit by psychiatrists and nurses and others around me. In 2013, though, it became impossible for me to put my faith in consensus reality any longer and as I have said in earlier posts went back to the psychiatrists to get it finally on the record that I was straight. And then in early 2014 presumably because of that I was put under the Mental Health Act and forced to receive medication that I no longer believed in.  

For almost all of my life and for most of this blog I have been a Postmodernist who believed that language shapes reality. It may seem that I am resiling from this position by suggesting that the term 'consensus reality' doesn't make sense. Rather though I am trying to say both things at once. The idea that reality is constituted by beliefs about it is the insight of the mad; the idea that reality is independent of anyone's belief about it is the insight of the sane. I am not truly abandoning either standpoint. Rather I wish to try to hold both perspectives at once, alternately or concurrently, an almost impossible balancing feat. It seems though that in these end-times in which we are living we need more than ever to cleave to the idea of truth. Opponents of Trump sometimes seem to frame the coming war as a battle between love and hatred but, really, it should be framed as a battle between truth and bullshit.

I want to end this post by talking about something close to my heart: language. I sometimes struggle to find the right word and this happened twice in this post. For instance I used the word 'incredulity' to describe commentators' attitude to Trump: I could think of no other word that comes anywhere close to capturing how intelligent people can't quite get their head around the awful truth that Trump is actually just as stupid or crazy as he often appears. In my film, The Hounds of Heaven, I have Jess describe herself as a 'sciolist'. When I wrote the film I was using a definition of this word 'sciolist' in which a sciolist is someone who has a superficial knowledge of many different subjects, who is something of a dilettante. According to Google, a sciolist is "a person who pretends to be knowledgeable and well informed". The different definitions give the word 'sciolist' different shades of meaning. I intended the first but my readers may have thought I meant the second. Even in the last paragraph of this post I decided to double-check my understanding of the word 'resile' and found different definitions floating around the internet, some good, others totally bogus. Recently I was chatting to someone who parroted a received opinion that the United States is the most Communist country in the world – people who espouse this opinion obviously having very little idea what the word "Communism" actually means. Insofar as the terms 'consensus reality' makes sense, we need a consensus about the meanings of words. It is important to use language precisely and know precisely what we are trying to say. And this is my fear, that people don't. The ignorant are calling the shots and the people who control the language control the world.