We're All Schizophrenic Winos
"I don’t know how to feel – everything has to go through my brain." The Anonymous Schizoid
Seinfeld once said Americans will take as many prescription drugs as possible. "Doctor, figure out how much will kill me, then back it off a little."
That's unfortunate. We ought to figure out why the drug would kill us before taking any of it. By seeing death in the extreme, we can glimpse harm in the moderate and then properly decide whether we ought to avoid it altogether.
A similar dynamic works with mental illness. It casts relief on problematic traits that might otherwise go unnoticed. In the words of William James:
Insane conditions have this advantage, that they isolate special factors of the mental life, and enable us to inspect them unmasked by their more usual surroundings.
Most mental maladies, including schizophrenia and autism, result from right hemisphere damage (depression, btw, is a notable exception).
When the right hemisphere isn't working correctly, the left hemisphere works independently.
The results range from the scary (the schizoid who believes he must kill you because you're part of the plot) to the comical (guys on the lower rungs of "the spectrum"), but they have this in common: a loss of reality.
The Advertising Industry Sells Authenticity
The protagonist ad executive Don Draper in Mad Men repeatedly emphasizes that advertising is about filling an emotional need.
I’m not sure what emotional needs the ad executives tried to fill in the 1960s, but today, they try to fill consumers’ appetite for “the authentic.” Consumers today crave the authentic, so Madison Avenue tries hard to convince consumers that its clients' products are "authentic."
If consumers think a product is authentic, they'll buy it, just like a wino will buy a bottle if he thinks there's alcohol in it.
But would a wino spend $5 on a bottle if he already has access to a crate of Boone's Farm?
Probably not.
Similarly, consumers wouldn't spend $5 on something authentic if they already have access to a crate of authenticity.
But they're not.
Authenticity is Reality
Authenticity is merely reality. If something is authentic, it's real.
If we crave authenticity, we are merely craving reality.
How could that be? We stand in reality; we are surrounded by reality; to be is to be real. How can we crave "being" when to be is to have being? It makes no sense.
But it can happen.
Just ask The Anonymous Schizoid.
"I don’t know how to feel – everything has to go through my brain."
Everything for the schizophrenic must be processed through the brain. He has to think about reality: dissect it, break it down, and then try to reassemble it, but never successfully: the puzzle pieces never quite come together.
Why doesn't it come together for the schizophrenic?
It's because schizophrenics have damaged right hemispheres. So even though the schizophrenic’s left hemisphere has all the pieces of reality, they don't come together right.
The left hemisphere by itself can’t see the gestalt: the reality that is greater than the sum of the pieces. Only the right hemisphere "gets" the gestalt.
Because his right hemisphere is impaired, the schizophrenic doesn't have a sense of reality because he approaches the world only with his left hemisphere. The same phenomenon occurs in Asperger's and autism.
A Culture of Schizophrenics and Autistics
Now shift back to the rest of us.
Our right hemispheres aren't damaged like the truly deranged, but they've atrophied. A lot. Our left hemispheres are doing way too much work. They're happy to do the work--in fact, they demand it--but an over-active left hemisphere results in a weakened right hemisphere.
The result?
We increasingly have lost the gestalt: the greater reality.
As modernity spins further and further away from reality, we increasingly crave more and more authenticity.
Today, we're all winos sitting on empty crates. We'll eagerly spend money for that bottle of Boone's Farm. We just want that feeling, that experience, that reconnection with reality that is “authenticity.”
But we don’t need Madison Avenue. We just need to re-engage the right hemisphere and re-install it as the rightful master of our mental world.
I won’t re-hash ways of doing that. It’s the topic of the ongoing series of essays you’ll find at “Outside the Modern Limits: Flourishing Despite Modernity.”
Many more pieces are already in the queue. Stay tuned.