Is it possible for an entire nation to develop schizophrenia? Let’s look at the evidence, but first a definition. Schizophrenia is a long-term mental disorder involving a breakdown in the connections among thought, emotions and behavior. It leads to faulty perception, inappropriate actions and feelings, a withdrawal from Reality and personal relationships into fantasy, delusion and a sense of mental fragmentation.
Is the polarization happening in America today (2020) an example of mental fragmentation? Some of the population seems to be presenting schizophrenic symptoms. Brian Stelter’s book Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth offers our first insight: “Fox viewers are especially likely to hold inaccurate views of important issues, but what is actually going on in their heads when they sit down in front of the TV? The closest Stelter comes to answering this question is when he asserts that for some, ‘Fox is an identity. Almost a way of life.’”[i]
Next, we turn to The Unreality of Memory, a collection of essays on disaster culture, climate anxiety, and our collective sense of doom, by Elisa Gabbert. “If the first part of the collection focuses on the ways in which catastrophe upends Reality as we know it, the second and third take an elegant scalpel to the notion of Reality itself. Gabbert turns her attention to the blind spots and mistaken impressions that constitute our subjective experience of self and world, from false memories and phantom limbs to witch trials and compassion fatigue … [we have] passages on the ‘Mandela effect’ (a popular term for collective false memories) and Holocaust denial.”[ii]
Philosophers also have insights. Wolfram Eilenberger saw the 1920s as crucial, plus Heidegger, Benjamin, Cassirer and Wittgenstein saw that shift in worldview was necessary for a sustainable community. They suggested we “draw up a plan for one’s own life and generation which moves beyond the determining structure of fate and character to break away from the old frameworks (family, religion, nation, capitalism) finding a model of existence that made it possible to process the intensity of the experience of war, transferring it to the realm of thought and everyday existence.”[iii]
Simple Reality is just such a plan.
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Supplemental Reading: Psychology, The ABC’s of Simple Reality, Vol 2
#48 Schizophrenic Nation
[i] Enrich, David. “Fox in the White House.” The New York Times Book Review. September 27, 2020, p. 16.
[ii] Kleeman, Alexandra. “Disaster Report.” The New York Times Book Review. September 27, 2020, p. 18.
[iii] Kaag, John. “Time of the Magicians.” The New York Times Book Review. September 27, 2020, p. 13.
