(Part 1 of this series presented a brief overview of this topic and a series of questions. We suggested that consensus is an important part of whether something is real. In this piece, we’ll run sideways with this idea and consider whether consensus is part of what creates reality, or whether it actually creates false realities. Maybe that sentence makes no sense…or maybe after reading, you’ll find it kind of does!)

My grandmother was a hospital nurse for a substantial portion of her life. While completing a nursing education, you spend some time in each department so you have some background and practical knowledge in all of them. Of all the things she saw throughout this process, one of the experiences that stuck most with her was plain old everyday life in the psych ward. Dealing regularly with people who were stuck in inpatient care long-term made her realize, she says, that the line between normalcy and dysfunction or even insanity is very fine indeed, uncomfortably so in fact. It looks like it would be incredibly easy to go over the edge yourself. Most of the time we don’t even have the slightest idea what does push people over the edge.

And then, what’s the edge?

It’s not like, say, trauma care; if you’re a doctor meeting an ambulance coming from a car wreck, you’re not left wondering if your patient has a broken leg or got stabbed in the chest by a broken piece of metal, or what exactly it means to have a broken leg. You might have to use an X-ray machine to see exactly what happened, and you might inadvertently miss some hidden injury that ends up causing problems later, but nobody ever doubts that there is a fact of the matter as to what the patient’s injuries were, and while different physicians might disagree on the proper treatment, they will without a doubt agree that the patient in fact broke his leg. In contrast, if we’re really lucky, sometimes we can observe some kind of physical or chemical or functional pattern in the brain associated with a mental health issue. Plenty of times we can’t. Even when we can, it’s often not entirely clear whether that pattern is an effect or a cause, and often some healthy people display the same pattern. We’re stuck with purely operational definitions that are, essentially, made up by people, and not everyone can agree on how to apply those definitions.

Now it’s not as if the definitions are made up randomly; someone didn’t just sit down at her desk one day with a cup of tea, turn on some music, and write up the diagnostic criteria for clinical depression from her head like I’m writing up this post. They’re based on experience in the field and chosen because, in general, the criteria help people find appropriate treatments and improve their health. But we don’t know what’s really happening, and this kind of taxonomy is, to a logical mind, thoroughly unsatisfying – why, exactly, should we divide this category of disorder into these types? Do these patients actually have the same issue appearing in several different forms, or do we just think they do because we don’t actually understand what’s going on and the symptoms listed in the book match for both of them? Does it even make sense to talk about a single issue that causes a mental illness?

Some people are fond of pointing out that having a tulpa can’t be a form of mental instability because it doesn’t meet DSM criteria (creating a tulpa is an intentional act, it doesn’t cause clinically significant distress, etc.). While I obviously agree that tulpas are, in and of themselves, unproblematic and often beneficial for mental health, I’ve never found this line of argument convincing. Sure, the DSM is authoritative and important to clinical psychology, and the people who influence it have experience in the field, but ultimately they arbitrarily chose those criteria. If I were looking to be convinced that someone wasn’t crazy, I would be hoping for an understandable, logical explanation rather than a pointer to an obtuse manual that says some other guy says they aren’t crazy – in the same way that if I needed to be convinced that two plus two equaled four, I would be satisfied if shown a variety of demonstrations intuitively showing this fact or relating it to other facts I already accepted, and rather peeved if merely pointed to a book that says that two plus two equals four.

But this is my grandmother’s point – with mental illness, there are no demonstrations involving moving objects from pile to pile to show that two plus two equals four. The interesting thing is that, except when we stop to think about it or we have a formative experience like hers, we rarely notice that we actually have very little to go on. We comfortably apply labels to issues people are having without giving it a second thought, both when we’re told to by professionals and when we dislike someone and start looking things up on WebMD to “diagnose” them. We’re even relieved when we’ve been feeling a bit off, perhaps even our entire lives, and we finally have a label to apply to it. The label becomes a part of our identity.

In other words, because we as a society have agreed on them, the DSM criteria construct our reality. Our taxonomy of mental illnesses seems very real to us and has vast implications for the rest of our thinking, but ultimately it is based on little more than consensus.

For another, perhaps more chilling, example, let’s turn to Nazi Germany. In the immediate wake of the Holocaust and the unfolding understanding of the exact magnitude of what had just taken place, people across the world were left questioning how exactly this could have happened. How did untold numbers of previously normal people become criminal masterminds orchestrating genocide or agree to turn their neighbors over to authorities who they knew would horribly mistreat and likely kill them? In an at the time deeply controversial and much misunderstood series of articles, later to become the book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, political philosopher Hannah Arendt suggested that there was nothing special about those people and leaves us all to uncomfortably ponder the fact that no matter how moral we feel, there is precious little reason to think that we wouldn’t end up selling out and participating too under the same circumstances. The evil that arose during the Holocaust wasn’t the result of the participants being part of a class of bad people, the evil was the result of a perverted form of morality that invaded the Germans involved (and the citizens of other nations who aided the Nazis).

As Arendt explains it, normally there are certain internal barriers we have to break down in order to do something we consider immoral: we feel strongly that it is wrong to, say, steal money from a homeless person on the street, and as such it’s very difficult for most people to get themselves to do something like this even if they legitimately are in dire straits and need the money. But during the Holocaust, due to the actions of the masses and the influence of the propaganda machine, the situation became inverted: doing the right thing (that is, not participating in genocide) became difficult, not just because of external threats but because of a perverted internal sense of morality. People felt like they wanted to help their neighbors escape the Nazis, as one might want to steal money from the homeless person to feed their family, but that it was wrong to help a Jew or an enemy of the state escape the Nazis, so they didn’t. Again, consensus (probably an apparent consensus at first, and then a real one as the process continued) constructed reality, to disastrous effect.

Whether you subscribe to Arendt’s theory exactly or not, I think it’s fair to say that something very strange happened to people’s impression of reality during the Holocaust. If you don’t like the theory (I happen to find it both tolerably convincing and useful to my understanding of human nature), spend a few minutes sometime thinking about how those events could possibly have taken place given your understanding of how people normally behave. It’s not an easy question.

To fast-forward some seventy-five years, Greta and I have recently taken to cynically calling today’s world a “post-fact world.” I think this state of affairs has been worsened considerably by the state of United States politics in the last two years or so, but to some extent or another it has probably been in development for many years now. Perhaps it’s fitting, as it’s looking more and more like President Trump has broken the law in some way or another and might end up getting impeached, that our first post about the nature of reality here on PPOW invoked Bill Clinton’s famous line during his own impeachment scandal, “It depends on what the meaning of the word is is.”

In some way that’s what we’re asking in this series of posts. What is? Increasingly, even well outside the realm of philosophy, I think people are feeling that they have no idea. A year and a half or so ago, the public began to become aware of the phenomenon of “fake news.” Originally, this had a very specific definition. It was distinct not only from actual news but also from satire: fake news sites were sites which, either as a form of clickbait for their own profit or with the intent to damage someone’s reputation, completely made up “news” articles about events that never occurred but seemed vaguely believable.

This was all well and good; no normal person, not trying to be technical or a smart-ass about it, would have denied that these articles were “fake” and “not real” in a very straightforward manner. They were, exactly as the term stated, fake news. And if you look up “fake news” on Wikipedia today, you will still get essentially this definition.

Yet somehow, only weeks to months after the phenomenon of fake news and its role in the ongoing election came to the public’s attention, we got to the point where President(-elect) Trump was asserting that events described in the New York Times, one of the most prestigious and respected journalism outlets in the country, were “fake news,” despite the fact that the articles in question were intended as an accurate, truthful, reasonably unbiased description of reality and, in fact, consisted of accurate information. And if it were just Trump, we could probably ignore it, seeing the sheer volume of lies and narcissistic justifications that comes from his mouth and his Twitter feed on an everyday basis. But it isn’t just Trump; the phenomenon has expanded to not only Trump’s supporters but people from across the political spectrum. “Fake news” has, essentially, come to mean “information or an argument made in a news article that I disagree with.”

Now I’m not denying that the media is a huge influence on reality – especially political reality – and that we cannot trust the media to be unbiased, especially in an era where a few wealthy people, connected to each other, own most of the major media outlets. But this “fake-news” phenomenon is something else altogether. In politics, not only in the US but with the rise of populist candidates and associated debates in many other democracies as well, we have begun to argue not about policies but about falsifiable facts, an absurd situation which has been aptly described as post-truth politics.

The consensus is eroding, and with it reality is eroding. Politics, especially in a country as large, diverse, and complicated as the United States, has always felt somewhat divorced from reality – when can you claim to have actually seen the direct results of dropping your paper in the ballot box? – but typically politicians try to at least maintain the appearance of researching and using the facts of the situation their constituents face on the ground! Last month I in passing mentioned the “memory hole” in Orwell’s 1984, into which government officials place all records of an event they want to expunge from reality. With the records incinerated and no remaining proof that the event happened, anyone who thinks they remember the event is essentially automatically gaslighted. Today no political group has managed to go to these lengths, and with the existence of the Internet, completely destroying all traces of an event would be extraordinarily difficult, but we have gotten to the point where any claim whatsoever related even tangentially to politics has to be considered potentially not only misleading but intentionally designed to manipulate our perception of the truth. The truth, and reality, feels like it’s eroding just as surely as if it were being centrally manipulated by Orwell’s Party government.

So where does this rather eclectic series of examples put us in our discussion of the types of reality? I think it shows two things simultaneously: (1) that things do in fact become, to our perception, more real the more agreement there is about them, regardless of how absurd or unfounded they are; and (2) that understanding this, in a bizarre way, makes our consensus reality seem less real.

Consensus helps to determine whether something is part of what we call “reality.” Sometimes, as in the case of mental disorders, we can use this effect to create useful concepts (which remain useful at least to the extent that we continue to understand they are human creations and not the final truth of the matter). Other times, it can be extremely dangerous and lead to mass delusion.

At the beginning of this post, I posed the curious question of whether consensus creates reality or creates false realities. At least for me, after writing this article, that seems to be a pretty valid question. And as so often in philosophical matters, it leads to another question: What is a real reality or a false reality? Implicit in the idea of a taxonomy of reality is the idea that there is more than one type of reality, and then necessarily that there is more than one reality so they can be of different types. We’ll be considering these questions next month.