Solo show about why our brains no longer work.
Audio production by Steven Toepell of Bohemian Passport Inc.
TRANSCRIPT (Not exact)
I begin this episode of The Filter with some questions. For you. Have you found, over the past few years, and especially over the past few months, that your brain doesn’t seem to be as good as it used to be at comprehending the world around you? Do you feel not just overwhelmed by how much is happening, and by how much new information you have to make sense of in such a short time, but that your very ability to reason about your world seems to be under assault.
If so, I don’t think that’s an accident. I think it’s an inevitable consequence of the times we live in, and in particular of the complete breakdown of the forces that helped us understand the world, the breakdown of accountability, and the rise to dominance of narrative driven journalism and the reactionionary mob as central forces in our lives.
But before getting into that, I want begin with an observation. Just as a nation can, as famously declared, contain a lot of ruin, but does have its breaking point, our minds can contain a certain level of hypocrisy or cognitive dissonance, but not an infinite amount.
In fact, to be human is to accept the necessity of living with contradiction. Everyone is a hypocrite, and much of what looks like hypocrisy is merely the conflation of a group of heterodox individuals, with what is presumed to be their group philosophy. Or sometimes’s it’s just the personal failing of someone to live up to their stated goal. For example, if a guy who decries the evils of drinking to others, drinks like a fish at home, not a hypocrite, he’s an alcoholic who knows first hand how bad
that is.
To varying degrees, we all live in this state of mismatch between rhetoric and reality, and so far as I can tell, we always have. Our public selves are always lies. We code switch. We fail to live up to our own standards.
This mismatch extends from the personal to the societal. We have official, establishment lies that bear only a vague resemblance to reality, or are strictly aspirational. These range from the fundamental to the trivial.
Two hundred plus years ago my birth nation declared that all men were created equal, in a time of widespread slavery. Today I live in a city where most of the doors marked with “Emergency exit only, alarm will sound,” open silently and are the normal ways to leave a building. At first that bothered me. Quite a bit, actually. Now I barely give it a second thought. Small disconnects with reality, like this one, make a ripple in the pond of our brains the first time we see them, but the ripples diminish over time as re-wire our brains to understand that “Emergency exit” just means exit.
To extend the analogy, the state of the pond represents our capacity to comprehend, assimilate, and reason about our world. Except for the most autistic among us, the Emergency exit lie won’t take us down for long. But more consequential lies are like bigger rocks tossed into our pond-like brains. It takes longer for them to settle down. On a personal level, these can have a profound and lasting effect. Sudden death of a loved one. Partner who cheats on you. It may take weeks, months, or years to recover from these, not just in terms of emotional stability, but in terms of basic rational thought.
In The Year of Magical Thinking, author Joan Didion recounts how, after losing her husband of several decades, she finds herself unable to throw out his shoes, thinking he might come back any moment. These moments of disconnect with reality take a long time to fade.
In the pond of our brains, the size and duration ripples arising from multiple disturbances at once, can have non-linear effects.
