Like Watching a 3D Movie Without Glasses

Recently I gave the following quick synopsis of the theory of universal insanity to a new acquaintance: “Most of us think we perceive reality directly and accurately. But we don’t. What we see is an individual mind-generated reality, heavily distorted by our beliefs and assumptions. We confuse our subjective opinions with objective facts. We’re all deluded about what is real, and this is why we’re all insane.”

I could see that he found this a dubious proposition, and I was pretty sure it was because he was convinced that he was perceiving reality directly and accurately.

It occurred to me that the analogy of a 3D movie could help to illustrate the concept of universal insanity. When a 3D movie is being made, two cameras film simultaneously from slightly separated positions. The final film superimposes the offset perspectives. When you wear polarizing glasses those two images are separated and delivered to the appropriate eye, and you perceive the illusion of three-dimensions on a flat movie screen. But when you look at the film without glasses, it’s blurry, like it’s out of focus. If you watch it too long it’s disorientating and nauseating.

The more clearly an organism perceives objective physical reality, the better its survival chances. For example, when we are trekking through the jungle, if we can’t distinguish the crouching tiger from the obscuring foliage we’re dead. Humans are the product of over three billion years of evolution on this planet, and our ability to construct an effective model of physical reality in our minds is quite remarkable.

But there is another reality built in our minds, a subjective reality, and this doesn’t match physical objective reality exactly. It is offset from physical reality by a certain amount, depending upon the content of our personal subjective beliefs. This offset causes dissonance in our minds, analogous to the way the 3D picture causes nausea. This dissonance is our delusional insanity, and the more our subjective reality is offset from objective reality, the more insane we are.

As 3D films show, it doesn’t take much offset to create an uncomfortable distortion. This is why it can be hard for us “normal” people to grasp our insanity, because our everyday actions appear to prove that we are in touch with objective reality. We can navigate our cars through rush hour traffic, handle the demands of our job, shop for groceries, cook dinner, bathe the kids—all this seems to indicate that we are accurately perceiving objective reality. But accompanying these actions are the distortions caused by our subjective reality: we’re unhappy, or anxious, or depressed, or wish we could be doing something else.

We have all been programmed to think this internal dissonance is completely normal. It’s “normal” if by that word you mean what most people live with every day. It’s also “normal” in the sense of being an evolutionary inevitability. But this dissonance is exactly what we mean here by universal insanity. We confuse our subjective reality with objective reality, and when life doesn’t go the way our subjective reality thinks it should we feel anger, anxiety, or depression.

Recognizing my insanity means I stop trying to impose my subjective beliefs on objective reality. It doesn’t mean I don’t have a subjective point-of-view, it means I eliminate a lot of the dissonance—conflicts, disappointments, worries, problems—in my life.

Virtual Reality

This is the first chapter of the manuscript version of We Are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity, by Kathleen Brugger.

Thomas Jefferson is revered in the United States, in part for his inspiring language in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Noble words, but ones which reveal an astonishing cognitive dissonance in the mind of the man who wrote them. Thomas Jefferson is infamous for being a slave owner. Clearly he could believe in the ideal of liberty and equality for “all men,” yet simultaneously believe that some men could be enslaved and treated unequally because of their skin color.

Today we congratulate ourselves that we’re beyond this kind of confused thinking on race, but most of us still believe in the concept of race itself. We think there really are “Caucasian” and “Asian” and “Black” humans. But, according to the majority of anthropologists, the concept of race exists entirely in our minds; there is only one race, the human race.

Yet this mind-generated reality of separate races has caused enormous suffering for millions of humans through our history, and continues today. People are still killed, imprisoned, and discriminated against because of a completely illusory “reality” that racial categories exist.

Most of us think we perceive reality directly and accurately. That is not true at all. Each of us creates, and lives in, our own individual reality.

A friend of mine shaved off half his moustache one morning, and then walked around all day enjoying people’s reactions. He couldn’t believe how long it took most people to become aware of his half-moustache.

People “saw” him with his moustache intact—entirely missing the reality that half of it was gone—because they were seeing a mind-generated reality, not the objective reality in front of them. When they finally noticed that half his moustache was missing their faces always registered shock (realizing how out of touch with reality they were) before dissolving into laughter.

What do we mean by insane?

In a word: delusional.

Most of us think we perceive reality directly and accurately. That is not true at all. Our senses take in information from our environment, and that information is filtered through our beliefs and assumptions before we become aware of it. Our reality is generated in our minds. Each of us creates our own individual reality.

Psychologists put it this way: we build models of reality in our minds, called “mental maps,” which we use to navigate the world. We do not see actual reality, whatever that might be. We see only our mental models of reality.

No one knows what reality actually is, but we all think and behave as if we do. We erroneously conclude that our model of reality is reality.

What do we call someone who confuses their model of reality with reality itself? We call them delusional, or insane.

The idea that we live in a mind-generated reality seems strange because it feels like we experience the physical world directly and perceive it accurately. For example, when I want to pick my shoe up off the floor I can accurately locate the physical object—the shoe is here on the floor, not over there on the dining table—and I can precisely move my hand to its location and pick it up. Surely this means I’m experiencing the physical world the way it is!

Optical illusions are amusing and shocking because they let us see that we do not perceive physical reality accurately.