Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [19]
The attraction of an altered state is not, as one might initially imagine, just its pure weirdness—how far it diverges from everyday life. Instead, it is the combination of this weirdness and its proximity to everyday life. What is altered, in an altered state, are the elements of the world, the relations among them, and the rules that govern them. But the way we experience these states remains essentially unchanged. The tools we use to gauge and understand the sober world—our reason, our emotions, and above all our senses—are largely unimpaired and sometimes even enhanced in the trippy one. As a result, these false worlds have all the intimacy, intensity, and physicality—in short, all the indicators of reality—of the true one.
What does it mean about the realness of reality if it is so susceptible to alteration—by a dream, a drug, a difference of just a few degrees in body temperature? And, conversely, what does it mean about the supposedly unreal if it is so easy to conjure and so intensely convincing? These questions have haunted our collective imagination from A Midsummer Night’s Dream to The Matrix (both of which, incidentally, hinge on drug trips). One of the most consistent answers—and the crucial one, for my purposes—is that the false and the true are reversed: that the unreal is, so to speak, the real real. Freud, as I’ve already noted, believed that the false worlds of our dreams reveal deep and hidden truths about ourselves. So did the writer Artemidorus Daldianus, who, almost two thousand years earlier, penned the Oneirocritica—a Greek Interpretation of Dreams. And they weren’t alone. Virtually every culture in every era has believed that dreams express otherwise inaccessible truths about the dreamer: about her forgotten or unknown past, her secret beliefs and desires, her destiny. In the same vein, virtually every culture in every era (with the halfway exception of the industrialized West) has regarded visions and hallucinations as revealing the otherwise inaccessible truths of the universe. From Siberian shamans to Aztec priests to the Merry Pranksters to spiritually inclined potheads the world over (ancient Christians, early Jews, Scythians, Sikhs, Sufis, and Rastafarians, to name just a few), we have regarded our drugs as entheogens—substances that can lay bare the truth of the cosmos and show us the face of God.
If dreams and drug states create acute but temporary alterations in our understanding of reality, the acute and ongoing version is insanity. You might think (and hope) that insanity would take us even further away from everyday error, but instead it brings us full circle. Diderot’s Encyclopédie defined madness as the act of departing from reason “with confidence and in the firm conviction that one is following it.” Maybe so, but if that’s how we go crazy, it is also how we go wrong. The more recent French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault called insanity “the purest and most complete form of quid pro quo”—of taking one thing for another. To take something for something it is not: If that’s not error, what is?
Ultimately, only three factors seem to distinguish the false reality of madness from the false reality of wrongness. The first is purity, as in Foucault’s “purest form”: insanity is error undiluted. The second is consistency: one noted early classifier of disease, the eighteenth-century physician François Boissier de Sauvages, described the insane as those “who persist in some notable error.” The third factor concerns substance: which quid you take for which quo. We can be wrong about all manner