We’re All Mad Here

Down the Rabbit Hole Through the Doors of Perception

Over dinner last weekend, someone brought up Silver Linings Playbook and the conversation progressed from the inevitable gushing over Bradley Cooper’s hotness to a heated debate on moral judgment and criminal justice.

In the criminal justice system, most of what we call crime is, from the point of view of the perpetrator, the pursuit of justice[1]. Most homicides are instances of capital punishment, with a private citizen as the judge, jury, and executioner. It’s a reminder that the way we conceive of a violent act depends on our vantage point.

Consider Pat Solatano Jr. (Bradley Cooper’s character), a man who is tried and institutionalized for beating up the lover of his wife Nikki. From the point of view of the law, the aggressor is the husband and the victim is society, which is now pursuing justice. From the point of view of the lover, the aggressor is Pat Jr., and he is the victim; if Pat Jr. gets off on an acquittal or mistrial or plea bargain, there is no justice, as the lover is enjoined from pursuing revenge. And from the point of view of Pat Jr., he is the victim (of cuckoldry), the lover is the aggressor, and justice has been done—but now he is the victim of a second act of aggression, in which the state is the aggressor and the lover is an accomplice.

These observations overturn many dogmas about violence. One is that violence is caused by a deficit of morality and justice. On the contrary, violence is often caused by a surfeit of morality and justice, at least as they are conceived in the minds of the perpetrators.

Our experiences are subject to many different interpretations or perspectives, and no one specific interpretation or perspective is the privileged or correct point of view. But in order to form one perspective we need to ignore many others. In this way we create “truth”, though we convince ourselves that we have discovered it.

We sit in judgment of what counts as relevant to our lives and we convince ourselves that our ideas give us a correct and accurate picture of the way things are. Our desire for knowledge impels us to choose, to select, and to simplify what counts as real.

NARRATIVES

Life’s adventures now become exercises in controlling perspectives. Experiences of growing, failing, and falling down the rabbit hole change our perspectives and move our narratives into situations that challenge us and our perceptions, which beg for newer interpretations and meanings. We create adventures to relieve us from a life of dullness and indifference. Sometimes we need to hear a good story, read a good book, or watch an interesting movie.

Stories give us unique perspectives and help us to create meaning for our lives. When the stories end we are left with nothing but a meaningless void and we are back facing the abyss. We depend on narratives that keep us engaged, keep our attention from wandering.

Stories have changed, sadly. There are no more battles between good and evil, no monsters to slay, no maidens in need of rescue. Most maidens are perfectly capable of rescuing themselves in my experience, at least the ones worth something, in any case. There are no longer simple tales with quests and beasts and happy endings. The quests lack clarity of goal or path. The beasts take different forms and are difficult to recognize for what they are.

And there are never really endings, happy or otherwise. Things keep going on, they overlap and blur, your story is part of your mother’s story is part of many other stories, and there is no telling where any of them may lead. Good and evil are a great deal more complex than a princess and a dragon, or a wolf and a scarlet-clad little girl. And is not the dragon the hero of his own story? Is not the wolf simply acting as a wolf should act? Though perhaps it is a singular wolf who goes to such lengths as to dress as a grandmother to toy with its prey.

Perhaps there were never any simple tales at all, but that is a complicated matter. The heart of the tale and the ideas behind it are simple. Time has altered and condensed their nuances, made them more than story, greater than the sums of their parts. But that requires time. The truest tales require time and familiarity to become what they are.

PERSPECTIVISM

Few things in this world are clear–cut. Since each narrative is open to interpretation, experimentation on perspectives take a new turn. Each story is subject to scrutiny and take on many different perspectives for comprehension. Is there one point of view that is correct or most accurate? This question doesn’t make sense, because there is no spoonapart from our experience—only perspectives on the spoon.

But can’t we make a distinction between the appearances of the spoon and the independently existing “reality” of the spoon? Alas, there is no difference between the appearance of the spoon and the spoon itself. Reality is not something behind appearances; rather, we arrange our appearances into a perspective that enables us to survive and make sense of an otherwise formless flux, or what Nietzsche calls arrangements of “wills of power.” [2]

We are always in danger of falling into abysses, for what we assume to be the ground, the stable, unchanging “reality,” is merely a fiction. Those who are aware of this lack of ground or presence of an unchanging “reality” Nietzsche calls “free spirits“[3]. They “dance near abysses” because they take nothing for granted and are conscious of the lack of ground beneath them. They construct a world in which their own values are manifested, and they have no pretense that their views represent objective reality.

To recognize untruth as a condition of life—that certainly means resisting accustomed value feelings in a dangerous way; and a philosophy that risks this would by that token alone place itself beyond good and evil.[4]

Free spirits take control of their perspectives and do not pretend they are in any way an accurate account of the way things really are. They know that their mode of life is their own creation and that it is not the only possible mode. Unlike dogmatists, they do not impose their views on others. Free spirits pursue “truth” by adapting to their illusions while always retaining the awareness that they are illusions.

WE’RE ALL MAD HERE

“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”

“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “otherwise you wouldn’t have come here.”

The more we can control our perspectives, the more the world makes sense to us. We are the creative artists of our lives when we select our own perspectives. As the Duchess says to Alice: “Be what you would seem to be.”[5]Esse quam videri.

The Cheshire Cat has a curious way of fading in and out of existence. It typifies the transitory and ephemeral nature of truth. To use Nietzsche’s formulation, there is no “cat” existing apart from the appearances of the cat, or, more precisely, apart from Alice’s experiences of the cat. To assume the “cat” exists as a substance independent of our perspectives is another one of the errors or prejudices of philosophers. As perspectives fade, the Cheshire Cat fades, illustrating the transitory nature of “truth.”

In The Doors of Perception Aldous Huxley recounts his first experience with mescaline. He writes of being “shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large“.

Mescaline for Huxley offered a way of knowing things objectively, apart from his normal and limited perspective. “I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation—the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.”

This is a pretty big claim. How is it that mescaline allows Huxley to see naked existence? It is almost impossible to argue against the influence of subjectivity because we cannot get outside of our own subjectivity to have anywhere to argue from. Except, Huxley tells us, that when you experience pure awareness, you can tell your perceptions are realer.

When we wake from a dream, come down from a high, or return to normal reality from some other altered state, there is always the chance that the lingering traces of the experience will retain their credibility even as they lose their immediacy. If they don’t retain their credibility, then we are, like Alice, occasionally mad, and this—normal reality—is all there really is. But if our distorted experiences do linger, as the mystical ones often seem to, maybe our normal experience of reality is partial.

Whether distorted reality has anything to offer us is left to each of us to determine for ourselves. Most questions surrounding perception and reality are open ones. One of the only certainties is that the rabbit-hole is very deep indeed.