Reality Cloaking: A New Social Disease? | Psychology Today

Six seemingly disparate elements stimulate this analysis: the assault on Congress on January 6 and its connection to the election-fraud movement; the murder of George Floyd last year and the defund-the-police movement; opinions circulating on social media regarding male/female relationships; COVID-19 and the school shutdowns; the Netflix Queen’s Gambit series about a female chess prodigy; and Cambridge University researcher Simon Baron-Cohen’s newest book, The Pattern Seekers.

Disparate elements, you might say. But they do connect, I promise! By the end of this three-part post, I hope you will clearly see how social media inflicted trauma response mechanisms in the brain are creating dangerous reality-cloaking. This reality cloaking allowed and encouraged a mob that attacked the halls of Congress. This cloaking creates thousands of dangers—though not as dramatic as January 6, perhaps—for us and our children daily.

Reality Cloaking

Reality cloaking is my term for rumination loops our brains develop as we try to systemize complex reality toward safety. When reality was too complex in 2,000 B.C. or 1,000 A.D. or a hundred years ago, human brains turned away from the reality in front of them to project new visions, new ideas, hopes for progress and, in nearly every era, invisible beings, entities, or ideas to help them—angels, gods, monads, ideals, God. Many of these reality cloaks were inventive and led to great progress.

In 2020-2021, we are doing the same thing in the face of a new trauma—our social media barrage. In the face of constant short and long bursts of social media words and images, we and our children experience stress/fear in the brain’s amygdala. In response, our brains naturally systemize data to combat the fear as our cortisol levels (stress hormone) are heightened by the media/social media barrage and we must form tenacious rumination loops between the amygdala (fear center) and the cingulate cortex (attention center) and other centers to quiet our anxiety. These loops help us feel safe against the fear and help lower our cortisol levels, at least temporarily.

As you’ll see in these three posts, people on all political sides become afraid and form loops. In Part 1, now, I’ll focus mainly on the election-fraud conspiracy because its consequences in our nation’s capitol on January 6 are so current. In Parts 2 and 3, I’ll look at loops formed by people in the middle and on the Left because what I am getting at in these blogs is primal in the face of social media trauma—it is not partisan.

To look at the attack on Congress: If you were a Trump supporter, the election loss was frightening, especially because throughout media/social media, the president made dire statements about what the world will become without himself as president. The solution to losing the world, he proposed, was to create a reality cloak in which he would continue as president. Around 60 lower courts and the Supreme Court studied the evidence and did not see election irregularities that could constitute election fraud, but the barrage from media/social media was traumatic for millions of brains. These brains looped a reality cloak between amygdala and cingulate cortex: belief in election fraud.

Good people voted for Mr. Trump for various reasons and voting for Donald Trump is not an example of dangerous reality cloaking. But after he lost the election, the reality cloaking became dangerous, culminating in the attack on the Capitol building and Capitol personnel. Five people died, more than 50 were injured, and our democracy was not just embarrassed but, for a moment, destabilized.

Are media and social media dangerous? Perhaps we can say that looking at a single text or tweet is not dangerous, but when media/social media constantly barrage our brains with fear and stress, our brains will cloak reality to survive and many of the cloaked realities will lead to danger points. Thousands of danger points like the attack on Congress occur every day as we’ll analyze further in these posts, even if they are not as dramatic as January 6 was.

What Is Reality?

Before going further, it is important to define “reality.” Most importantly—since we are wondering over a new disease—let’s define reality not just as “what’s out there” but from the brain’s internal viewpoint.

Reality is external phenomena empirically processed by the brain’s intimate embrace of its lived experience. Shared reality is the brain’s collective embrace of empirical experience and data sets through common sense processing.

You as an individual live in your own reality via your intimate and daily embrace of people and places around you. Our communities, regions, and nations live out our collective realities by embracing what is happening around us in political parties or social media groups that meta-process data sets. Overall, we personally live in the reality around us and we also collectively process data presented to us about realities we do not live in. For both our personal and collective reality, a non-barraged/non-traumatized brain will apply common sense for measurement of the data and validation of external reality. A traumatized brain is most likely to reality cloak.

After the January 6 insurrection, people asked, “How could this happen in America?” It happened because millions of people were traumatized via media/social media, so much so they feared an apocalyptic future. The election fraud concept, strategically placed into social media barrages, provided a reality cloak to help the brains feel safe. Within the reality cloak, a systemizing frame emerged that enhanced the feeling of safety—and led to action.

Systemizing Frames

An example of what Baron-Cohen calls “systemizing” and I further call a systemizing frame is the "Stop the Steal" idea that became embedded into the reality-cloaking loop. Without social media barrages, Stop the Steal would not have risen to the power it did in people's minds. As "our nation will be destroyed without Trump" became "the election was stolen," Stop the Steal provided a way for the loops in the brain to compel action. Our brain's rumination loops—their reality cloaks—are not always static, e.g., leading to increased depression and anxiety internally, but as loops include other parts of the brain, they can include the cerebellum, (the doing center of the brain) that seeks action as a part of the fear- and trauma-solution.

The action that some of the January 6 protestors chose in the cloaked reality—attacking the physical building and the Congress members and Senators themselves—was clearly illegal. Once the rest of us saw these actions, we were shocked and disgusted, yet these actions were an outgrowth of the rumination loop/reality cloak (the world will become dystopian without Trump), and within that cloak, the new systemizing frame (Trump won, the election was rigged) that pulled reality away from common sense and activated dangerous and reprehensible actions that “felt sacred" to those brains from within the cloak and frame.

The Reality Cloaking Dilemma

As Baron-Cohen elucidates in The Pattern Seekers, our brains naturally systemize realities into patterns for good reasons—survival, thriving, safety, social progress, family, love. The danger of reality cloaking and systemizing frames I am elucidating here regards something new: influence of media/social media that create trauma responses as we ourselves and our children spend too much time on social media.

Because media/social media are built to present reality in short-burst images/words, they cannot provide us with reality itself (reality is too complex). Into this dilemma walks our brains: out of practical necessity, in the face of traumatic short word/image bursts that increase our trauma and fear, reality cloaking must occur in our brains.

What will we do about social media? Throughout these three blogs, I will give solutions beginning with the most obvious: we and our children must spend much less time in quick burst media/social media. We must provide our own and our children's brains with other, healthier stimuli.

The powerful new documentary, The Social Dilemma, explores this algorithmically revealing dangers that ensue when we are not aware of the reality cloaking itself and unable, even if aware, to shut off media and social media. As we allow too much social media into our own and our children’s brains, we create a familial atmosphere of trauma that keeps growing—it does not recede. In so doing, we relinquish our own and our children’s development to the probability of rumination loops that will appear real but may, in fact, be dangerous to us, our families, and our nation.

Is the title of this series of posts—Reality Cloaking: A New Social Disease?—meant just to be incendiary, or can social media trauma actually comprise a new social disease? Over the course of these three blogs, my answer will favor "disease," but to avoid “short bursts” and, thus, avoid the social disease itself, I am writing a long post for you in three parts that will utilize different examples of disease from across the social spectrum.