In his book How America Lost Its Mind: The Assault on Reason That’s Crippling Our Democracy, Harvard political scientist Thomas E. Patterson notes that the problem facing our political world is not simply ignorance, but rather the fact that many believe in “an alternative world.” (8) Thanks to the rise of overtly partisan programming in the wake of the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 (which required networks to air both major political perspectives), Patterson has found that the “screaming heads” have replaced the “talking heads.”(63) They tell us that the American government is not working, “even when it is.”(65) The main casualty in this new landscape of bias is shared truth.
As a researcher of mental hospitals, I find our current situation reminiscent of the madhouse in popular culture. A recurring theme in asylum writing is that a patient enters a place that at first seems normal, but in fact, it is a topsy-turvy reality. Here, rational, independent thought is punished, while wild cruelty and hallucination are rewarded.
Take Elizabeth Stone’s A Sketch of the Life of Elizabeth T. Stone, and of her Persecutions (1842). In this classic account, Stone recounts being taken to what she is told is a “young ladies’ boarding place.” It looks quaint enough. The next thing she knows, she is being ushered deep inside, the “iron grate” telling her all she needs to know. Next come the stultifying drugs, the “dungeon,” and the torturous “therapy.”
Or see Luisa May Alcott’s 1863 short story, “A Whisper in the Dark.” Here an orphan named Sybil learns that her scheming uncle is after her inheritance. He drugs and kidnaps her, and she awakens in a sparse room. It seems like an ordinary mansion. But the windows have grates, and there is no way out. She is, in fact, in the private madhouse of Dr. Karnac. On come the drugs and the confinement, which work together to undermine her grip on reality. Sybil even finds a hidden message from another patient, warning her, “If you are not already mad, you will be, I suspect you were sent here to be made so; for the air is poison, the solitude fatal, and Karnac remorseless in his mania for prying into the mysteries of the human mind.”
The message in both of these tales is that when you lose touch with reality, you can be subject to the whim of a tyrant. Stone concludes that asylums need to be made more democratic. Alcott relates the deeply unfair legal status of women in the 19th century. Her happy ending feels, to say the least, tacked-on.
This unreality theme reminds me of America today. Did we just have a democratic election, or was it instead the “most fraudulent Election in history” (to quote Donald Trump). According to a recent survey, four-fifths of Trump voters think it was the latter. Their primary source for this is, of course, Trump himself, whose evidence appears to be whatever he gleans off the internet that supports his complaints.
This reality mismatch cries for a strong dose of critical thinking. As a professor, I teach my students to vet sources, recognize logical fallacies, weigh the evidence, and make judgments that are both sound and yet still subject to further review. It is not enough just to say you are right or to baselessly assert that your facts must be true because “a lot of people are saying” them.
Truth is not a commodity that we can pick and choose based on a person’s dubious opinions. Rather, we need to accept the existence of expertise and of the scientific foundation of quantitative data gathering, which best explains our world. The authority of an expert, trained in a specialized field and whose findings are subject to the scrutiny of other qualified experts, is infinitely better than tuning in to one’s “screaming head” of choice.
This is not to say we should “blindly” follow experts—don’t blindly follow anyone, I tell my students. Rather, recognize those who are more informed than you while checking their findings against data gathered by other experts. If you don’t like the results, it does not mean you should tune in to someone else whose reality makes you feel better. This is the root of the “alternative world” problem that is plaguing us. Critical thinking is our best means of escape from a socially-constructed madhouse of unreality.