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What is “reality”? It is lived phenomena empirically processed by the brain’s intimate embrace of lived experience. What is “shared reality”? It is our collective embrace of empirical experience and data through the lens of common sense.
In Parts I and II of this series, I combined neuro-biology and citizen science to help you look at how media/social media bombard and often traumatize adult and children’s brains. If you have not read Parts I and II, I hope you will do so. Part III follows on their shoulders to provide you with insight into the seven stages of what I view as a sort of social disease, which I call reality cloaking. Throughout these blog posts, I have made sure to use examples from the Left and Right and all political sides. Reality cloaking is a primal brain response no matter where we fit on a political spectrum.
Reality Cloaking as Social Disease
While reality cloaking itself is not new, as I noted in earlier blog posts, I believe the power of media/social media to control us algorithmically, politically, personally, and collectively does lead to a new disease whose symptoms are:
- depression
- anxiety
- limited empathy
- anger
- rage
- in some cases, violence
This disease happens in stages in our brains.
First Stage: Fear Response via Cloaking. We feel fear as well as empathy for a person or identified group in response to the social media bombardment that compels our sensory register to activate trauma-responsive centers in the midbrain, ruminate in loops, and cloak reality for self-protection.
Second Stage: Embedding. A systemizing frame develops along with or because of the reality cloak which becomes embedded in our rumination loops between the amygdala and cingulate cortex.
Third Stage: Projection of Stereotyped Enemy. This stage of identifying and inculcating an enemy out of a stereotype comes at a distinct moment in the psychological process of reality cloaking and sustains and moves stages 1 and 2 forward. Yet it sneaks up on us because we are sure we are not stereotyping.
Fourth Stage: End-Justifies-the-Means Application. No political party or person is immune to this stage once the rumination loops in our brains make reality cloaks and systemizing frames that attach to specific social media sources that are set up algorithmically to increase our anguish.
Fifth Stage: Rage and/or Hate. We feel anger, rage, even hate at the other group—the enemy stereotype. The danger inherent in this stage alone recommends, to me, the appropriateness of labeling reality cloaking a social disease. This rage and hate cause harm and violence.
Sixth Stage: Banishment/Isolation. We come to believe that the other enemy group or stereotype is not needed anymore and try to banish them or it from our own thinking, physically from our culture, and/or by isolating ourselves from others.
Seventh Stage: Institutional Entrenchment. The reality cloak becomes institutionalized in a system—whether family, workplace, government, school, faith community, agency, group—and as such, becomes a monolith in some large part created by media/social media bombardment and then fed by it.
An example from my own profession shows the seven stages. In the gender field, media/social media bombardment occurs constantly around the unproven concept that the science of male/female difference harms women’s and LGBTQ rights. Relatively quickly, fear among many people of this harm became the self-protective reality cloak “There is no male/female anymore,” “male/female is heterodoxy of the patriarchy,” “if you talk about male/female, you are anti-feminist, anti-woman, anti-LGBTQ.”
Male and female brains are different at the molecular level, so there is no doubt of male/female difference in reality, but the reality cloak I've described has become a new systemizing frame pursued mainly in social media as, “there is no sex anymore, there is only gender, which is fluid.” This has gradually embedded into parts of academe, government, and the media as males, especially white males, and their "heterodoxy" have been stereotyped and projected as enemies; this enemy is considered the single most important cause of our social problems; various means are used in social media to discredit this projected enemy despite that projecting “white males” as enemies is racist and sexist. Rage and hate have ensued for many people, as well as banishment and isolation in the form of "cancel culture" which further entrenches reality cloaking into institutions.
I've chosen our current gender war as an example of reality cloaking but you will likely be able to think of many others as you study this phenomenon.
Overall, then, I am arguing that the so-called disease of reality cloaking has seven symptoms, the seventh of which is comorbid with violence:
- Increased depression or anxiety from intense social media use.
- Increased agitation, anger, or rage from that social media use.
- Internal dominance by racist, sexist, or other types of stereotyping.
- Myopic and single effect/single causality answers to complex human questions.
- Isolation from the whole while adhering to a smaller group that is reached, mainly, online.
- Thoughts of hatred, rage, end-justifies-the-means, and violence following sustained social media use.
- Finally, attempted or achieved violence following sustained social media use, e.g. in the insurrection at the Capitol Building on January 6.
Reality as the Best Ground of Invention
I have written this detailed, three-part blog series to provide you with deeper analysis than quick burst social media affords. I am hoping these posts, like my own and other’s books and longer analyses, will aid you in building a society in which we do not let reality cloaks define the important social justice conversations, debates, and activity our culture desperately needs. Ultimately, I hope you will move away from media/social media reliance/dominance in either your own or your children's lives.
The gains from this practical and consistent distancing will not only show up in better mental and physical health but also through new inventiveness. In The Pattern Seekers, Baron-Cohen and his team track how human invention works and how invention—from tools to language to smartphones—occurs in response to reality-reflective paradigms. When we invent things based on what we actually face in our reality, we invent things and ideas that have longevity.
Left, Right, progressive, conservative, heteronormative, LGBTQ—wherever one fits on the political or gender spectrum, when we succumb to reality cloaks, we are leaving reality’s ground to fight battles or wars with "enemies" who are, for the most part, not our enemies at all. While rage, anger, and violence express themselves in our reality cloaked wars, little is invented that has longevity to solve our social problems.
What You Can Do Right Now
If you can at least avoid social media that is purely political (however you lean politically), I don’t think you will regret it. Meanwhile, you can practice deep discernment by connecting your own elements and finding your own patterns. In connecting the six elements with which I began this series to a pattern of thought, I have fulfilled the very human urge to pattern-seek, an urge you have as well. In this pattern, I have turned off nearly all social media. In doing so, I have returned to a deepened inventiveness.
If you can hold off giving your children smartphones until they are 13, I hope you will do so, perhaps inspired by Bill and Melinda Gates who held off until their children were 14. As you stop social media from occupying your child's life, your child may protest or be angry at you at first, but within a few days or weeks, the child will notice how much better life is—less anxious, less depressed, less angry. It will feel like the lifting of disease from the body and soul.
The Nobel Prize-winning poet Czeslaw Milosz wrote beautifully and humbly: “to exist on earth is beyond any power to name.” The destruction and paralysis resulting from reality cloaking is perhaps most dangerous to adults and children because it operates as an arrogance always false, always mistaken. Humbly, I hope we will admit that media/social media bombardment is traumatic to our brains and leads to disease. Once we do that, we will free ourselves in ways we have perhaps not even invented yet.
