Self-medication is more important than truth (otherwise known as – The feeling is the fact)

People are prone, by human nature, to equate feelings with the truth. They see Donald Trump being pusillanimous before V. Putin, and they state conclusively that he is strong. They hear his blatant, provable lies, and they know they’re hearing truths. Human beings have always seen nothing but death after life, yet they believe we have eternal spirits. They see cruelty to foreign children, and they are certain it’s a factual good.

But “they” isn’t the minority population that voted for an empty-souled con artist. Or only people with the “wrong” religion. It’s everyone. And it must be.

Your 18-year-old son swerves his car to avoid hitting a dog, smacks a street sign which breaks off and decapitates three bystanders. You are shocked to learn of it, feel acute sorrow and horror for the victims and their families. But there is no way on earth you would accept that your son should spend years in jail. Everyone in the world thinks he was reckless and irresponsible. You are certain he had an unfortunate but excusable accident. Perhaps he should pay a fine, but that is all.

There are ten candidates for a psychotherapist position. All have a doctoral degree but you, who have a master’s. You are rock-solid certain you’d be the best one for the job. You know your skills, your knowledge, your therapeutic character. And you “know” that individuals who pursue the doctorate are, paradoxically, more apt to be lost than found about psychology: Wanting to be expert in numerous different and contradictory theories and schools of therapy, believing that many approaches are valid, means that through their bachelor’s and master’s studies they have never found themselves or understood their own psyche. And they want to wear the Napoleon Complex armor of “expert” when there can be no experts in the human psyche.

You are certain that the only good society is communal and liberal. Your brother knows that the only good society is individualistic and conservative.

Why must feelings supersede objective facts for all of us? Before addressing the question, we have to observe that there seem to be two distinctly different subjects of that question, what could be called preference and delusion.

To want my son not to be imprisoned, losing critical years of his life in suffering, would probably seem rational to most people. That is my feeling, my preference. I will be defining “guilt” or culpability differently from the world’s definition. And beyond that: I would shamelessly believe my definition should be insular to myself: If your child decapitated mine because he thought that a dog was more important than the safety of human beings in public spaces, he would deserve to be put away. Though I’d be defining “guilt” in accord with my personal feeling, I wouldn’t be considered delusional.

Is that scenario different from some right-winger’s certainty that Donald Trump’s inaugural crowd size was the biggest ever, period? Doesn’t that seem to be rank delusion, not merely a feeling or preference or re-definition? The answer, I believe, is that there is no difference, despite the appearance of one. It is feeling that determines a person’s definition of guilt; feeling that determines his construing of “biggest”; feeling that determines her definition of the moral, of scientific truth about matter and spirit. What differentiates preference from delusion is simply the direction in which one points one’s strongly invested – need-based – feeling. I know, as do those of the Democrat persuasion, that Trump’s inaugural crowd was inferior to Obama’s. But I also know that had Obama kowtowed to Putin just as Trump had done, I would perceive him to be intelligently strategic, right in some way that I was too unsophisticated to grasp at the time, strong. Or possibly – grounded in brutal reality as I believe I am – I might well acknowledge his uncharacteristic failure in that one area, but would nevertheless defend him as right and true and moral and admirable in the overall picture. Just as Trump’s followers defend Trump.

I’d be delusional in my way, you in yours.

A delusion can be defined as a belief, a certainty one is critically emotionally invested in, which is demonstrated to be wrong by objective (“unemotional”) measures. We are invested in a belief in order to save ourselves from emotional or identity devastation. I cannot lose my 18-year-old son. You cannot abandon your need for strength to be hard and cold and superior, because those are the qualities that protected you against deep losses in your childhood, losses that would disintegrate you to feel again.

In a way, this is proof that each of us is born an island, an island with an inborn urge to have a sense of self that we can accept. Between cradle and grave we may believe in an archipelago: We are humanly linked together. But that’s a delusion.