The Dawn of Cultural Schizophrenia

You Don't Have to Be Schizophrenic to Live Here, But it Helps!

Way back in 2006 John Michael Greer wrote a piece called Knowing Only One Story. The crux of which relies of this statement:

• Knowing many stories is wisdom.

• Knowing no stories is ignorance.

• Knowing only one story is death.

Greer’s point was in relation to tradition, myth, and culture, in that one who knows a singular story end up filtering everything via a single lens, therein killing any possibility of exo-default growth. With one of the great pitfalls of knowing a single story being that upon meeting with a contradiction, one simply erases that facet of reality as opposed to being able to apprehend its complexity, or, in the words of Anthony Wilden, “Reality is what trips you up when you don't pay attention to it."

Those that know no stories are ignorant, both generally, but also - in my opinion (and likely Greer’s) - to the single, contemporary default story they inhabit and that rules the day, i.e. The Myth of Progress. If you know no stories at all, you are simply at the whim of whateve scapegoat or cultural force is seizing the day and will follow it wherever it shall lead.

Those that know many stories are wise, and thus able to deal with the complexity of the universe and thus their immediate reality. Basically, knowing many stories allows one to enter into a relationship with the only constant of the universe, namely, change.

This isn’t a criticism of Greer - and 2006 was vastly different in terms of information acceleration compared to now - but I think his hierarchy of complexity: Death > Ignorance > Wisdom (One Story > No Stories > Many Stories) stops short. For there is something beyond wisdom and it isn’t necessarily good. Let me extend Greer’s statement by a single line to clarify what I’m talking about:

• Knowing only one story is death.

• Knowing no stories is ignorance.

• Knowing many stories is wisdom.

• Knowing too many stories is schizo.

Before going on I want to clarify that there is difference between medical and cultural ‘schizophrenia’, because I will be utilizing the latter. Medical schizophrenia is serious medical condition that I don’t intend to make light of. As is stands, however, multiple philosophers and theorists (Deleuze, Guattari, Becker, etc.) have utilized ‘schizophrenia/schizophrenic’ as a signifier in relation to culture and communication. For my own case here I want to use Ernest Becker’s spectrum of depression-schizophrenia to open up this fourth ‘story point’.

The second major idea Becker pursued during this period was to reimagine two major mental “illnesses” of his time (depression and schizophrenia) within a nonmedical, relational, problems of living frame of reference. Here he emphasized the place of life-meaning as a cultural product, and its relationship to language. Specifically, “normal” human life is maintained by an ongoing sense of positive self-regard (self-esteem) grounded in the proper use of language within a specific cultural setting. As Becker pictured it, this balance can falter in either of two main directions. On the one hand, we can become so mired in the established meaning system of culture that we in effect lose the language/narrative/self-talk we need to see ourselves as free agents within that system. On the other hand, we can become so lost in language games themselves that the grounded connection of language to the cultural meaning system is lost, and we end up desperately spewing out word-salads in a frantic attempt to find that lost connection. The former problem of living Becker linked to states of depression, while the latter he linked to schizophrenia. (Link)

On the one hand, then, we have ‘depression’ as an understanding of a relationality that is so locked into a singular frame of reference that any sense of sovereignty is usurped by the self-imposed dogma of the system itself, leading to both the former ignorance Greer writes of and a personal form of melancholic depression. On the other hand we have schizophrenia, a relationality so unkept than anything and everything is packed full of meaning, connections are drawn between everything, and existence is pure pattern and relation. But, if everything means something, nothing means anything. Meanings needs limits, yet can’t be dogmatically limited. Meaning, then, needs equilibrium.

As it is, in this glorious age of the internet, us moderns have access to every story known to man (practically speaking). At the click of a button we can gain access to literally millions upon millions of books, texts, tales, stories, fables, religions, systems, incantations, philosophies, and theories, that, in decades gone by, would have taken the majority of people lifetimes to find. There has been little in the way of gradual transition to this state of affairs. Man has moved quite swiftly from an existence of geographically/nationally contextual knowledge to complete, unbridled cultural schizophrenia in no time at all. If anything, we can perhaps state that the age of newspapers and the paperback boom was a middle stage, but that was shortlived in the grand scheme of things.

But there is an interesting side-note to be made regarding this form of cultural schizophrenia that certainly pertains to our current malaise. Modern, cultural schizophrenia is as wide as the ocean and as deep as a puddle. The problem being that if one has access to millions upon millions of stories, one also doesn’t have the time to research or meditate on those stories in any deep manner. Everyone ends up with a veil-thin sporadic knowledge of many stories and their relations, without ever attending to their depths. Leading masses of conversations to become little more than titbits of information and data flung in solely as signifiers of knowledge and meaning, yet never actually adhereing to any form of practice or purpose.

Ever since Nietzsche was on the scene, it has been said time and time again by multiple philosophers that we are living within an existential crises. That our pools of meaning are running out. That there is no meaning in the universe. This is an easy-out for the fact meaning is quite a difficult thing to hold onto, but it isn’t necessarily difficult to procure. There’s meaning everywhere and in everything, it’s just a matter of finding the meaning that’s…meaningful. This search is itself a problem made all the more difficult by the ongoing cultural schizophrenia crisis. Everywhere I look there’s some new meaningful system being built or spoken about, some new philosophy or insitution etc. We are absolutely swamped in meaning, we are sick to death of meaning. There’s too much bloody meaning.

The problem itself is due to another factor outlined by Becker, that of ‘free agency’. Within the depressive side of the spectrum the matter of freedom is inherently negated by the depression itself. Dogmatism is inherently self-limiting. It is a prison that begets its own walls. Schizophrenia, at the other end of the spectrum, is completely the opposite to this. Schizophrenia (cultural) is inherently self-emancipating (where meaning is concerned). It is a party that refuses to end.

It is of no surprise, then, that within the modern, consumerist age that prides itself on freedom-of-choice that cultural schizophrenia only ever accelerates. We find ourselves not only completely mired in ever-changing meaning, but equally such a state gives us an anxiety in relation to choice. Afforded a million-and-one meanings there is no hope for actual fulfilment, but only anxiety and stress as to whether or not one has picked the ‘correct’ meaning. Thus, when the selected ‘meaning’ doesn’t appear to give us what we assumed we desired we can just as quickly move onto the next and the next and the next, all the while not realizing that our true system of meaning is the one that is allowing us to make these nomadic leaps in the first place.

The question, then, is to what extent limitation is healthy? To what extent are we to limit our personal contexts and understandings as to actually form something of substance? This isn’t a question I can answer except for myself because each person’s path is their own. Like most things today, one need only step back and ask the question, ‘What is it I actually want?’ to begin unravelling all the nonsense meaning, and head back towards a more harmonious balance of stories and meaning.