I left Alice Springs in the early morning, dropped off the tarmac on the outskirts of town and drove northwest for six hours into the Australian Central Desert. Everywhere, it seemed, there was death. I saw skeletal kangaroos, the picked remains of starved calves, the upturned shells of cars, distant abandoned outstations and, every now and then, a lonely white cross that had been planted in the dirt. The west Macdonnell Ranges behind me were once higher than the Himalayas, but eight hundred million years of weather have reduced them to low, crumbling bluffs. Dead animals, dead mountains, dead earth; from the bloodwood trees and the ghost gums to Mount Unapproachable and the Sandy Blight Road, the soul of this landscape is revealed in the way that it has been christened by its early white explorers. It is a place of murderous beauty: a wasteland of spiny shrubs, barren rivers and psychotic centigrades.
After six hours, I neared the remote community of Yuendumu. Alcohol is forbidden there and the town’s limits were forewarned by a meteorite-shower of beer cans and broken stubby glass that had been thrown from car windows. A little over eight hundred men, women and children live in Yuendumu – it is mostly Warlpiri and Anmatyerr people who dwell in the forlorn government breeze-block houses. Its few dusty streets were scattered with abandoned cookers and snapped CDs and hounded by delinquent dogs that yelped and chased and fought. An atmosphere of dolorous stillness held the place. The violent jags of a shouting woman interrupted the silence every now and then. A derelict petrol pump rusted in the heat.
At the art centre, an old man with yellowish curly hair, oil-stained jeans and a pale Stetson hat rattled open the wire gate. A pack of worshipful mongrels followed him in, fussing around his legs, shooting him meaningful glances. He settled on the concrete floor outside the building and I watched him use a narrow dowel rod to mark a large canvas with yellow dots of paint, apparently not bothered by the dogs that had begun making themselves comfortable, circling and lying on his work. The man was Shorty Jangala Robertson. A superstar.
Shorty’s generation was born in the desert – the last nomads ‘came in’ as recently as 1984 – and so nobody knew his age, but he was thought to be in his nineties. Earlier, the manager of the art centre had told me his story. One day, Shorty was wandering unhappily around Yuendumu when she said to him, ‘Shorty, come paint for me.’ He told her, ‘I’m hungry.’ She replied, ‘Well, I’ve got these nuts. If you come to the centre to paint tomorrow, I’ll give you three hundred dollars.’ The canvas that Shorty painted the next day currently hangs in the National Gallery of Victoria. He has since produced more than a thousand works. Each one sells, typically, for between eight and twenty thousand dollars.
I asked Shorty, via an interpreter, why he thinks his canvases are especially popular.
‘He says he paints the water dreaming,’ says the interpreter.
‘But why do his paintings sell, while the paintings of others don’t?’ I asked. ‘What is it that Shorty’s doing that’s unique?’
‘He says it’s water dreaming.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I know he paints the water dreaming. But what does he think white people like so much about the water dreaming?’
‘He says it’s because it’s water dreaming.’
‘Yes, but why does he paint water dreaming?’
By now, both Shorty and the interpreter had become visibly frustrated.
‘Because it’s water dreaming, water dreaming.’
It was only later that I understood. Aboriginal people don’t see art in the same way that we do. They don’t look at Shorty’s work and judge it on its aesthetic quality but on something more fundamental. A painting is only as good as the story that it relates. As the manager told me, ‘I’ve got lots of artists who paint a really good story but I can’t give their paintings away and they don’t understand.’ For the Aboriginal people, story is everything. It is their history, it is their religion, it is their sense of identity and their register of ethical lore. It is how they have survived in these hostile lands for forty thousand years and more. It is their map of survival.
Every Aboriginal newborn is assigned a ‘tjukurpa’ – a story from the time of the world’s creation which, in its details, will tell them everything they need to know about where to find food, medicine and water for hundreds of miles around. It will teach them about magic and spirits and detail an elaborate moral code. A tjukurpa is a cross between a Bible parable, a Just So story, a supermarket plan and a travel guide. It is a multi-dimensional map of life that speaks of time, space and meaning. Events in the story’s plot – battles and birthplaces and hideouts – correspond to actual facets of the physical landscape, so you will know that you can find carrots, for instance, in the spot where the bush carrot beat the bush potato in a fight. Tjukurpas are incredibly complex. They are taught in stages, with each new level of detail being revealed by elders when an individual is considered ready. They are imparted in as many ways as possible: dance, song, body-painting, rock-carving and sand-drawings that cover a hectare. But they are highly secret. They are passed down strictly between members of the same ‘skin group’. Men do not know the women’s tjukurpas, and women do not know the men’s. White people have only ever been told as much as the youngest Aboriginal children. The paintings that artists such as Shorty produce are highly codified and obscured, so that their tjukurpas remain hidden. But they are all based on these essential, ancient lessons.
It is said that the Australian Aboriginals belong to the oldest surviving culture on earth. It appears profoundly different from ours. But I have come to believe that, in one crucial sense, we are just like the Aboriginals. We share their means of negotiating reality. Our lives, to an almost unimaginable degree, depend on stories.
*
When you begin to look for stories – when you purposefully seek out that familiar, seductive pattern, the sly hook of the narrative – you realise that you are surrounded. On the news, in literature, film and song, in your memory, your sense of who you are and how you got there and in most of your conversation. I did this, and it was terrifying. Cause and effect plus emotion. It is the fundamental formula of your brain’s understanding of the world. It is the fundamental formula of narrative.
Our compulsion for emotional narrative is why the BBC news chooses to report on ‘Astro’, the Australian horse that got stuck in some mud, and not the nameless thousands of humans who happened to die, the same day, in road accidents and of curable diseases and the effects of poverty. It is why $48,000 of US taxpayers’ money was once spent on a twenty-five-day mission to rescue a small dog. It is why Saxon families revelled in the monster-slaying drama of Beowulf and why, twelve hundred years later, cinema-goers by the million queued to watch the monster-slaying drama of Jaws. It is why, in the seventeen years that followed the birth of silent cinema, more than ten thousand films were made in Hollywood alone. It is why we are addicted to celebrity magazines and to the grandest Russian literature. It is stories that lie at the root of vast world religions that hold genuine power over billions of faithful followers.
It is thought that humanity’s earliest stories sought to explain the world. They were a primitive form of science, and indistinguishable from religion. At some stage we began to use those tales like the brain uses its models – to attempt to predict and to change the world. Rituals developed around them. We made sacrifices, sang songs and prayed to the gods to effect natural phenomena. The historian Mircea Eliade writes of the ‘culture heroes’ that were subsequently created to effect social phenomena. Western storytellers imagined legendary characters – Hercules, Aphrodite, King Arthur – whose ghostly archetypes appear in the myths of faraway cultures and in the blockbusters and bestsellers of today.
Sigmund Freud believed that we are emotionally satisfied by the hero’s slaying of the monster because we are all secret Oedipuses, murdering our fathers to win the hand of our mothers. For the psychologist Otto Rank, the hero narrative unconsciously tracks our struggle out of childhood and into independence. For the mythologist Joseph Campbell it speaks to the formative adventures of early adulthood. These academics understood that fiction is the journalism of the unconscious, reporting back sensed truths from the silent realm of feelings.
Today’s scientists have discovered that we experience the tales that we immerse ourselves in as if they are happening to us. We feel the heroes’ feelings, fight their fights, love their lovers. This is possible because stories mimic the illusion of consciousness. The novel’s narrator, the film camera’s eye – they are points of singularity in which sound, sight, emotion, motive and mission are combined. As we surrender ourselves to the tale, we surrender our own minds to that of our hero. We become infected by the tales that we expose ourselves to.
Observing how fear spreads through a herd of antelope, Professor Bruce Wexler writes that ‘contagion is at the heart of emotion.’ It is significant, I believe, that contagion is also at the heart of stories. But to become contagious, a story requires surprise. According to Professor Daniel Kahneman, ‘a capacity for surprise is an essential aspect of our mental life’ and when we experience it, we feel ‘a surge of conscious attention’ as our minds seek new information to feed in to their recreation of the world. And so it is with narrative.
Harvard Professor of Psychology Jerome Bruner writes, ‘a story begins with some breach in the expected state of things.’ In its most dramatic literary form, this narrative shock is Aristotle’s ‘peripeteia’, a sudden reversal of circumstances. Peripeteia is the ultimate disruption – a life spun around without warning. What happened next? How did the hero struggle? Was resolution found? What valuable information can be harvested and fed into the neural models?
*
The brain constructs its models during childhood and adolescence, the period in which it is extraordinarily alive with creative activity. By the age of five, children have developed a sophisticated ‘theory of mind’ and are, therefore, ‘story-ready’. During our formative years we absorb many thousands of tales of ever-increasing complexity of message. Professor of Psychology Keith Oatley has observed that learning to negotiate the social world requires weighing up ‘myriad interacting instances of cause and effect. Just as computer simulations can help us get to grips with complex problems such as flying a plane so novels, stories and dramas can help us understand the complexities of social life.’ We build our understanding of the emotional world through the myths and legends of our culture. We are all, in part, made of fairy tales.
*
But stories are not just cultural teachers. They can be motivators and agents for epochal change. Evolutionary psychologist David Sloan Wilson has compared their effect to an imaginary ‘mutant gene’ that appears in a primitive tribesman and serves to distort and magnify his dread and hatred of his enemy, thus pushing him to fight with superior violence. Marxist philosopher Georges Sorel believed that myths were essential for revolution. Writing in Nature, Professor Paul Bloom has observed that stories have helped shift the moral codes of nations: ‘Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin helped to end slavery in the United States, and descriptions of animal suffering in Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation and elsewhere have been powerful catalysts for the animal-rights movement.’
Stories change us first, and then they change the world.
*
The mind is addicted to story – crisis, struggle, resolution – because that is how it experiences life. We are in the world, and we are battling against foes in order to make better lives.
As our brains are bombarded with a superabundance of information, we are constantly searching for our plot among the chaos. Psychotics such as Rufus May are too sensitive to stories. They see salient details everywhere. But I sensed this tendency, too, in the people I have met who were not mentally ill. It seemed a common thing, to confabulate wild explanations of cause and effect that weren’t really there. Veronica Keen and her Illuminati. Dr Valerie Sinason and her Satanists. Lord Monckton and his totalitarian United Nations. Hidden plots. Conspiracies that they were fighting, bravely.
All of it begins in the unconscious. We experience hunches about moral rights and wrongs; wordless desires and repulsions; powerful instincts that seem to come from nowhere. This constant throbbing of emotions can be unsettling. We sometimes feel things that we don’t understand, or even want to feel. When we come across an explanation of the world that fits perfectly over the shape of our feelings – a tale that magically explains our hunches and tells us that it is all okay – it can seem of divine origin, as if we have experienced revealed truth.
When the racist lorry driver from Maidstone was a boy, he saw a party political broadcast by the National Front. ‘Everything made sense,’ he told me, shaking his head at the wonder of it all. ‘It just fitted.’ When I asked John Mackay how he knew that God was real, he explained, ‘It’s something in me.’ When Lord Monckton’s audience, with their right wing brains, heard him talk of climate conspiracy, he realised that they always knew instinctively, ‘that something was going on in this climate story that they didn’t like the smell of. They just couldn’t quite work out what it was …’
Stories work against truth. They operate with the machinery of prejudice and distortion. Their purpose is not fact but propaganda. The scientific method is the tool that humans have developed to break the dominion of the narrative. It has been designed specifically to dissolve anecdote, to strip out emotion and to leave only unpolluted data. It is a new kind of language, a modern sorcery, and it has gifted our species incredible powers. We can eradicate plagues, extend our lives by decades, build rockets and fly through space. But we can hardly be surprised if some feel an instinctive hostility towards it, for it is fundamentally inhuman.
*
I will never forget my own experience of the brain’s incorrigible story-generating ability. Lying on Vered Kilstein’s massage table, it took hardly a nudge for my mind to produce a vivid and emotional narrative of my life as a wartime widow. To recall its principal scenes, even now, is to slip into the drizzle of genuine melancholy. A part of me becomes that doleful woman. Vered spoke of clients who had reported similarly powerful experiences: the English knight who, after cavorting with his lover, was struck during a fight over his dishevelled appearance: a fantastic confabulation woven around a humdrum dodgy shoulder.
Consciousness is the first storyteller, and the greatest one of all. Its basis is the illusion that we are coherent individuals, in control of our beliefs and actions and operating freely at the centre of the world. Because we are driven to cause things to happen, and we witness their effects over time, we naturally experience our lives as a constantly flowing narrative. We have victories and failures, enemies and allies. We have hopes. We have goals. We have drama. Philosophers and neuroscientists ask why consciousness is necessary. Why go to the trouble of creating this sensation of singularity when we could just as easily pass on our genes as instinctively behaving zombies? Why have we adapted for this trait?
I believe that consciousness is the Hero-Maker. The mind reorders the world, turning the events of our days into a narrative of crisis, struggle, resolution, and casts us in the leading role. In this way, our lives gain motivation and meaning. We are coaxed into hope, into heroic acts, into braving impossible odds. We are made David against Goliath and, in this way, we become stronger and more successful. How many hero stories have I heard since that night in Gympie? How many people bravely fighting to change the world? John Mackay, giving up his career in an effort to disprove the Devil’s propaganda and save unbelievers from hell. Swami Ramdev creating his paradisal world free of Western medicines. Ron Coleman campaigning to rescue the innocent from the brutish psychiatry industry. The Buddhist S. N. Goenka abandoning his business life to offer tens of thousands of people free meditation. James Randi braving death threats to prevent a coming ‘dark age’. Vered Kilstein, who is ‘one of the millions who are here to help people move to a new consciousness.’
The neural illusions that collude in the Hero-Maker are many. We believe that we are better looking than we are, more moral than we are, less susceptible to bias than we are, that our creations are worth more, that the ‘spotlight’ is always on us and that we are incapable of true evil. Our memories rescript our past in the service of our glory. And yet a witchbag of powerful forces works against us, silently guiding our behaviour: excessive obedience to authority; unconscious prejudices; genetic predispositions and situational and cultural pressures that can drive us to terrible acts. These forces are made invisible to us. To truly be a hero, we must believe that we are our own captains, and that we possess free will.
Through the Hero-Maker’s lens, religions and ideologies are seen as parasite hero plots; prophets and political leaders become seductive storytellers. They provide ready-made confabulations that have been generalised by use until they fit neatly onto the instincts of a certain kind of brain. Because they match up so well with an individual’s unconscious moral hunches, they can appear to be more than true. They come from out there and can seem miraculous, sacred, even worth dying for. These parasite plots serve to make people happy because they validate their emotional instincts and then give them purpose – enemies to fight and the promise of a blissful denouement if their quest is successful. It is an illusion. It can be a profoundly dangerous one. And it can be a profoundly useful one.
*
Our lives are lived in two realms – the physical and the narrative. The model that our brain makes of the world of objects has to be accurate. If it wasn’t, we would be bumping into walls and trying to eat chairs. But not so the invisible kingdom of feelings. That soft matrix of beliefs that we exist within – that ever-flowing narrative of loves and feuds and hopes and hatreds – can be a place of tremendous distortion. The story that is woven for us is concerned, primarily, with our hero status, and not objective truth. It is often wrong. The ‘true’ nature of reality can appear so clear and obvious that we frequently underestimate just how wrong it is possible to be. If others persist in seeing things differently, we conclude that they must be corrupt. It is what the Morgellons sufferers believe of the Centers for Disease Control. It is what James Randi thinks of Rupert Sheldrake. It is what the family of Carole Felstead believe of Dr Fleur Fisher. It is what David Irving thinks of his critics and what his critics think of David Irving.
We underestimate how perilous it can be, if we cling too hard to our hero delusion. An expert on the psychology of evil, Professor Roy Baumeister, has written that ‘dangerous people, from playground bullies to warmongering dictators, consist mainly of those who have highly favourable views about themselves. They strike out at others who question or dispute those favourable views.’ Perhaps I saw this notion in its mildest form among the UFO-spotters who, when challenged, grumpily hardened their beliefs. And I saw it in a stronger form still in some of those whose dramatic personalities and intensely held positions have made them famous. Heretics are often betrayed by the spotless coherence of their plots. They tell the cleanest tales with the most perfect separations of good guy and bad. It is why they should not be trusted.
But the writer, too, tells a story. Like the mind, we pick out a plot through the superabundance of information that we gather on our chosen subject. What you have read in these pages is presented as if it is the whole truth, and yet it is just a narrow path that I have picked through a landscape of facts and incident. I spent seven full days travelling with David Irving and his acolytes. My interviews with the historian alone lasted for more than four hours, my transcript for the chapter is in excess of twenty-eight thousand words – nearly a quarter of the length of this book. I applied my own map of salience to all that evidence, elevating the moments that I believed most relevant and that told the story that I wanted to tell. If Irving was given identical materials, he would surely have crafted a different narrative. It would be just as true as the one that you have read, and it would be just as untrue.
*
If the covert modules of our minds conspire to make us feel like heroes, then this phenomenon has an evil twin, a dangerous corollary. The Demon-Maker.
To be a hero, we must have an enemy. Every David requires a Goliath, and the tales in these pages teem with those. John Mackay conjured himself a ferocious battle-scape of witchcraft and devils and necrophiliac priests. His ideological enemy Richard Dawkins insisted that Mackay’s phantasmagorical beliefs are ‘a serious threat to scientific reason.’ The evolutionary biologist Nathan Lo was convinced that the creationists’ suppressed motive was to make money.
On another side of the world, sufferers of unexplained itches confabulated complex stories about nanotechnology and government conspiracy. In a different country still, one highly regarded expert in schizophrenia called another ‘a liar and a charlatan.’ Lord Monckton blamed almost all the dreads that have befallen the West on the nihilistic, jealous, power-crazy left, insisting that the British empire fell because of the welfare state. David Irving, meanwhile, held an intrigue of scheming Jews responsible for the same event. Despite the fact that his version of wartime events has been almost universally rejected, Professor Deborah Lipstadt still worries that it somehow presents ‘a clear and future danger’ to historical knowledge. For the Skeptic Dr Steven Novella many practising homeopaths were ‘psychopathic con artists,’ while for alternative medicine proponent Dana Ullman, Skeptics were often ‘Big Pharma shills.’
We are betrayed by our maps of salience. They plot our narratives, identify our enemies and then coat them in distorting layer of loathing and dread. We feel that hunch – withdraw – and then conduct a post factum search for evidence that justifies it. We are motivated to fight our foes because we are emotional about them, but emotion is the territorial scent-mark of irrationality. We tell ourselves a story, we cast the monster and then become vulnerable to our own delusional narrative of heroism.
The Demon-Maker loves this kind of binary thinking. It insists upon extremes: heroes and villains, black and white, in-tribes and out. This corrosive instinct is evident in the so-called ‘culture wars’. For many Skeptics, evidence-based truth has been sacralised. It has caused them to become irrational in their judgements of the motives of those with whom they do not agree. They have also sacralised reason. When we spoke, James Randi was chilling in his expression of where pure logic can ultimately lead. Viewing the matter stripped of emotion, it might make sense to persuade people with ‘mental aberrations’ and ‘histories of inherited diseases’ from having children. But the idea is obviously repellent. Randi’s belief demonstrates a truth that is sometimes forgotten by his followers: reason alone is not enough.
My encounter with the patron saint of the Skeptics was a crystallising moment. At the conference in Manchester, I struggled to work out what it was about the movement that made me uneasy. I believe that Randi’s speech resolved the warning of my unconscious. ‘These are not innocent people. These are stupid people.’ Skeptics can be reminiscent of creationists, who think that I will go to hell because I am not a Christian. They treat belief as a moral choice. If you do not choose as they do, you are condemned. And while beliefs can have moral consequences, which the law must appropriately punish, we should not judge others for thinking their thoughts, nor be censured ourselves for the form of our hearts.
Anyone who proudly declares themselves a ‘free-thinker’ betrays an ignorance of the motors of belief. We do not get to choose our most passionately held views, as if we are selecting melons in a supermarket. Gemma Hoefkens is no more free to reject her conviction that homeopathy cured her cancer than I am to fall to my knees and flood myself with Jesus. And good. This monoculture we would have, if the hard rationalists had their way, would be a deathly thing. So bring on the psychics, bring on the alien abductees, bring on the two John Lennons – bring on a hundred of them. Christians or no, there will be tribalism. Televangelists or no, there will be scoundrels. It is not religion or fake mystics that create these problems, it is being human. Where there is illegality or racial hatred, call the police. Where there is psychosis, call Professor Richard Bentall. Where there is misinformation, bring learning. But where there is just ordinary madness, we should celebrate. Eccentricity is our gift to one another. It is the riches of our species. To be mistaken is not a sin. Wrongness is a human right.
*
The Hero-Maker tells us why intelligence is no forcefield and facts are no bullets. If you were to discuss the near-zero discount rate in the Stern Review with Lord Monckton, you would not be engaging in a simple matter of yes or no concerning an arcane point of science. Facts do not exist in isolation. They are like single pixels in a person’s generated reality. Each fact is connected to other facts and those facts to networks of other facts still. When they are all knitted together, they take the form of an emotional and dramatic plot at the centre of which lives the individual. When a climate scientist argues with a denier, it is not a matter of data versus data, it is hero narrative versus hero narrative, David versus David, tjukurpa versus tjukurpa. It is a clash of worlds.
The Hero-Maker exposes this strange urge that so many humans have, to force their views aggressively on others. We must make them see things as we do. They must agree, we will make them agree. There is no word for it, as far as I know. ‘Evangelism’ doesn’t do it: it fails to acknowledge its essential violence. We are neural imperialists, seeking to colonise the worlds of others, installing our own private culture of beliefs into their minds. I wonder if this response is triggered when we pick up the infuriating sense that an opponent believes that they are the hero, and not us. The provocation! The personal outrage! The underlying dread, the disturbance in reality. The restless urge to prove that their world, and not ours, is the illusion.
I used to believe that it was humanity’s rational nature that built civilisation. Now I think it is our inherent desire to slay Goliath, to colonise the mental worlds of others, to win.
*
How many of us actually are heroes? Which of us have that treasured capacity? Do heroes of the kind found in literature, film and the imaginations of the masses even exist?
Over the course of twenty years, historian Laurence Rees has met hundreds of veterans from the Second World War: members of the SS, concentration camp officers, rapists, mass-murderers, unreformed Nazi veterans. His films are justly decorated with awards.
A guiding question of his life’s work seems to be, how do ordinary people become complicit in acts of evil? ‘I’ve broadly come to this conclusion,’ he told me. ‘We massively underestimate the power of the culture that we are in to shape us. People say, “I wouldn’t have done that.” But they haven’t been exposed to any of the things, culturally, that might have made them do it. And the warning I take is that the number of people in a group who will stand out against these cultural forces are much smaller than you think, and you’re probably not one of them. In fact, I think you can probably tell if you are because you’re pretty bolshie already. If you’ve got a good career, and you’re pretty sociable and you’re going up the hierarchy and all the rest of it, where are you going to get your sudden revolutionary spurt from?’
*
There are possible objections to the idea of the Hero-Maker, as well as questions to which I don’t know the answer. The anthropologist Daniel Everett has studied the Pirahã, a hunter-gatherer tribe of around three hundred and fifty people in the Amazon, who seem to have no tradition of storytelling or myth. Their musical language is based on just eight consonants and three vowels. They are said to live as they speak: completely in the present.
But they do understand story. These distant and primitive people, who have been separated from the wider world for tens of thousands of years, lack a culture of art and who seem to be incapable of learning even basic counting, had no trouble enjoying a showing of Peter Jackson’s 2005 film King Kong. Writing in the New Yorker, John Colapinto reported: ‘The Pirahã shouted with delight, fear, laughter, and surprise – and when Kong himself arrived, smashing through the palm trees, pandemonium ensued. Small children, who had been sitting close to the screen, jumped up and scurried into their mothers’ laps; the adults laughed and yelled at the screen.’
I worry, too, that the Hero-Maker is overly Western in its perspective. Do hero myths differ radically in various cultures and, if so, do these differences affect how individuals deal with conflict and struggle? A 2012 study, reported in The Economist, asked why levels of ‘wisdom’ in Japanese youngsters seemed to be so in advance of those of their American counterparts. Could the answer lie in the nature of the stories that they have been bathed in since birth?
In the closing stages of the writing of this book, I have experienced cold moments, in which I charge myself as being just as guilty of faulty reasoning as the most extreme people that I have met. Here I am: the atheist who concluded that religion is a ‘parasite hero narrative’; the journalist suspicious of James Randi who discovered him to be a liar; the novelist who found storytelling to be of vital importance to the advancement of humanity. Here I am: confirmation bias come alive.
I am also concerned that I have overstated my argument. In my haste to write my own coherent story, I have barely acknowledged the obvious truth that minds do sometimes change. People find faith and they lose it. Mystics become Skeptics. Politicians cross the floor. I wonder why this happens. Is it when the reality of what is actually happening in our lives overpowers the myth that we make of themselves? Are we simply pursuing ever more glorious hero missions?
*
If so, our missions can also fracture in a different way: one that has far more threatening consequences. Professor Bentall told me that ‘depressed people have a huge gap between how they see themselves and how they would like to be – their ideal self.’ Professor Lewis Wolpert writes, ‘In the inner world of the depressive self, the self is perceived to be ineffective and inadequate, whereas the outside world is seen as presenting insuperable obstacles.’
The periods in my life when I have felt hopeless are the ones in which the narrative has collapsed. Goliath has grown too big and I have found it impossible to cast myself as the hero. The sense of non-specific wrongness that has always shrouded me is the product of a partially true, yet unhelpful plot. When I look back upon my early life I see myself at fault and in trouble, with parents, teachers, employers and lovers. My mind has seized upon these episodes to construct my autobiography. My map of salience has worked against me.
My wrongness is one story, but there are others. I look out at the Australian Central Desert and see a landscape of death while an Aboriginal sees water and shelter and food. The Skeptic tells the story of Randi the hero; the psychic of Randi the devil. We all make these unconscious plot decisions: what is relevant? What is salient? Which are the defining moments?
Why should I take it to be of such potent importance that my father believes in God? Or that a magazine journalist wants to bomb Tehran? Are these facts such a challenge to my hero illusion that I must alienate myself from friends and family? And why must I define myself chiefly as a man who used to steal and drink and be an unstable boyfriend?
*
Everything we know starts as electrical pulses, incoming from the senses. These pulses combine to construct a best-guess but distorted recreation of reality.
Having learned this fact, and tracked some of its ramifications, I find myself creeping about my beliefs, timidly peeking over their rims, examining them for cracks and presenting them nervously. I have become wary of feeling too much passion, getting carried away and emotional. Does my knowledge of the Hero-Maker mean that I must forbid myself, forever, from angrily fighting for a belief? If everyone was to do this, it would be disastrous. Progress would halt, civilisation would desiccate. I must conclude, then, that as dangerous as the illusion can be, it can also work for the good. And so the proper response is to accept my human nature, close my eyes, open my arms and fall back into it.
I will try to remember, though, that as right as I can sometimes feel, there is always the chance that I am wrong. And that happiness lies in humility: in forgiving others, and in forgiving myself.
We are creatures of illusion. We are made out of stories. From the heretics to the Skeptics, we are all lost in our own neural tjukurpas, our own secret worlds. We are just ordinary heroes fighting phantom Goliaths, doing our best in the service of truth when the only thing that we really know are the pulses.