Have you heard? Last week a whistleblower revealed that the new president of Ireland can’t speak a word of English.
If you believe that, friends might consider you either crazy, ridiculously ignorant, or, depending on how they think, in possession of a scandalous truth.
Every month I meet on Zoom with four psychiatrists. It’s not that I’m a high-maintenance patient; these are medical school classmates in regular reunion. I recently asked them this question:
“What do you call it when someone insists on believing what plainly isn’t so, or is less likely than a trout singing opera? What do you say to someone who insists that cannibals lurk in the library or that Italian satellites are tweaking our thyroids? Do you call that psychosis? Delusion? Lucid dreaming? Fear porn?”
Of the variety of answers these shrinks offered me, one made especially compelling sense. “Crazy as it seems,” my classmate said, “that’s normal human behavior. So-called Homo sapiens has always been that way. When times are confusing, we need a frame, a map, some way to organize apparent chaos. So when we’re desperate we reach for the simplest answer, whether it makes rational sense or not. We’ve always done that, and probably always will.”
Given, then, that such porous credulity is all too human, never mind trying to convince your cousin that corndogs won’t cure psoriasis, or that there’s actually no North Korean colony on the dark side of the moon. No one can change a made-up mind.
We inevitably direct our lives according to our beliefs, such as they are. My psychiatrist friend has convinced me, once and for all, that we believe whatever we jolly well want, independent of facts. Often our beliefs serve us nicely, bringing contentment, but sometimes they deliver unpleasant consequences.
Genuine truth, like cream, will eventually rise to the individual and popular surface. When that happens–and provided we’re mentally healthy — we reconsider our less fruitful beliefs, and so change our course. In fact, such flexibility is a hallmark of mental health.
Jeff Kane is a physician and writer in Nevada City
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