Delusions of... Normalcy

It's late and I should be asleep.

I know that SGDQ is running now, but it is late and I have two different rehearsals/practices tomorrow. Not to mention that I just recently ``recovered'' from my stupid tension headache.

But I had to write this piece. The topic had been floating in my head for the past week or so, and if I don't write about it now, it will become an obsession that will persist and end up with me engaging in weird compulsive behavior. So off I go.

Delusions. I think that as humans, we have a tendency to operate under our own set of delusions. Now, these delusions need not be of the more grandiose kind that one might be used to hearing about, but just random pieces of magical thinking that we tend to have to just allow the day to pass by quicker without having to fall into despair on realisation that in the cosmic scale of things, even human existence is meagre and meaningless.

I have my delusions of course. As do everyone else. Some of these delusions are rather overt -- everyone seems to believe that I have some kind of skill in some of the things I do when at best I'm merely mediocre. Some are covert, for instance the belief that one has power over the elements, or even to control/manipulate luck outside of the RNG.

Delusions are not as abnormal as they sound. I think it is part of the human condition. I thought back about the time when I was much younger, and realised that over time, ``growing up'' meant substituting the more fanciful delusions of my capabilities/worth with other delusions that do not superficially contradict the experience gained from observing the way the universe works. So, for example, instead of thinking that I have the capability of controlling weather, I now think that I have some kind of preternatural control over all things that use software programmable electronic circuits (aka ``computers'').

It's still consistent with the way one views other fellow humans -- delusions are part of the black-box package that comprises the brain and mind, and we don't usually need to care about the specifics of the delusion in order to function with the said people. The only times where it becomes necessary to have some partial understanding of another's delusions are when there is a need to create/maintain a stronger relationship bond other than mere acquaintance, i.e. when one needs to live with a person or when one is with an incompetent individual, with ``incompetent'' taking on the technical/legal meaning that the person is not wholly responsible for his/her actions due to youth or lack of maturity. In these cases, the partial understanding is needed to generate the kind of empathy that is often the bedrock of deep relationships.

Not all delusions are harmless though. Those that involve other people tend to be more harmful than those that live on silently within the person's mind. Projected emotions, assumptions are just two of the many different manifestations of harmful delusions that involve other people; they are harmful because they enforce the deluded individual's perspective on others who do not share the same, therefore leading to a lack of empathy, which leads to conflict. There are other personal delusions that can be termed harmful, but I am not of the opinion that it is in our place to explicitly point out to the person that his/her delusion is harmful to him/her, unless there is an exact situation where the said delusion is a direct contributory cause towards a life and death situation involving the person.

This means that state-mandated committing of people to asylums for acts that do not involve an immediate threat to anyone's life is something that I do not support in principle.

Given then that everyone has delusions and necessarily uses them to make everyday living less stressful, it becomes ludicrous when we start considering the notion of a ``normal'' psychology. As put by my abnormal psychology professor, a ``normal'' psychology (be it be population mode, median, mean metrics) is the most abnormal of all -- everyone is abnormal in some way, and all that matters is the degree of abnormality, and more importantly, how much it affects the quality of life. This means that it is much harder to prove that someone is ``sane'' instead of ``insane'', which provides a reason why I think that state-mandated committing of people to asylums is generally not a good idea.

But the purpose of this rant isn't to argue about what powers the state ought to/ought not to have; it is to point out that the world is delusional in general.

The important part is to know how to pick ``useful'' delusions so that we don't end up harming ourselves or others, while still staving away the void that is the rest of the universe.

In fact, it might be the case that matter itself is the biggest delusion of all, since most of the universe is made up of things that we cannot even start to characterise other than ``it is dark energy''.