Digital Ontological Insecurity or Schizophrenia-By-Internet

I'm thinking aloud. Bear with me.

I've spent a large part of the past 30 years or so thinking about the internet as a separate space. A fantasy world that we travel to. A wonderland that is both somewhere over the rainbow/through the screen and in our minds at the same time. A dream space. A utopia. A hallucination.

In order to exist in this new space, we've created separate digital selves which exist as a kind of tulpa, nirmita or a thought form - a 'summoned' being. This other self of ours exists in a non-physical realm that doesn't obey the laws of physics we understand in Nature. Our digital self is bodiless, formless, ethereal. It can be anywhere, anytime, anyone we want it to be.

The digital space our digital self exists in is a kind of 'anti-Nature'. There is nothing about the digital space that is confined to any rules of the real world. If it can be imagined, it exists. For many people - and seemingly more and more each day - this imaginary world is being confused with reality. People read the imaginations of others and think that they exist, not just in the digital, unreal realm, but they think the digitally displayed words on a screen are able to be conjured into the reality of our world. We're starting to create a language for this- fake news, deep fakes, post-fact - as we can all see the shockwaves when objective reality butts up against these fantasy worlds that exist in peoples minds.

Every single one of us thinks we are seeing the world objectively and that everyone else has lost their minds. We've got names for people who live in their own fantasy reality, as well - snowflakes, wing nuts, libtards, sheeple, woo merchants, fash, melts, gammon, woke... They must have lost their minds, they must be 'mad' because they cannot see the world "as it is"/as we see it... without ever thinking that we too are seeing the world through a specific lens or a particular ideology.

"But," we might say, "My way of seeing the world is CORRECT!"

lol.

I'm currently reading RD Laing's book 'The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness' for a second time. I read it for the first time a few years ago when I was thinking about 'alienation'. I filled my Kindle copy of the book with highlights. It felt like there was something worth saving on every other page. Every time I see one of my previously made highlights I wonder why I didn't also highlight the paragraphs immediately before or after it. There's just so much in it that is making sense to me. It feels like this book about schizophrenia and psychosis published in 1960 describes a lot of what I see online.

The book was a revolutionary re-thinking of mental illness. Laing believed that schizophrenia isn't a medical condition that needed to be treated with - as it was at the time - electroconvulsive shock therapy and heavy medication, but was actually a result of an individual's inability to relate the world as their self. He said it was “a sane reaction to an insane world”. He believed that at least some people seen as schizophrenic can be 'guided' through it and back to reality.

Laing says that 'ontological insecurity'- that is, a profound and overwhelming uncertainty about ones sense of or experience of 'being' (ontology is concerned with the nature of existence) - is at the root of schizophrenia. He said that in order for certain individuals to feel safe or secure or to survive in their environment (ie their family), they created a separate 'inner' self that they kept hidden from the world. As time goes on these two selves become more and more divided, then the border between them can start to break down and the 'inner self' starts to break out into the real world.

From The Divided Self:

A man may have a sense of his presence in the world as a real, alive, whole, and, in a temporal sense, a continuous person. As such, he can live out into the world and meet others: a world and others experienced as equally real, alive, whole, and continuous. Such a basically ontologically secure person will encounter all the hazards of life, social, ethical, spiritual, biological, from a centrally firm sense of his own and other people’s reality and identity.

If, however, one has over-identified with their separate inner self:

The individual in the ordinary circumstances of living may feel more unreal than real; in a literal sense, more dead than alive; precariously differentiated from the rest of the world, so that his identity and autonomy are always in question. He may lack the experience of his own temporal continuity. He may not possess an over-riding sense of personal consistency or cohesiveness. He may feel more insubstantial than substantial, and unable to assume that the stuff he is made of is genuine, good, valuable. And he may feel his self as partially divorced from his body.

(Italics mine)

When one spends too much time on the internet, that is, spends too much time as their inner self, without at least checking in on or even valuing the real, material, physical world, they can start to behave in strange ways.

We ALL know people in our own lives who are doing this. Friends, relatives, colleagues. From the outside, it will look as if they've had a personality transplant, but they will talk about how they are 'awake', finally being their 'true self', 'seeing the world as it really is', 'happier than they've ever been' when they behave in ways that don't look happy at all. Some will be attaching labels to themselves - we've all seen them - that they cling to more and more each day and inform the way they talk about themselves and the world, as they see it, becomes more and more narrow.

They might start to make statements about their lives or their pasts that have very little connection to your own experiences with them. They might talk about how they really care about the rights of women and feminism, but their wife informs you of the unfeminist reality of their home life... They might go on about socialism all the time, and then you find out they own a few buy-to-let properties or have inherited a large house with extensive grounds from their parents... They might go on about how they are 'queer', but they've been happily (and heterosexually) married to their husband for 30 years with no intention of that changing... They might make statements about how they have 'always' thought this or believed that or 'always' been like this or behaved like that, when you - who have known them for 10, 20, 30, 40 years - have never once seen or heard any of that from them previously. It seems especially odd when what they are talking about having 'always' believed is a very contemporary, internet-facilitated belief. You can't see how 10, 20, 30 years ago this person would have fervently believed in extremely 'now' ideas about atomised queer identities or internet red-pilled beliefs about relations between the sexes or 5g towers. But these people sincerely say they have 'always' believed these things, as if they are speaking the truth.

Because the internet has no connection to time or space, however, I can see how it is perfectly possible that people identifying too closely with their digital self might lose a sense of the passage of time in the real world and choose to disregard it when referring to their digital self. Because I have this weird little personality quirk where I really care about facts and reality, I couldn't legitimately say that I have ALWAYS been a fervent believer that the UK should be part of the EU, because I know that people around me knew me years ago when that kind of thing wouldn't have ever crossed my mind even 15 years ago. Not everyone seems to be so committed to facts or reality or even history though. And it's this ahistoricity we see in people we personally know who've lost their minds on the internet that is one thing that can deeply irk us. We know who they were. We know how they behaved. We know what they talked about. And it isn't this.

RD Laing on schizophrenia from The New Left Review:

All of us, patients and psychiatrists alike, start from the fact that we live in two worlds, an inner world and an outer world.

The normal state of affairs is that we know little of either and are alienated from both, but that we know perhaps a little more of the outer than the inner. However, the very fact that it is necessary to speak of inner and outer at all attests to the fact that an historically conditioned split has occurred, so that the inner is already as bereft of substance as the outer is bereft of meaning.

Some people wittingly, some people unwittingly, begin or are thrown into more or less total inner space and time. We are socially conditioned to regard total immersion in outer space and time as normal and healthy. Immersion in inner space and time tends to be regarded as anti-social withdrawal, a deviancy, invalid, pathological per se, in some sense discreditable.

Sometimes, having gone through the looking glass, through the eye of the needle, the territory is recognized as one’s lost home but most people now in inner space and time are, to begin with, in unfamiliar territory and are frightened and confused. They are lost. They have forgotten that they have been there before. They clutch at chimeras. They try to hang on to fragments of external reality by projecting the inner on to the outer, or by importing outer categories into the inner. They do not know what is happening, and no one is likely to do other than add to their confusion.

These internet created digital selves don't need to have existed for a very long time in real world terms, they just need to be deeply believed in. People sometimes seem to have a kind of eureka moment with their digital selves, they can be tootling along just fine online for 10, 15, 20 years and then out of the blue they claim to be some brand new other person. And in many respects, it doesn't matter if this new digital self exists online, but more and more people are dragging that strange, ill-formed persona into the real world- as Laing says above, they are trying to maintain a connection to "external reality by projecting the inner on to the outer". So, you meet up with a friend and they're now talking about how they are 'straight sized' (ie 'not fat') or your cousin is suddenly a flat earther (when he was into the skeptic movement 15 years ago) or your English, straight, married, white, middle class, male co-worker keeps going on about black trans women's rights. Literally WTF?

Our digital selves automatically by their very nature are 'bereft of substance' as Laing mentions above. And perhaps the reason ones outer self goes online in a desperate attempt to find a connection with others is that their outer self is 'bereft of meaning'. The web is facilitating the creation of a new kind of schism in ourselves that is forgoing substance in the pursuit of meaning.

What if 'meaning' can only be found in 'substance'? What if the significance of being can only be found in material reality? What happens then to everyone who is forgoing reality for the digital realm?

From The Divided Self:

The person who does not act in reality and only acts in phantasy becomes himself unreal. The actual ‘world’ for that person becomes shrunken and impoverished. The ‘reality’ of the physical world and other persons ceases to be used as a pabulum for the creative exercise of imagination, and hence comes to have less and less significance in itself. Phantasy, without being either in some measure embodied in reality, or itself enriched by injections of ‘reality’, becomes more and more empty and volatilized. [...] Without an open two-way circuit between phantasy and reality anything becomes possible in phantasy. Destructiveness in phantasy goes on without the wish to make compensatory reparation, for the guilt that prompts towards preserving and making amends loses its urgency. Destructiveness in phantasy can thus rage on, unchecked, until the world and the self are reduced, in phantasy, to dust and ashes.

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See also: