Moments after Peter Weir’s 1998 The Truman Show hit theaters, it’s primary twenty-minutes-from- now science fiction concept became old hat. Truman, played by Jim Carrey, is a guy who lives inside a giant film production set. His whole life from birth spent in the confines of this set as thousands of cameras spied on his every moment. His life streamed to televisions around the world. He doesn’t realize that he’s trapped in a bubble and his whole family are merely actors improvising along with him. It’s high concept became quickly and strangely dated by the early 2000s as reality television exploded in popularity, changing media, politics, and perhaps social reality itself. Shows like “Survivor,” “Big Brother,” and “The Apprentice,” among hundreds of others, dominated trash tv to bewildering ratings and paved the way for a new world. Further, who could have foreseen the road paved for a kind of world in which Donald Trump could become president?
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In the early years of the twenty-first century, something curious started happening in psychiatric hospitals like the one I once worked. Patients were showing up reporting a bizarre new variety of persecutory psychosis. The patients reported that they believed that hidden cameras were secretly taping them and that every detail of their life was cast to millions of riveted watchers quietly munching away on their popcorn in the dark. The patients said that the other people in their lives were actors – all of them in on the ruse – the patient alone was being punked by the producers of an invisible television program, a conspiracy that they cannot crack or get out of. The psychiatrists who published the finding, appropriately called this the Truman Show delusion (Gold, J. & Gold, I. (2012). The “Truman Show” delusion: Psychosis in the global village. Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, 17(6), 455-472).
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This new phenomenon may be dismissed off-hand as mere variant of garden-variety mental illness. But it’s also somewhat more than this as it indicates how much culture constructs the forms delusions take. I’m not suggesting society is suffering from clinical psychosis, but rather that contemporary society is adapting a particular paranoiac, persecutorial, and conspiratorial-minded style of interacting. It’s a style resembling the Truman Show.
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The method I have in mind here recalls Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style of American Politics. Published in 1964, the historian and social critic claimed the paranoid style was a tactic of the angry fringe of right-wing reactionary politics. What he had in mind was the racist, anti-communist, anti-Semitic type of American patriots, a constantly suspicious character type. This rabid right-wing base fueled the John Birch society, Cold War hawks and red baiters that drove the lunatic fringe of the fifties and sixties. Allied with big business, reactionaries dogged the New Deal consensus and fomented the candidacy of Barry Goldwater, then considered an unhinged usurper and unhinged. Of course, this style would be back with a vengeance, enduring through the long Cold War, the war on terror, and finally finding a home in the perfect machine for conspiracies – the internet. The paranoiac style did not subside, but grew exponentially.
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Hofstadter’s provocative thesis, and warning, needed nuance, however. It turned out that paranoia was not only manufactured on the right, but grew in other corners of society. Cultural theorist Peter Knight, in Conspiracy Culture, (2000), suggested that paranoia as a style increased in productivity ever since the 1960s. True, there have always been fringes of society that indulged in conspiracy, but something’s been growing. Knight argues that this increasing paranoia is a growing symptom in tandem with the cultural mechanisms of postmodernism.
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This is due to mass cultural fragmentation, which leaves the individual subject disoriented, and in many cases unable to map a coherent sense of social reality. Symptoms of this failure are increasing social anxiety, suspiciousness, unable to discern reality from fiction, and in the void of truth, indulges in conspiratorial thinking with all manner of dramatic stories to fill in the map. While there is a suspicion of the old grand narratives, the conspiracy theorist invents dumber grand narratives to take their place.
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A low grade Truman Show delusion is the character form of what is widely being called a post-truth era. Everyone’s a suspect, everything a production, a narrative, a con, a come on, an advertisement. Every social motivation one of carefully cultivated maneuvers of self-promotion. Relationships are disingenuous, as are feelings in a world where nothing is as it seems. Taken to the end point of the syndrome, the world is a stage, or simulation. And the lonely isolated individual a sucker, persecuted like a postmodern Kafkaesque hero.
A slight modification the social Truman Show Delusion has with the individual one is that it doesn’t focus on the individual as a victim of society, but is more likely to focus on the victimhood of a social or ethnic group. Sometimes there becomes competition of oppressed groups. It’s not just minority groups, who might have real world cause to feel oppressed, but the majority which feels oppressed by a vast conspiracy. What does seem to be consistent though in each case is the belief that there is a puppet master, an evil demon at work behind the veil of appearances, vague forces at the levers of society brainwashing the masses against the good people.
The Truman Show delusion may be the private human cost of the peak fulfillment of a media-saturated world. As Neal Gabler wrote some years ago in Life: The Movie, (2000), and Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death, (1985) entertainment has conquered reality, leaving nothing besides. Sensationalism conquered the world of facts. Gabler’s work elaborated on French sociologist Jean Beaudrillard, who theorized for decades that art no longer a reflection of the real world, but its hall of mirrors absorbing reality itself, becoming hyperreal. Only when everything became an absorbing simulation, everything became somehow more melodramatic. It was emotional. It was suspicious, meaner, dumber.
It isn’t so hard to believe that when television is the primary source of information, yet simultaneously the most suspect, it leaves one feeling somehow punk’d by the world. Unmoored from the text-based logocentric society, knowledge was handed to a medium best suited for dramatic visual and emotional stimulation. Could we really be in the world our parents once warned us about by sitting too close to the tv – that it would ruin our eyes and rot our brain? A world in which everyone’s lost their collective minds? A menticide? A television-induced apocalypse of crackpot theories and paranoiac nightmares?
In the logic of the social contagion of the simulacrum appearances dominate. Seeing is no longer believing. Everyone is a liar, or a crisis actor at staged events. This whopper perhaps first hatched from the restless brain of Alex Jones about the Newtown school shooting. This paranoid fantasy, smacking of Truman Showism, has become mainlined by the NRA, right-wing churches and conservative media outlets in general. Their stinking suspicion that there are evil demons manipulating a virtual reality of actors and sets, reading from scripts produced by George Soros and the lizard people of the Hollywood and political elite. While Jones used to be among those fringe figures, Fox News has too fallen into the paranoiac’s rabbit hole. Geraldo Rivera and Ann Coulter among those claiming that the pipe bombs sent to CNN and up to a dozen or so liberal public figures from Obama to DeNiro were a false flag conjured by desperate Democrats. Chuck Todd theorized it was a Russian conspiracy.
Neither conservative, nor liberal, media is immune. Pizzagate and Quanon on the one hand, or the slightly more socially acceptable Kremlingate on the other. The suspicion that Russians are lurking everywhere has revived Cold War paranoia and turned Rachel Maddow into a liberal version of Glen Beck, going as far to propose that Russians might shut off energy in the Midwest to freeze Minnesota to death in the depths of winter. This is a glimpse at the surreal world of today’s politics on the ledge of sanity. Or, the idea that the Judge Kavanaugh accuser Dr. Ford is a paid actor. Or, that the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School mass shooting survivors are actors. Or, that climate change is a hoax conjured by bored scientists, or was it socialists, or the Chinese … or whomever. These wild paranoid claims becoming mainstream are ever more alarming. Wild suspicions about reality are getting wilder and wilder as in the case of flat earthers. Even the worshiped technocrat Elon Musk is now joining an increasing chorus of Silicon Valley elites singing that it’s pretty likely that we’re all living in a computer simulation generated by a sophisticated artificial intelligence. Is this simulation theory the next evolution of the Truman Show delusion’s long decent into collective madness?
When everyone today is implicated in the mysteries of a dark reality, enemies lurk everywhere. And in this world only the few know the real truth while everyone else is deluded. We’ll think to ourselves the X-Files credo “the truth is out there,” yet each week fall a little further away from any ability to claim truth. We’ve become little TV-addicted Fox Mulders but can’t seem to get a break in the case. Our vertigo worsening each day by the ever-bleaker, ever-bloated, world reflected in mass media. The fact of the matter is that there may be a truth to be uncovered, but we won’t ever find it in these conditions. While we’re inundated with incalculable bits of data we lack the tools to make any sense of it. The truth always just around the corner, out of grasp, yet never graspable.
Political operative, it seems, both understand and embrace this new condition. Cultural authority is given to the best bullshitters they can muster. Truth is beside the point when bullshit has the bullhorn. All of this suspicion and cynicism, which does not yet seem to have reached any limit, renders cute and infantile statements like Barack Obama used to try to calm fears of a Trump presidency by saying “reality asserts itself.” Later, he said to his own bewilderment at politics’ bold-faced rejection of empirical reality, “We see the utter loss of shame among politicians who are caught in a lie and they just double down and lie some more.” In the past, attaining the truth may have seemed like a noble goal. However, perhaps a reality-based world is now beside the point, a new realm has been entered that doesn’t follow the old rules.
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There’s more at work here than mere lying. Philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s book On Bullshit (2005) points out that lying portends to cover up a truth. There is a tacit understanding that there is even a truth that needs cover up because lies serve specific functions. Bullshit on the other hand is more widespread. It is the art of not even caring what the truth is. To bullshit is to create (un)truth. The bullshit artist does not care what the truth is because truth is subservient to his basic emotional needs. Indeed how quaint mere lying was.
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Neocon operative of “Bush’s Brain” fame Karl Rove opened up this Pandora’s box when he said to Ron Suskind, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” (“Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush,”New York Times, Oct 17, 2004). There’s no better endorsement of the next step – bullshitting. They know we know it’s bullshit. What’s more is that no one has the power to contradict its overpowering tide.
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The primary question in the news media no longer became what is true, but how convincing appearances are. Pundits yak constantly with this meta-communication. How does one look? How moving is this demonstration? Did so-and-so “send the right signal?” Is he kneeling during the anthem? Is that a fist bump or a terrorist fist jab? Is he saluting with a coffee cup in his hand? Is so-and-so “credible?” These are the kinds of questions for the director of a film set, or perhaps a reality television program.
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During the Trump presidency, the main historical reference point has been the crooked, paranoid, beleaguered last years of President Nixon. There is something both correct, and something wrong with this comparison. It’s wrong in that the sociopolitical climate is very different now. However, it’s correct in that many of us, like Trump, are becoming conspiracy-peddling reactionaries. As documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis says in his short film “How All of Us Became Richard Nixon,” that Nixon cast himself as a political outsider contemptuous of a conspiracy of elites. Hollywood, the Banks, the deep state, career politicians were “the establishment.” Nixon, in the grip of creeping paranoia, created an inner circle of “plumbers,” a secret intelligence agency within the White House that wound up in the Watergate break-in. In the 1970s, there was a reality-based community, led by a press that was capable of bringing Nixon down.
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History, never short on ironic turns, would have it that Nixon was an unwitting pioneer. The society of the seventies could assert reality in a way that society today no longer can. Instead, the media itself, as well as vast swaths of the public has become Nixonian – suspicious of reality and contemptuous of “elites.” So suspicious that when faced with actual reality, or an earnest plan, or an earnest politician, we would do everything in our cynical, paranoiac will to tear them down.
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The trouble in the current situation isn’t that the current president is a master bullshitter. Because of course he is. Trump is Richard Nixon on bath salts. The deeper trouble is that a critical mass of society no longer cares about truth at all. They need to sustain the bullshit and elevate the master of its art. This is the circumstance today. Perhaps in a few years, Curtis will do a follow up piece called “How All of Us Became Donald Trump.” Perhaps many are already there.
The tragic trap in the condition is not that people are victims of lies, but reflections of surfaces in a world that has lost depth. In the shallows, the world becomes grandiose staging reflecting the tropes of reality television. Grandiosity and paranoia, the poles of the Truman Show delusion calls on the victim/hero dynamic conjuring paranoid fantasies of victory and/or martyrdom. America has taken on the character dimensions of Donald Trump. And he, by turn, is a product of its contemporary political id. MAGA voters identify with his raw feelings, course language, even his delusions. He’s the Truman Show hero par excellence: alternatively grandiose and paranoid, victory signaling and victim playing. His popularity and rise as a political figure is entirely the product of reactionary paranoid tweets and the spectacle of doubt over the birth of Barack Obama. Trump didn’t make this world, but he fits into its paranoid echo chambers hand in glove.
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In the tribalistic thunder dome politics that has emerged, politicians have become champions of social outrage tournaments. Political talk shows resemble “Wrestlemania”; (which is another place Trump has appeared). No one in this logic even has a vision for a better world as long as they can stick it to the opposition upon waves of retweets. So people believe their own bubbles of truth, echo chambers of rage conducted by algorithm. Like different Truman Show sets, they are decorated in different tones, even genres. For half the nation, there is a longing to return to an elusive mythic time of America’s glorious past, hence the MAGA slogan. The core truth under this desire perhaps is not an unsympathetic one. It might be a cry for a simpler, comprehensible, mappable world over today’s future shocked pomo cybernetic fragmentation. The battle cry for that lost fairy tale world – “If only it weren’t for the deep state puppet masters, everything would go back to normal.”
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On the other side, in broad terms, liberals are tossed into a frightening alternate reality Truman show bubble. Besides a Russophobic flare-up of Cold War tropes which casts Vladamir Putin as puppet master, there are suspicions of puppet masters everywhere. Estimations of the resurgence of skinhead and goose-stepping brownshirts in America was overblown. Consider also liberal hysteria over vaccinations, and we have the beginnings of a new paranoiac echo chamber and their own ideas of the puppet masters at the clandestine controls of the world.
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Is there a way out of the Truman Show trap? I think what must be confronted is just a recognition the delusional hold has, but a reckoning with what mass communication has done existentially. Perhaps the most harmful of consequences of this paranoiac social world is the withered dignity of the autonomous human being. It’s the Baudrillardian trajectory of humanity in the sense that he saw people’s primary engagement is not with God, or even themselves, but with a preoccupation with signs, images and information. In a sense, people are not people any more, but rather like cybernatic nodes regurgitating memes, replicating signs gone viral, feeling helpless and hopeless all the while. Social passivity punctuated by impotent rage. The outrage growing ever more, vaguely suspecting that all along there are puppet masters of society just beyond view. But the puppet masters may not be George Soros or the Illuminati or the Elders of Zion or Vladamir Putin. As Shoshana Zuboff beautifully argues in Surveillance Capitalism (2019), the masters are the software. The metadata, algorithms and bots are the orchestra conductors of the digital universe. Society more and more resembling the echo chambers of Twitter. If only algorithms were as a charismatic villain as Putin, something might be done.
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Anti-psychiatrist R.D. Laing once asked “Is love possible? Is freedom possible? Is the truth possible? Is it possible to be one’s self with another human being? Do human beings even exist?” In the Baudrillaridan dystopia of the present, the answer is no, sorry, not really. So long homo sapien sapien, hello homo facebookus. For so long we wondered how the internet could help human progress, we forgot to ask how the internet would change human beings. How we’d change our society to match the algorithms of the Googleverse into a kind of mass media-induced psychosis. And how we’d modify ourselves in new levels of reactivity and dependency morphing into nihilism. The delusional rage of withered beings growing in step with the proliferation of this semiotic matrix.
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That is most cruel consequence of this post-truth age. At the end of the Truman Show, (I almost wrote Trumpman Show), Jim Carrey at least understood he was a human being. At least he understood there was a limit to his world, and that the limit came in the form of a physical wall. How quaint – indeed, how positively retro – it is to have physical walls to cross. It’s much harder to cross the vague boundaries of a phony world. Where are the true boundaries today back to a firm reality or humanity? Is that desire to return to self itself even real? What’s left after this assault on our tender docile bodies? What’s left when we ourselves have gone from apes to apps? The first step to slay the beast is to name the beast.
A Fragile Dignity 