by Amber Trotter, Psy.D.

SOCIAL REALITY

“All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned ....” (Marx, VI, 135)

Functional societies require shared narratives, symbolism, values, and protocols. We agree on fictions: time, money, legislative procedure. Society inculcates a “second nature” which Plato considered sacred, and which individualistic, relativistic, postmodern hypercapitalism renders profane. In Nietzsche’s famous derision, truth is “a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that is what they are” (1954, p. 46-7).

Nietzsche, dear Nietzsche, you set me free, but when God is dead, when truth is illusion, we might get, well, men in Viking helmets roaming the capital shitting incoherently. 

In the end, the seeds we sow are all we have to reap. Iconoclastic, consumptive, manifest-your-own-reality digital post-post-modernism has led us here. “Polarized” doesn’t begin to capture the breakdown of consensual reality.

This reminds me of working with a certain kind of a couple. The kind that sits down, begins to tell a story, and then starts screaming about what actually happened and how bat sh*t crazy the other person is. In contradistinction to garden-variety “different perspectives,” these people live in distinct realities. 

Trauma is usually at play. It’s hard to build empathy. It’s hard to get each person to stop violently reacting for long enough to relate to the other person and begin to develop a consensus. 

Perhaps we don’t need to build a shared reality, political speaking. Perhaps the White supremacist right will simply drown in the rising sea of multiculturalism. And perhaps it isn’t possible. We may be too far gone for such sanguine notions. Still, I have hope.

With the aforementioned paradigmatic couple, trauma must be acknowledged before anything else. A modicum of validation fosters a modicum of trust and goodwill that in turn fosters a modicum of willingness to step outside oneself and inhabit the other person’s perspective. Some sort of container and authority is often necessary, represented in this case by the psychotherapist. This does not entail conflating trauma with truth. Reality isn’t merely projection or convention, Nietzsche.

The proper epistemic mooring for “reality” involves a conversation spanning sensory perception, ethical principles, critical analysis, and emotional, intuitive processes. There are better and worse, truer and falser ways of representing our experience. In a democracy, dissensus is the norm: conflict can never be eliminated, but must rather be navigated with patience, skill, and resolve. 

I hope the Biden-Harris team can continue to offer leadership, authority, and containment, while also recognizing that the contemporary breakdown in social reality signals collective trauma. If we have any hope of reconciliation and healing, that trauma must be acknowledged and processed collectively.