Bell Curves and the Gaslighting of Genius: Part 2

Read the preface to this post here

Disclaimer: This in no way is to contest that there are real, physiological reasons for mental illness. I studied Bio/Chem and (as my beloved bell curves show) there are always some people who produced aberrant amounts of hormones/ neurotransmitters or in some other way lack the ability to regulate what is considered a 'healthy' biological state. I always advocate to try all possible options, starting with the highest probability of success. Body systems are complex and each person's solution looks very different from another's. This is conjecture based on my personal experience and I felt there may be a piece in here that wasn't widely being looked at. Maybe it will bring some of the comfort of comprehension it has brought me to others.

"The car has been inspected three times already, this doesn't make sense. My sister just brought it back here yesterday"

"Yes, it does make sense, because your name is different, the name on your account is different."

"But... it's the same car. The same wheels, same lights. That's what you are inspecting, correct? To make sure this specific car is safe. You see the VIN number... it's the same tires and lights and brakes as yesterday. We could just put all the cars in the lot, inspect them, decide if they are safe, and that has nothing to do with the name of the driver. We have been sharing this car for a year, it's the same car. How does it make sense to go through the inspection again?."

"It makes sense because you have a different name."

Ok. Being frustrated by corporate pedantry does not a genius make. But, sitting in that office I started to notice a familiar feeling. An uncomfortable anger. To put it frankly, an insanity. I will admit, I thought very seriously that day about checking myself into a mental hospital for a few days. How could I possibly be considered so intelligent and yet be so out of touch with what supposedly makes sense in the world. I'm not talking about delusions of superiority, but a lifetime of real feedback; figuring things out before I was taught them, or understanding people emotionally, intimately, within only minutes of listening to them. And yet this sensation of insanity was always lingering, or, as this year played out, growing to an ever-present pressure that felt like my mental gears weren't moving. Like I was utterly incoherent to others, save for my small tribe of loved ones.

When I was 16 I felt the same pressure, and asked my mom to take me to see a psychiatrist. I said "Either I'm a genius or I'm crazy, and I want someone who knows these things to tell me which one it is." I went, and the doctor told me I had ADHD (which I see now kind of means both). I actually felt better to see all my symptoms had names and weren't existing in a vacuum of my possible 'craziness'. Because, to be honest, I feel pretty sane in my own body. I feel like I trust my senses and can explore the world and relate to others. I feel excited about discovering things and talking to people. I understand money as a game, economics as a structure and social relationships, and art as the sanctuaries and meaning amidst it all. I feel pretty solid. Except, when I don't.

Remember in the movies The Aviator about Howard Hughes, or The Hours about Virginia Woolf, watching them disintegrate mentally, until even those closest to them couldn't really communicate with them any more? I felt how scary that was, and would weigh out the possibility of that happening to me. What about bipolar, or schizophrenia, or depression is it that makes people go so desperately insane... what does being insane really mean?

I was sitting in my car, crying, trying to decide if I should just go somewhere and let them sedate me for a while (I don't actually know what happens when you check into a psychiatric hospital- I just have movies and books and imagination - I was assuming they would knock me out with a Xanax or something and keep me for a few days), and I started to piece together all of the stories of insanity I knew. Socrates, talking about the cave, and how the others killed the person who saw shadows instead of reality. Or spiritual leaders who gave their lives to try and explain infinity to finite, physical humans. How in science the advent of telescopes, microscopes and other extra-sensory tools shifted our views, but that there was always somebody who could sense, or truly see, things long before others. Of course!! These people might have believed in what they could see, but unless the proof came in their lifetime many of them slowly started to unravel, sometimes with only a few people left validating their cognitive health. Thinking in bell curves, the likelihood that you have whatever trait it is that makes you impervious to social dissonance is really low. People are social creatures, our mental and emotional health are tied into one another. So the probability that you have the 'impervious to social dissonance' trait and all of the traits that make you inflict social dissonance through your ability to see what others don't - whatever type of genius that may be- is highly improbable. So you have the recipe for gaslighting: somebody who has a healthy sense of sanity (I see it, other people see it, it is there) and also the social feedback saying that they are not experiencing reality correctly. Anyone who is familiar with or has experienced being gaslighted knows that it is a slow deteriorating type of abuse. At first you question yourself and the other. Then, after being convinced, you accept what they say is the reality and move on, without really feeling much different. This happens to all of us daily, we don't agree with another on what we saw or heard, maybe its an argument, but it doesn't deeply affect our sanity. It's the compounding of incidents that does the real damage, the severity in the differences. You slowly withdraw from trusting your own conclusions, and although you start to depend on the outside to process for you, you never really shake that feeling of trying to sort it out.

Now to flesh this out very simply back to back, because you might be thinking "Well, then anyone who isn't impervious to social dissonance would become insane". Yes and no. No human traits are solid hues, they are shades, tints and tones. Most people do respond to social dissonance, that is why we have trends, and why marketing can manipulate populations quite easily. And, to be fair, most people have some level of awareness that aspects of our society don't make sense. They can tell they are being manipulated, as we can see by the large movements towards change, and, in my opinion, an increase in mental illness across the board. So, yes, unless you don't care about feedback from others at all (also not ideal, even the most genuisy of geniuses aren't processing everything perfectly), then you will and probably are experiencing the depression or misplaced aggression that comes with being confused by gaslighting. The difference is, the higher the intelligence the more profound the dissonance is, and unless you remove yourself from the situation that is causing it, well, we have many dramatic examples of how it plays out.

There is, of course, an obvious undercurrent of purposeful manipulation throughout human history. I have a video in this post that outlines the behavioral science field and ways it has been used nefariously. Plus, we've all heard countless historical stories about how information is suppressed by targeting the sanity of the person trying to bring it to light. I wanted to touch here on the accidental ways we all contribute, and, specifically as a society, shun then exalt these people.

When we teach our kids one thing and then behave differntly, whether in our religious groups, government structures or day to day behaviors, we set them up for the dissonance that leads to mental instability. We teach the works of poets and philosophers, revolutionaries and scientists that brought us to where we are today, and then dissuade our children from being like those people in their sleep/work schedules or focus of production. We are asking our children, just as we were asked, to see what is true but ignore that reality, and their own cognition, to follow arbitrarily dictated rules of conduct. We may not notice it because we ourselves have been gaslighted, and we have taken to the abuse within the aggregated normal hump of the bell curve- dissatisfied, anxious, but not insane. But those on the fringe, the ones whose ability to truly see the workings of of our physical and emotional world is much too astute to be brushed aside with illogical and inconsistent 'becauses', the ones that we will put on the pedestal and marvel at centuries after they're gone, those are the ones we will spend our lives wringing our hands over, whispering about their sanity.

Final note, since this an emotional subject. When I say 'healthy sense of sanity' I am talking about the most quantifiable version of experiencing reality. If you have an anomaly which causes your body to create sensations with no detectable outside stimuli, you will have to use others as a control. This is the best we can do. I am not negating extrasensory experiences, because I know there are a lot of things happening in the universe that we cannot detect with our current bodies and tools. We are all trying to understand the world around us as best we can, and my only hope is the we suffer the least, and experience the most joy while we do it.

Photos:

1. Virginia Woolf
2. Still from the movie "The Aviator"
3. Still from the movie "One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest"
4. Nikola Tesla, Smithsonian Collection
5. Pixabay, find it here