Mindmap Illusions
Without a working mindmap of reality, we can get lost. We can get frightened and confused. if we cling to a false mindmap, in extreme cases, madness ensues.
Our mindmap, worldview, zeitgeist, weltanschauung, or paradigm organizes life for us, so new data fits into a pattern. Without a Big Picture of how life works, our lives do not make sense to us. We cherish whatever beliefs about life make the most sense to us, so we feel safe. When life stops making sense, we feel unsafe. If we make sense of life as dangerous, we may wish to be saved by a higher power or authority.
Without a working mindmap of reality, we can get lost. We can get frightened and confused. If our subjective mindmap is objectively in error, if we cling to a false mindmap, in extreme cases, madness ensues.
“Insanity” lately is mistakenly defined as “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” Misattributed to Einstein, this Rita Mae Brown quote is an example of insanity, not a definition. Insanity is far more disturbed and disturbing. Fruitless repetitious behavior may be social or cultural conditioning, after all, not psychosis.
One clinical example of insanity is Narcissistic Personality Disorder, described by the American Psychiatric Association in The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The diagnosis is earned when a person presents at least five of these summarized symptoms:
• Self-perceptions of being unique, superior and high-status.
• Fantasies of power, success, intelligence, and attractiveness.
• Grandiosity with expectations of superior treatment by others.
• A sense of entitlement to special privileges and to being obeyed.
• A pompous and arrogant demeanor.
• Needing constant admiration from others.
• Intense jealousy of others with a belief others are jealous of them.
• Unwillingness to empathize in pursuit of one’s own self-interest.
• Exploiting others without conscience to obtain personal gain.
We each may exhibit a few of these behaviors, as I did while a minor local celebrity in youth. But when elected officials present all these traits, are they crazy? The legal definition of insanity is a mental illness so severe a person cannot tell fantasy from reality, or right from wrong.
I diagnose our modern view of life as insane. We believe we can spoil the earth without cost. Thinking deeds lack consequences is lunacy. Only an insane person leaps from an airplane without a parachute and gladly sings aloud while plummeting to earth, “So far so good!”
A pebble plopped into a pond radiates ripples lapping every shore. Every thought, feeling, word, and deed reverberates outward. My anger at a store clerk infects the next customers with my grumpy mood. Actions radiate inward, too. My wrath lingers in me, affecting how I feel about myself, which affects how I relate to others and to life, which affects how I relate to the world and how the world responds to me.
We make sense of life through all the ways we communicate. Each communication loop links to all the loops in our families, jobs and social networks, linking our communities, our nations, our planet, and beyond. Understanding interactivity helps us see our power. Knowing what we do to others we do to ourselves, we tend to cooperate. We improve the way we interact. We create or co-create together a better world to share.
Our mental model of life sets or presets how we communicate. Communication weaves the warp and weft of our lives. The way we make sense of reality filters our perceptions and choices. False beliefs distort our objective, subjective and shared realities. Mary Wollstonecraft asked, “Who but a fool would part with a reality for a fleeting shadow?”
Mary Wollstonecraft asked, “Who but a fool would part with a reality for a fleeting shadow?”
We get into trouble if we filter out awareness that our oneness makes us objectively powerful. A false belief we’re isolated and powerless is the delusion despots depend upon to repress our liberty.
We get into trouble if we insist any belief is the only absolute truth. We may defend that truth, not from reasoned certainty, but from shadow insecurity, so we feel righteously safe in our beloved community.
We get into trouble when our faith ignores objective facts to hide in the shelter of a glorious true leader doing our thinking for us.
We get into trouble when any group sees life in a way that conflicts with other groups seeing life differently (intersubjectively). They may see your property or life as theirs to take. You see them as thieves and killers. How can we enjoy peace n earth if we make sense of life in opposing ways?
This is why a unifying global sense life can transcend our deepest conflicts.