Denying Reality Drives You Nuts

Lying takes energy, telling the truth and recognizing reality does not.

I was thinking about the mind/body duality on my run with Murph this morning in light of has-been Sex in the City actress Cynthia Nixon touting her observant Jewish transgender son's participation in a hunger strike for the people of Gaza.

There are just so many juicy contradictions and reality evasions in that one statement - it is like a smorgasbord of idiocy and coping...and mental illness. My guess is that the reasons all her children are some sort of biologically gender non-conforming has less to do with their mental state and more to do with hers.

That line of thought reminded me of something I wrote about duality - the mind/body problem - about four years ago:

"The concept of dualism or duality is something that arose in early philosophy and religion to explain the “dual” nature of humanity – male vs. female and good vs. evil are some of the most common examples.

The ancient Greeks contemplated another type, the dualism of the mind vs. the body.

Further advanced by Rene Descartes, in the philosophy of mind, dualism is the theory that the mental and the physical, the mind and body (the physical brain), are, in some senses, radically different kinds of things. This thinking gives rise to the consideration of the mind as the person and the body as merely a cloak that is donned as a physical necessity and changed as desired.

Very roughly, you can think of it as how, when you leave home each day, you dress in different clothing from your closet. You may change the clothes according to your preferences and moods, but you are still the same person no matter which clothes you wear. Clothes may be a representation of how you feel that day or simply utilitarian coverings expected by society, but the clothes do not change the person that the world sees as you.

The more I dig into Queer Theory and the current fad of transgenderism, the more I begin to understand how this idea of dualism is a factor.

Despite neuroscience research confirming the interdependence of the mind and the brain, the idea of mind/body dualism persists and rather than conceiving of one being consisting of mind AND body, transgenders see the real person as the mind and the body as merely clothing for the mind, separate and apart."

But the reality is that the mind cannot make physical changes in a body. Drugs and surgery can alter appearances and bodily functions, but that still doesn't change the body at a genetic level. No matter how hard a man puts on his ruby slippers, clicks his heels super, super hard and shouts in his best falsetto voice "There's no place like home!", he ain't gonna wake up at Auntie Em's farmhouse in aptly named Liberal, Kansas and find the Wizard of Oz has magically transformed the twig and berries he was born with into a vagina and boobs.

Facebook friend Jefferson Knight posted this morning about a paper that examined how constant lying about reality and believing those lies drives people crazy.

I commented that when you tell the truth, it is over, but the maintenance needs of a lie are constant - you use brain power and storage space to keep track of the thousands of things you must continue to support to keep a lie alive.

Truth is self-sufficient. One and done. You have to live with it, but no more of your mental energy goes toward maintaining it. You brain is free to consider relevant things rather than constantly defending an illusion.

So, it is not surprising that liars - unless they are pathological with absolutely no sense of empathy or shame - are depressed, anxious, sad, and basically just going nuts.

The mind is a powerful thing - but it cannot deny reality. If you deny reality, there's something wrong with you and you should seek immediate help.