A Culture of Hyper-Reality Made Paranoid Delusions True - Aeon Essays

A culture of hyper-reality made paranoid delusions true | Aeon Essays 13/02/2024, 12:00 PM
A culture of hyper-reality made

paranoid delusions true | Aeon
Essays
Clinical psychiatry papers rarely make much of a splash in the wider
media, but it seems appropriate that a paper entitled ‘The Truman Show
Delusion: Psychosis in the Global Village’, published in the May 2012 issue
of Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, should have caused a global sensation. Its
authors, the brothers Joel and Ian Gold, presented a striking series of
cases in which individuals had become convinced that they were secretly
being filmed for a reality TV show.
In one case, the subject travelled to New York, demanding to see the
‘director’ of the film of his life, and wishing to check whether the World
Trade Centre had been destroyed in reality or merely in the movie that was
being assembled for his benefit. In another, a journalist who had been
hospitalised during a manic episode became convinced that the medical
scenario was fake and that he would be awarded a prize for covering the
story once the truth was revealed. Another subject was actually working
on a reality TV series but came to believe that his fellow crew members
were secretly filming him, and was constantly expecting the This-Is-Your-
Life moment when the cameras would flip and reveal that he was the true
star of the show.
Few commentators were able to resist the idea that these cases — all
diagnosed with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, and treated with
antipsychotic medication — were in some sense the tip of the iceberg,
exposing a pathology in our culture as a whole. They were taken as
extreme examples of a wider modern malaise: an obsession with celebrity
turning us all into narcissistic stars of our own lives, or a media-saturated
culture warping our sense of reality and blurring the line between fact and
https://aeon.co/essays/a-culture-of-hyper-reality-made-paranoid-delusions-true Page 1 of 11
fiction. They seemed to capture the zeitgeist perfectly: cautionary tales

for an age in which our experience of reality is manicured and customised
in subtle and insidious ways, and everything from our junk mail to our
online searches discreetly encourages us in the assumption that we are
the centre of the universe.
But part of the reason that the Truman Show delusion seems so uncannily
in tune with the times is that Hollywood blockbusters now regularly
present narratives that, until recently, were confined to psychiatrists’ case
notes and the clinical literature on paranoid psychosis. Popular culture
hums with stories about technology that secretly observes and controls
our thoughts, or in which reality is simulated with virtual constructs or
implanted memories, and where the truth can be glimpsed only in
distorted dream sequences or chance moments when the mask slips. A
couple of decades ago, such beliefs would mark out fictional characters
as crazy, more often than not homicidal maniacs. Today, they are more
likely to identify a protagonist who, like Jim Carrey’s Truman Burbank,
genuinely has stumbled onto a carefully orchestrated secret of which
those around him are blandly unaware. These stories obviously resonate
with our technology-saturated modernity. What’s less clear is why they so
readily adopt a perspective that was, until recently, a hallmark of radical
estrangement from reality. Does this suggest that media technologies are
making us all paranoid? Or that paranoid delusions suddenly make more
sense than they used to?
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The first person to examine the curiously symbiotic relationship between

new technologies and the symptoms of psychosis was Victor Tausk, an
early disciple of Sigmund Freud. In 1919, he published a paper on a
phenomenon he called ‘the influencing machine’. Tausk had noticed that it
was common for patients with the recently coined diagnosis of
schizophrenia to be convinced that their minds and bodies were being

controlled by advanced technologies invisible to everyone but them.
These ‘influencing machines’ were often elaborately conceived and
predicated on the new devices that were transforming modern life.
Patients reported that they were receiving messages transmitted by
hidden batteries, coils and electrical apparatus; voices in their heads were
relayed by advanced forms of telephone or phonograph, and visual
hallucinations by the covert operation of ‘a magic lantern or
cinematograph’. Tausk’s most detailed case study was of a patient named
‘Natalija A’, who believed that her thoughts were being controlled and her
body manipulated by an electrical apparatus secretly operated by doctors
in Berlin. The device was shaped like her own body, its stomach a velvet-
lined lid that could be opened to reveal batteries corresponding to her
internal organs.
Although these beliefs were wildly delusional, Tausk detected a method in

their madness: a reflection of the dreams and nightmares of a rapidly
evolving world. Electric dynamos were flooding Europe’s cities with power
and light, their branching networks echoing the filigree structures seen in
laboratory slides of the human nervous system. New discoveries such as
X-rays and radio were exposing hitherto invisible worlds and mysterious
powers that were daily discussed in popular science journals, extrapolated
in pulp fiction magazines and claimed by spiritualists as evidence for the
‘other side’. But all this novelty was not, in Tausk’s view, creating new
forms of mental illness. Rather, modern developments were providing his
patients with a new language to describe their condition.
At the core of schizophrenia, he argued, was a ‘loss of ego-boundaries’

that made it impossible for subjects to impose their will on reality, or to
form a coherent idea of the self. Without a will of their own, it seemed to
them that the thoughts and words of others were being forced into their
heads and issued from their mouths, and their bodies were manipulated
like puppets, subjected to tortures or arranged in mysterious postures.
These experiences made no rational sense, but those who suffered them
were nevertheless subject to what Tausk called ‘the need for causality
that is inherent in man’. They felt themselves at the mercy of malign
external forces, and their unconscious minds fashioned an explanation
from the material to hand, often with striking ingenuity. Unable to impose
meaning on the world, they became empty vessels for the cultural
artefacts and assumptions that swirled around them. By the early 20th
century, many found themselves gripped by the conviction that some
hidden operator was tormenting them with advanced technology.
A desert nomad is more likely to believe that he is being buried alive in

sand by a djinn, and an urban American that he has been implanted with a
microchip and is being monitored by the CIA
Tausk’s theory was radical in its implication that the utterances of

psychosis were not random gibberish but a bricolage, often artfully
constructed, of collective beliefs and preoccupations. Throughout history
up to this point, the explanatory frame for such experiences had been
essentially religious: they were seen as possession by evil spirits, divine
visitations, witchcraft, or snares of the devil. In the modern age, these
beliefs remained common, but alternative explanations were now
available. The hallucinations experienced by psychotic patients, Tausk
observed, are not typically three-dimensional objects but projections
‘seen on a single plane, on walls or windowpanes’. The new technology of
cinema replicated this sensation precisely and was in many respects a
rational explanation of it: one that ‘does not reveal any error of judgment
beyond the fact of its non-existence’.
In their instinctive grasp of technology’s implicit powers and threats,

influencing machines can be convincingly futuristic and even
astonishingly prescient. The very first recorded case, from 1810, was a
Bedlam inmate named James Tilly Matthews who drew exquisite technical
drawings of the machine that was controlling his mind. The ‘Air Loom’, as
he called it, used the advanced science of his day — artificial gases and
mesmeric rays — to direct invisible currents into his brain, where a magnet
had been implanted to receive them. Matthews’s world of electrically
charged beams and currents, sheer lunacy to his contemporaries, is now
part of our cultural furniture. A quick internet search reveals dozens of
online communities devoted to discussing magnetic brain implants, both
real and imagined.
The Gold brothers’ interpretation of the Truman Show delusion runs along
similar lines. It might appear to be a new phenomenon that has emerged
in response to our hypermodern media culture, but is in fact a familiar
condition given a modern makeover. They make a primary distinction
between the content of delusions, which is spectacularly varied and
imaginative, and the basic forms of delusion, which they characterise as
‘both universal and rather small in number’.
Persecutory delusions, for example, can be found throughout history and

across cultures; but within this category a desert nomad is more likely to
believe that he is being buried alive in sand by a djinn, and an urban
American that he has been implanted with a microchip and is being
monitored by the CIA. ‘For an illness that is often characterised as a break
with reality,’ they observe, ‘psychosis keeps remarkably up to date.’ Rather
than being estranged from the culture around them, psychotic subjects
can be seen as consumed by it: unable to establish the boundaries of the
self, they are at the mercy of their often heightened sensitivity to social
threats.
In this interpretation, the Truman Show delusion is a contemporary

expression of a common form of delusion: the grandiose. Those
experiencing the onset of psychosis often become convinced that the
world has undergone a subtle shift, placing them at centre-stage in a
drama of universal proportions. Everything is suddenly pregnant with
meaning, every tiny detail charged with personal significance. The people
around you are often complicit: playing pre-assigned roles, testing you or
preparing you for an imminent moment of revelation. Such experiences
have typically been interpreted as a divine visitation, a magical
transformation or an initiation into a higher level of reality. It is easy to
imagine how, if they descended on us without warning today, we might
jump to the conclusion that the explanation was some contrivance of TV
or social media: that, for some deliberately concealed reason, the
attention of the world had suddenly focused on us, and an invisible public
was watching with fascination to see how we would respond. The Truman
Show delusion, then, needn’t imply that reality TV is either a cause or a
symptom of mental illness; it might simply be that the pervasive presence
of reality TV in our culture offers a plausible explanation for otherwise
inexplicable sensations and events.
Here was what Hollywood executives always assumed audiences hated:

filmmakers playing smart with their audiences, pulling the rug from under
their feet
Although the formation of delusions is unconscious and often a response

to profound trauma, the need to construct plausible scenarios gives it
many commonalities with the process of writing fiction. On rare occasions
the two overlap. In 1954, the English novelist Evelyn Waugh suffered a
psychotic episode during which he thought he was persecuted by a cast
of disembodied voices who were discussing his personality defects and
spreading malicious rumours about him. He became convinced that the
voices were being orchestrated by the producers of a recent BBC radio
interview, whose questions he had found impertinent; he explained their
ability to follow him wherever he went by invoking some hidden
technology along the lines of a radionics ‘black box’, an enthusiasm of one
of his neighbours. His delusions became increasingly florid but, as Waugh
described it later, ‘it was not in the least like losing one’s reason… I was
rationalising all the time, it was simply one’s reason working hard on the
wrong premises.’
Waugh turned the experience into a brilliant comic novel, The Ordeal of
Gilbert Pinfold (1957). Its protagonist is a pompous but brittle writer in late
middle age, whose paranoia about the modern world is fed by an
escalating regime of liqueurs and sedatives until it erupts in full-blown
persecution mania (a familiar companion for Waugh, who abbreviated it
discreetly to ‘pm’ in letters to his wife). Although the novel smoothes the
edges of Waugh’s bizarre associations and winks knowingly at Pinfold’s
surreal predicament, the fictionalisation blurs into the narrative that
emerged during Waugh’s psychosis: even for his close friends, it was
impossible to tell exactly where the first ended and the second began.
By the time that Gilbert Pinfold was published, narratives of paranoia and
psychosis were starting to migrate from psychiatry into popular culture,
and first-person memoirs of mental illness were appearing as mass-
market paperbacks. The memoir Operators and Things: The Inner Life of a
Schizophrenic (1958), written under the pseudonym of Barbara O’Brien,
told the remarkable story of a young woman pursued across America on
Greyhound buses by a shadowy gang of ‘operators’ with a mind-
controlling ‘stroboscope’, but was presented and packaged like a sci-fi
thriller. Conversely, thrillers were incorporating plot lines that assumed the
reality of mind-controlling technologies. Richard Condon’s best-selling
novel The Manchurian Candidate (1959) turned on the premise that a
hypnotised subject might be programmed to respond unconsciously to
pre-arranged cues. In the book’s memorable and, with hindsight, eerily
prescient climax, an unwitting agent is triggered to assassinate the US
president. Condon’s deadpan satire was informed by Cold War anxieties
about brainwashing and communist infiltration, but it also drew upon
recent popular exposés of the ‘subliminal’ techniques of advertising, such
as The Hidden Persuaders (1958) by Vance Packard. It was expertly
pitched into the disputed territory of psychology’s black arts: a paranoid
tale for paranoid times, which still informs a thriving netherworld of
internet-driven conspiracy theories.
Perhaps the emergence of the influencing machine into modern fiction

can be most clearly traced through the career and afterlife of Philip K
Dick, who combined the profession of prolific pulp novelist with an intense
hypochondriacal fascination with psychotic disorders. He diagnosed
himself as both paranoid and schizophrenic at various times, and included
schizophrenic characters in his fiction; many of his novels and short
stories have a closer kinship with memoirs of mental illness than with the
robots-and-spaceships tales of his sci-fi contemporaries. They play out
restless iterations of the idea that consensus reality is in fact the
construct of some form of influencing machine: a simulation designed to
test our behaviour, a set of memories generated artificially to maintain us
in our daily routines, a consumer fantasy sold to us by power-hungry
corporations or obligingly furnished by mind-reading extraterrestrials.
Dick’s novel Time Out of Joint came out the same year as The Manchurian
Candidate and was a clear ancestor of The Truman Show. Its protagonist,
Ragle Gumm, inhabits a bland suburban world that is gradually revealed to
be a military simulation; the sole purpose of the set-up is to keep Gumm
happily playing what he believes to be a battleship puzzle in the daily
paper, while in reality his solutions are directing missile strikes in a war of
which he is kept unaware.
Throughout his lifetime, Dick remained a cult author. His devoted but
limited fan base prized his work for its uncompromising weirdness, never
imagining that it might be assimilated into the popular mainstream.
Indeed, after a series of visionary episodes in 1974, which he elaborated
into a complex personal theology, Dick’s work became still more hermetic,
remote even to his core sci-fi readership. He died in 1982, just as his novel
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) was being adapted into
Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner, its storyline soft-pedalled by a studio that
believed audiences would reject the climactic revelation that its
protagonist was himself an android. Subsequent film adaptations of Dick’s
work, such as Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall (1990), also toned down the
radical reality switches of the source, limiting them to an opening set-up
before settling into a final reel of uncomplicated action.
In 1999, however, The Matrix struck boxoffice gold with a script that
presented a classic Dickian influencing machine in stark and undiluted
form. An inquisitive hacker stumbles onto the ultimate secret: the so-
called ‘real world’ is a simulation, concealing a reality in which all humanity
has been enslaved and harvested by machines for centuries. Buttressed
by reams of dialogue exploring the scenario’s existential implications, here
was precisely what Hollywood executives previously assumed audiences
hated: filmmakers playing smart with their audiences, pulling the narrative
rug from under their feet, even toying with the fourth wall of the drama.
And yet it was a sensational success, resonating far beyond the multiplex
and inserting its memes deep into a wider culture that was now hosted by
the internet.
As the American screenwriter William Goldman observed in his memoir

Adventures in the Screen Trade (1983), in the movie business, nobody
knows anything. It might be that a similarly bold metafiction could have
been successful years earlier, but it feels more likely that the cultural
impact of The Matrix reflected the ubiquity that interactive and digital
media had achieved by the end of the 20th century. This was the moment
at which the networked society reached critical mass: the futuristic ideas
that, a decade before, were the preserve of a vanguard who read William
Gibson’s cyberspace novels or followed the bleeding-edge speculations
of the cyberculture magazine Mondo 2000 now became part of the
texture of daily life for a global and digital generation. The headspinning
pretzel logic that had confined Philip K Dick’s appeal to the cult fringes a
generation earlier was now accessible to a mass audience. Suddenly,
there was a public appetite for convoluted allegories that dissolved the
boundaries between the virtual and the real.
When James Tilly Matthews drew the invisible beams and rays of the Air
Loom in his Bedlam cell, he was describing a world that existed only in his
head. But his world is now ours: we can no longer count all the invisible
rays, beams and signals that are passing through our bodies at any
moment. Victor Tausk argued that the influencing machine emerged from
a confusion between the outside world and private mental events, a
confusion resolved when the patient invented an external cause to make
sense of his thoughts, dreams and hallucinations. But the modern word of
television and computers, the virtual and the interactive, blurs traditional
distinctions between perception and reality.
When we watch live sporting events on giant public screens or follow

breaking news stories in our living rooms, we are only receiving flickering
images, yet our hearts beat in synchrony with millions of unseen others.
We Skype with two-dimensional facsimiles of our friends, and model
idealised versions of ourselves for our social profiles. Avatars and aliases
allow us to commune at once intimately and anonymously. Multiplayer
games and online worlds allow us to create customised realities as all-
embracing as The Truman Show. Leaks and exposés continually
undermine our assumptions about what we are revealing and to whom,
how far our actions are being monitored and our thoughts being
transmitted. We manipulate our identities and are manipulated by
unknown others. We cannot reliably distinguish the real from the fake, or
the private from the public.
In the 21st century, the influencing machine has escaped from the
shuttered wards of the mental hospital to become a distinctive myth for
our times. It is compelling not because we all have schizophrenia, but
because reality has become a grey scale between the external world and
our imaginations. The world is now mediated in part by technologies that
fabricate it and partly by our own minds, whose pattern-recognition
routines work ceaselessly to stitch digital illusions into the private cinema
of our consciousness. The classical myths of metamorphosis explored the
boundaries between humanity and nature and our relationship to the
animals and the gods. Likewise, the fantastical technologies that were
once the hallmarks of insanity enable us to articulate the possibilities,

threats and limits of the tools that are extending our minds into unfamiliar
dimensions, both seductive and terrifying.

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A culture of hyper-reality made paranoid delusions true | Aeon Essays 13/02/2024, 12:00 PM

A culture of hyper-reality made

fiction. They seemed to capture the zeitgeist perfectly: cautionary tales

Join over 250,000+ newsletter subscribers

The first person to examine the curiously symbiotic relationship between

schizophrenia to be convinced that their minds and bodies were being

Although these beliefs were wildly delusional, Tausk detected a method in

At the core of schizophrenia, he argued, was a ‘loss of ego-boundaries’

A desert nomad is more likely to believe that he is being buried alive in

Tausk’s theory was radical in its implication that the utterances of

In their instinctive grasp of technology’s implicit powers and threats,

Persecutory delusions, for example, can be found throughout history and

In this interpretation, the Truman Show delusion is a contemporary

Here was what Hollywood executives always assumed audiences hated:

Although the formation of delusions is unconscious and often a response

Perhaps the emergence of the influencing machine into modern fiction

before settling into a final reel of uncomplicated action.

As the American screenwriter William Goldman observed in his memoir

When we watch live sporting events on giant public screens or follow

once the hallmarks of insanity enable us to articulate the possibilities,

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