One of the tedious tasks that psychiatrists sometimes have is to listen to a patient’s speech and report back whether what he is saying is delusional. Along with hallucinations and thought disorganization, delirium is the basic psychotic symptom affecting approximately 3-5% of the population throughout their lives. The beginner immediately starts with the criterion of the correctness of the idea (if it is wrong, then it is delusional); but clinical experience tells us that this is an insufficient criterion (1 + 1 = 3 is not delusion, it is simply an error) and that we have even seen someone with truthful delusion (e.g. a patient with delusion followed by jealousy with the same symptom when his wife, fed up with so much interpretive suspicion and imagination, decided to have an extramarital affair).
On the other hand, there are other characteristics of the delusional idea that define it more precisely and the surprise is to see that they are very familiar to us because they are more or less shared with the fanatical thought that surrounds us (or dwells within ourselves, even if we don’t recognize it):
People believe certain assumptions out of a fundamental trust bias. The growing child does not scientifically test every element of his childhood universe, but trusts his parents to guide him and provide models of certainty. As he grows and adolescents, he trusts friends, teachers, relatives, couples… And accepts a certain shared vision of reality with which he is comfortable: things are more or less like this. But he knows or should know that this interpretation of reality is fallible and the result of a biography, influences, a cultural environment that could have been different.
Because of this, you can enjoy contrasting your ideas in dialogue, because someone with a different perspective and historical journey can be partially right and complete their partial perspective. You can also turn to science and see if your assumptions are consistent with current knowledge. You are lucky because your time allows you to analyze huge amounts of data and thus correct your beliefs or adjust them to objective numbers. Give yourself the pleasure of saying “It’s true, but how stupid I was!”. In other words, having a sane portrayal of reality that is open to evidence and conflicting opinions, and a strength within yourself that allows you to look inside others rather than run away from them. As Carl Rogers said, “It takes a lot of confidence and courage to put yourself at risk to understand the other.”
Fanaticism is cowardly and flees from the other and from reality. Look for niches of homogeneity, workplaces where all of their members celebrate voting for the same party, gatherings where the leader’s authority “comes to the masses,” virtual communities that recirculate waste materials that draw a line between “those who be right,” mark the others. For this reason I think it’s healthy to think about how we relate to our own ideas and to others, let’s not be more fanatical than we think. Do the others, those who think differently, seem useless, stupid, clearly wrong to you? Or rather malicious, greedy, potential oppressors? It is common for the fanatical group to feel comfortable in the victim role, looking for aggressions in space and time to infer that these crimes were committed against them (reminiscent of psychotic self-referentiality). And the fanatical group will always pursue the traitor, as Amos Oz points out in Against Fanaticism. A traitor is the one who changes in the eyes of those who cannot change and never will change…
The challenge is to intervene so that these human tendencies toward fanaticism, this delusional enlightenment, are channeled into healthy political debate. One possibility is to promote metacognition, i.e. honest reflection on one’s own thinking, its history and its fallibility (that does not mean discarding beliefs). Create conditions for dialogue, with a minimum of calm and trust in stable, solid institutions, regardless of the political omens. Miscegenation and the thoughtful exchange of perspectives that encourage collaborative work between dissenting parties. Listen to independent experts and scientists, contrast opinions with rigorous, non-ideologized data and research. Be aware that the human in a ghetto – real or digital – tends to become a fanatic. Recognize and identify this bigotry, recognize the damaging potential it has on coexistence, and calculate the risk of spotlighting it. Foster tolerant leaders who know that no one is always right. Repeating again and again that life is very rich and complex and no slogan, scheme or single perspective can ever encompass it.
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