Depressive Realism
Some psychology studies have shown that people who have depression are better able to assess reality than people who don’t have depression. This is called “depressive realism”, and I want to be clear that it is not accepted by a significant portion of psychiatrists. I believe it’s real because it matches up with my experience.
I am not currently depressed, but I do have depression. It’s like how I’m not drunk at the moment, but I am still an alcoholic. These are conditions that govern my perception of reality.
I have always struggled to accept the world as it is. Alcohol, and other drugs, helped blot out the painfulness of existence in this world for a while, but eventually they stopped working. I have had to learn other, less destructive ways to cope with the horrible fact that I live in a world where cruelty and indifference to suffering are the norm. Antidepressants help me get through the day. My belief that there is — or at least, might be — a divine intelligence operating behind and within history to bring the nightmare which we call the “human condition” to a peaceful resolution makes it possible for me to hope for something and not simply cut my participation in this world. I’m not just talking about the possibility that I’ll go to heaven when I die. I acknowledge the possibility that I’m wrong about God, and that death might just mean nonexistence, and I’m fine with that. I don’t see how nonexistence could be worse than living in the world as it is.
The Bible doesn’t just say that Christians will go to heaven when they die — it says that the world, the planet Earth, will be transformed into a new Eden, which the Bible writers usually call Zion. I guess all the microplastics and nuclear waste will disappear or something. I love this planet — I’m a committed environmentalist — and I very much look forward to enjoying it when it becomes what God intended it to be. I have hope for this.
On the surface of it, depressive realism seems to be the idea that reality is depressing. While I certainly find this to be true, that’s only because I can imagine something so much better. The scientific explanation for depressive realism — again, not accepted by everyone — is that people who have depression do not construct belief systems that are favorable to themselves, or adopt such belief systems when they are given them by their society. Creating or adopting favorable belief systems would seem to have some benefits: if you live in a situation where your survival depends on other people, sharing their beliefs will help you to bond with them, and they to you, which will make you more likely to work together for mutual benefit. So, if your tribe agrees that you are the best humans and all others are lesser, then you will be more likely to help each other in your competition for resources. The guy who comes along and says, “Actually, the other tribes are people just like us”, is undercutting the belief system that justifies competing for resources, as opposed to just sharing everything with the other tribe. That guy is right, of course, but being right doesn’t help him in that situation.
All nations engage in this kind of tribalism — nationalism — to some extent. The most obvious and appalling example would be Germany during the Third Reich, but there is no shortage of examples in history. Two-thousand years ago, Rome was actively subjugating as much of Europe, Asia and Africa as they could. Some people, including myself, would say that the United States has engaged in more than a little of this kind of behavior. And I’ve never been able to accept the apparent belief that so many people have, that I should care more about Americans than people of other countries.
When 9/11 happened, I saw a lot of people in a state of shock, as if the world as they knew had been turned inside out. I couldn’t understand it. The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were certainly surprising to me, but they did not shake my fundamental view of reality because I knew I lived in a world where things like that could happen. In fact, they happen all the time, just usually in other countries. I see people get shocked and upset about mass shootings — the really big ones — as if mass shootings weren’t routine events in the US. I agree that mass shootings are bad, but they’re bad things that happen every few weeks. I’m just not surprised anymore. Occasionally, I’ll be in the truck listening to NPR and they’ll be talking about some investigation that uncovered racism in some facet of American life — college admissions or medical treatment or whatever — and they act like it’s a big deal that racism exists in America, as if it hadn’t always been blatantly obvious. Really, show me a report that there is any aspect of American life that isn’t shot through with racism.
People don’t want to live in a world where terrorist attacks and mass shootings are normal occurances. White people don’t want to admit that they benefit from racism, even if they don’t actively engage in it. I understand — I also don’t like it — but I am not able to build or adopt a belief system that shields me from these realities. I can’t unsee the grotesque injustice that surrounds me everyday. And the most egregious and far-reaching false belief system that I see demonstrated by people all the time is the one that goes “this is just the way it is and we can’t do anything about it”, because we certainly can do something about it.
I believe that God has built into the framework of the world that He is working in partnership with human beings; that human beings have consistently failed to hold up their end; that God chose to work with and through a specific people group, the Jews, for a period of time; and that He completed that particular project by becoming incarnated as Jesus of Nazareth, a descendent of Abraham, being crucified and triumphing over death. That probably sounds inconsistent with everything I said about building or adopting belief systems, but there it is. My belief in Jesus is based on my experience — I have been convinced by the evidence of my senses. Martin Luther, following the thinking of Augustine, said that it is only by the grace of God that people can believe in God. That rings true for me. I could not accept the basic premises of Christianity, as anything other than metaphors, for many years. Then, quite unexpectedly, I found myself to be a Christian. I didn’t stop believing in science, and I do think that some of what’s presented in the Bible is intended as metaphor, but I have no trouble affirming the Apostles’ Creed.
Someone might say that by being a Christian I have adopted a belief system that benefits me. I would agree. Being a Christian does benefit me — so much so that I don’t need the promise of eternal heaven to make it “worth it”. I’m quite content to live this life as a Christian whether I get to go to a better place after I die or not. The fact that I’m a Christian doesn’t lessen my perception of the world as it is as a horrible place. Cruelty and indifference to suffering are just as sickening to me as they ever were. I continue to believe that it is indefensible that there are people starving and suffering from treatable illnesses in a world where food and medicine could be available to everyone, if some people cared more about people than profits. There is some upside to depressive realism — it means that I’m not shocked when bad things happen, and that I’m relieved of any responsibility to stay informed about pop culture. I’m a male-presenting trans lesbian, but I understand that pronouns are linguistic shortcuts that don’t actually matter, so I don’t have any need to insist that people ignore my beard and refer to me as “she”. It’s a mixed blessing.
The point that I’m getting at here is that people build or adopt belief systems that are beneficial to them — or that they think are beneficial to them. White people choose to believe that racism in America is the exception rather than the norm because they prefer to believe that they are not complicit in racism. This seems to benefit them/us in the short term, but in the long term it perpetuates a racist system that hurts all of us. Really accepting that they/we are complicit, to some degree, and then doing the work to change things would be more beneficial to more people in the long run, but it would require a critical mass of white people to change. People don’t like to change. There is research that shows that if you show most people evidence that their beliefs are wrong, they will work harder to defend their beliefs. That research is less disputed than the research about depressed people being better able to understand reality.
I don’t mean to give the impression that I think I don’t have any false belief systems. I very probably do. When I was in my mid-twenties, I believed that I was not racist at all. One day, it occurred to me to wonder if it was possible for me to grow up surrounded by racists, in a racist country, and not absorb any racist ideas. I realized that I was telling myself what I wanted to believe — that I was not racist at all — at the expense of the truth. Surely, I had picked up some bias against people of color during my life because how could I not have? At that point, I stopped telling myself I wasn’t racist and started focusing on treating people equally. I have had other realizations at various points about beliefs that I had that I didn’t know I had. I’m simply saying that I believe I have a slight advantage when it comes to identifying belief systems and questioning their validity.
Questioning our beliefs is valuable because we may be holding onto ideas that no longer serve us. From where I’m sitting, it seems pretty clear that the overwhelming majority of people on God’s green earth are holding onto beliefs that are bad for all of us. The human condition is a nightmare because collectively, we make it so. Ultimately, what I intend to do here is present my ideas about how we might do something different.