Jared Loughner's World of Illusion … and Y/Ours

You think Jared Loughner is nuttier than a fruitcake? Just take a few minutes out of your own schedule to read some of the e-mail you delete. Read some of the crap in your spam folder. Check your Facebook home page; read some or all of your Facebook friend's walls. Join a few freaky or idiotic Facebook groups that never in your right mind you would ever consider. Just for the hell of it, See what all you'll StumbleUpon. You don't have to go far to find stuff even far more weird. Try your local supermarket, library, McDonald's, Burger King or WalMart store or shopping mall where people hang out with no intent to be "normal." It's a ZOO out here in these United States... Then there are places everywhere in the big city or rural sticks where going down that road or lane is risking life and limb... You have just entered the Twilight Zone or killing fields... Jared seems a bit tame or naive or saner than most of what you can find under most any rock. Spooky!!!

Slate

Jared Loughner's World of Illusion … and Ours

The accused Tucson killer isn't the only one who has a love affair with alternative realities.

By Jack Shafer
Posted Thursday, Jan. 13, 2011, at 7:32 PM ET

See Slate's complete coverage of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting and the arrest of Jared Lee Loughner.

The Matrix, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, and Inception

As long as we're using Jared Lee Loughner's tastes in philosophy and literature to probe his psyche—and I'm not saying we shouldn't—let's scrutinize our own tastes, too. I'm not suggesting a Mailerian equivalence between Loughner and the average man, so stop composing that irate e-mail to me right now. But Loughner's obsession with alternative realities, his idea that the universe is malleable and a function of an individual's will, is mirrored almost everywhere we look in pop culture.

According to a Mother Jones piece by Nick Baumann, Loughner believed in "lucid dreaming," namely that "conscious dreams are an alternative reality that a person can inhabit and control." That may sound like the currency of the insane, but it's the stuff of our most popular entertainments. Lucid dreaming served as the foundation for the fifth-best grossing movie of 2010, Inception.

Today's Washington Post calls reality-bending novelist Philip K. Dick—the author of such classics as Time Out of Joint and Ubik—Loughner's favorite writer. While Dick produced most of his short stories and novels for the pulp press, he has recently been acknowledged as a master of literature by the Library of America, which has published three volumes of his work. In Dick's fiction, characters are trapped and liberated as the realities around them melt, buckle, and turn inside out. He defined reality in a 1978 essay as "that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away" but characteristically amended the thought several paragraphs later, writing, "If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words."

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An erudite overview of Dick's work published in the New Republic in 1993 captures the writer's oeuvre. "To enter a novel by Philip K. Dick is to enter a zone of disappearing worlds, nested hallucinations and impossible time-loops," Alexander Star writes. "Dick systematically blurs the boundaries between mind and matter, between storms in the psyche and crises of the atmosphere. The coiling search to set things right is doubled and redoubled and doubled again. Dick never met a story that ended or a regression that was finite."

If Jared Loughner was living out the Dickian philosophy to a schizophrenic extreme, so, it appears, did Dick. "Phil was not crazy by any standard I would dare apply," writes biographer Lawrence Sutin in Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick, citing his interviews with a psychiatrist and a psychologist who saw Dick during two difficult periods in his life. But Dick told his third wife, Anne Dick, that he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia when in high school. It was a very hot topic with the writer. "Phil was hypochondriacal about his mental condition," Anne said. When she was admitted to a psychiatric facility for assessment, Dick speculated about himself, telling a doctor that he was mentally ill, perhaps schizophrenic, and that he should be hospitalized, Sutin writes.

In one letter quoted by Sutin, Dick grumbles about how his wild behaviors had earned him the reputation "of an advanced schizophrenic who believed everyone was plotting against him." Dick self-medicated on drugs for most of his adult life, even trying a vitamin regimen, to beat his self-diagnosis of schizophrenia. He embraced the teaching of Swiss psychoanalyst Ludwig Binswanger, who, Star writes, "believed that schizophrenia involved a disturbance in the patient's orientation toward time." He had religious visions, claimed that his mind had been invaded by a "transcendentally rational mind" and believed he had been possessed by the prophet Elijah.

Jack Shafer previously analyzed Jared Loughner's photo, defended inflamed rhetoric, and warned against throwing inconvenient Web pages into the memory hole.

Again, I'm not equating Loughner and Dick but trying to establish how Dick harnessed the schizophrenic's worldview of mirror-worlds, parallel universes, and scrims behind scrims behind scrims to power his fiction. In Dick's world, the schizophrenic response to the world is not just normal; it is heroic—and doubly heroic when the protagonist breaks through the reality barriers that have marginalized him.

Thanks to Dick, pop culture caught up with schizophrenia and, thanks to Dick's followers, surpassed it. In Dick's world, the paranoid view is almost always the wisest one to embrace. Elements of Philip K. Dick can be found in such recent movies as The Matrix, in which a dreamer who is being fed upon by machines is awakened to fight and destroy them in a cyber realm. In Dark City, another dreaming protagonist discovers and combats the superintelligent observers who experiment on hundreds of thousands of people by periodically erasing their memories and reconfiguring the simulacrum of a 1950s Chicagoish city as they sleep. Hollywood has turned other Dick works into reality-bending movies, including Total Recall, Minority Report, and A Scanner Darkly. According to IMDB, a remake of Total Recall is in preproduction.

What is the TV show Lost but a six-season treatise on what is real and what is illusion, who is mad and who is sane, and what the limits of logic and faith are? In the Harry Potter series, the young wizard discovers a parallel world hidden to normal humans in which an evil power seeks to destroy and enslave the inhabitants of both worlds. Other movies in which reality is faked, augmented, and otherwise altered include The Truman Show, The Game, and Avatar, in which even the crippled can walk again. And I'm not even including the hundreds of movies in which ghosts take us into their realms or any of the physicists who speculate that our world is just a projection of some higher, multi-dimensional universe.

According to the Post, Loughner especially loved the movie Waking Life, which chronicles one man's adventures in the dream pool, as he walks "in and out of dreams, exploring ideas about the fleeting nature of identity."

Dreaming your way to a magical space was already a hackneyed notion by the time Dick started writing in the 1950s. Alice dreams her way to Wonderland, Dorothy's unconscious mind transports her to Oz, and Peter Pan takes Wendy and her brothers to Never Land as they prepare to settle down for a night's sleep. In all three stories, the young heroes struggle against the sometimes tempting, sometimes frightening alternative reality until they break free and return home. So satisfying were these tales that their audiences demanded—and were given—sequels in which Alice, Dorothy, and Wendy all return to their other, truer dimensions and were tested again.

Everybody shares Loughner's appetite for life in another dimension where they can be in control. One difference between Loughner and the man in the street is that the man in the street can easily distinguish between the imagined and the real—something Loughner appears to have struggled with. When our minds occupy alternative realities, we know it's only a movie, only a book, only a philosophical tract, or only a flask of physicists' moonshine. When we visit alternative realities, our grips on this reality grow firmer. When Loughner goes there, I suspect he strips a few mental threads and loses his hold on our world.

What's it like to live on the leading edge of paranoia? From his perspective, what does his 6-by-6 cell look like? Is it a collapsing cube or does it stretch beyond the infinite?

******

What alt-reality stories, movies, and authors did I neglect to mention? Surely something by Borges. Send tips to slate.pressbox@gmail.com. For an unsavory reality, dip into my Twitter feed. (E-mail may be quoted by name in "The Fray," Slate's readers' forum; in a future article; or elsewhere unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Permanent disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.)

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Why We Should Take Jared Loughner's Politics Seriously

Friday 14 January 2011

by: Steve Striffler, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

(Image: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t; Adapted: HeyThereSpaceman., unforth, D Sharon Pruitt)

Jared Loughner, the 22-year-old accused of shooting Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 19 others, apparently drew political ideas from the radical right and radical left, listing (fascist) Hitler's "Mein Kampf" and (communist) Karl Marx's "Communist Manifesto" among his favorite books. He was also attracted to conspiracy theories, thought we should be on a gold standard (because the government was trying to control us through currency), and at times just believed life was meaningless and nothing could be done.

Contrary to the prevailing wisdom, however, holding muddled political views does not in and of itself necessarily make Loughner mentally ill, unstable, crazy, or even particularly unusual. It makes him American and peculiarly so. In the college classroom, at political events and in grassroots organizing meetings, it does not take long to find many young (and not so young) people who hold what many of us consider to be an oddly contradictory collection of political views. After more than a decade of teaching, I can say that very few of today's college students have any sense of what "the left" or "the right" are or have traditionally stood for, what "liberal" and "conservative" have historically meant or where on the political spectrum we might place fascism and communism. When asked, most students - most Americans - "know" that Hitler and Marx are "bad," but very few can articulate what they stood for politically and many often assume that Nazi and Communist are synonymous.

Like Loughner, a significant portion of young people are, for very good reasons, profoundly anti-establishment, distrustful of anything they hear from the government or mainstream media. But this does not make them crazy anymore than it automatically leads them toward a coherent critique of the political system. Rather, in a world where fragments of information come from so many sources, it often leads them to the odd place where any explanation of the world is as good as any other, where there is no conceptual rudder for judging one theory or idea against another. Hence, they draw from wildly opposing political ideologies and are attracted to conspiracy theories. And it often leaves them in a frustrated place where public figures cannot be trusted, and to the conclusion that nothing can be done to change the world (except perhaps something chaotic and dramatic). Hence, the tendency toward apathy and (after a philosophy class or two) nihilism.

How the hell could we expect otherwise? It is bit ridiculous to ask why so few Americans are politically literate, much less hold politically coherent ideas, after we have gutted public education, turned schools into learning prisons and told young people over and over again they are consumers and not citizens. Political literacy, we learn, is no longer even a requirement for seeking political office, but is in fact seen as a drawback. And an important source of such political guidance, the left, has all but disappeared from mainstream life.

Within this context, it is amazing that any person in their twenties is able to develop anything resembling a coherent political framework for understanding the world, let alone acquire the tools to decipher between news and entertainment, to critically evaluate the fragments of information flying at them 24 hours a day from their TVs, computers and smart phones. Most do not have these tools by the time they arrive to college, and I long ago stopped expecting them to. But neither do I hold it against them, or dismiss their views simply because they are (from my perspective) muddled, incoherent and frequently go in completely opposite directions. I take them seriously both because it is my job as an educator and because I know a better future depends on equipping them with the ability to piece together a critical framework for understanding the world.

It is a bit ironic that at the same time as many commentators are urging us to listen more closely to our opponents' ideas and resist the urge to demonize them, that we are dismissing Loughner's political views without even so much as a real discussion. What he did is horrible, but the commentary has gone too quickly from "Loughner's actions were politically motivated" to "it had nothing to do with politics." We are now told that because his political views do not fall seamlessly into a neat box labeled "left" or "right" that they were irrelevant for understanding events in Arizona and, by connection, for understanding the current political situation in the United States. We should take Loughner's political views seriously. His mental state may have led him down a particularly destructive path, but his political confusion is by no means unique.

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