Delusions of Reality

Do you know what the definition of insanity is? No, it's not doing the same thing expecting different results. That's called practice. I do it every day with the piano and, sure enough, the results are slightly better each day.

No, insanity is when one's perception of reality is different from reality itself. For instance, a man who believes himself Theodore Roosevelt, or thinks himself a cat, or that he hears voices. In each case, the person's idea of what is real is different from what is really real. The man is not Theodore Roosevelt, or a cat, and the voices are mere hallucination.

Increasingly, I've been feeling that the whole world has gone, by this definition, completely insane. Totally loony. Off their rockers. Large swaths of the population seem to be totally given over to ideas that have no bearing in reality. It's like everyone is playing a children's game where we all pretend we're monkeys in the zoo, or astronauts in outer space, or cowboys and Indians. But when I don't play along, or return to reality and stop pretending, everyone gets mad and indignant with me because they really believe they are monkeys or astronauts or cowboys. It's really quite surreal.

What brought on this feeling most recently was an article my Google reader recommended items pointed me towards (it recommends weird things). Apparently a school in Michigan has refused to allow a girl to be homecoming king because she's a girl, not a boy. This is, apparently, a problem because the girl is playing a make-believe game in which she pretends she's a boy. But the weird part is that so many other people are playing along and pretending the same thing. The news item itself refers to her as a "him", despite the fact that it even mentions towards the end that she hasn't even had the cosmetic surgery to add boy-parts. So in no real, objective way is this girl a boy--only in her mind and the minds of those playing along with her. She has no Y-chromosome, or male genitalia, or a prostate, or any of the biological capabilities that set men and women apart, yet many people seem totally willing to give themselves into the fantasy that she is somehow a boy.

The thing is, I understand how we arrived at this point. This bit of insanity starts with a very simple and common desire--people want to have sex. Nothing in the world wrong with that, of course. "The union of man and woman in marriage is a way of imitating in the flesh the Creator's generosity and fecundity," sayeth the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC 2335) (emphasis original). The problem comes when people want sex without consequences. Since procreation is the natural end of sex--as ordained by God and, y'know, biology and natural selection--we have to step into our first little bit of insanity to get the footloose and fancy free sex we want: we must pretend that babies are not the natural end of sex, but an unintended side effect. This is, of course, a perception that is disconnected with reality--an insanity, if you will--but one that is pretty easy to make. After all, babies only occasionally occur from sex, and with contraception, they almost never occur (although I always feel obliged to mention my friend who has gotten pregnant three times while on The Pill). It becomes very easy to enter the contraceptive mentality, and convince ourselves that, as Jennifer Fulwiler says, "pregnancies that weren’t planned [are] akin to being struck by lightning while walking down the street — something totally unpredictable, undeserved, that happened to people living normal lives."

But this new pseudo-reality we've created for ourselves has consequences and implications of its own. If we pretend that sex is only for pleasure or bonding, and only mutual consent is required, then that means that any sexual act that fulfills that purpose of pleasure is not only licit, but equivalent to any other sex act with the same goal. The necessary outcome of this make-believe logic is that homosexual acts are equivalent to heterosexual acts. Suddenly, we've found ourselves with a new bit of insanity and we must now say that sex that has the potential to produce life is no different than sex that cannot by its very nature. We must pretend that homosexuals' unions are just like that of my wife and me, even though we made one of these and they can't. This is a much bigger disconnect from reality, but once we have accepted it, we are forced to pretend that, since homosexual sex and heterosexual sex are the same, therefore gay "marriage" must be permitted because not to do so would be discrimination.

And yet again, this new bit of greater insanity pushes us further along. For if gay "marriage" and real marriage are no different, then that means that men and women, when you get right down to it, are no different. And here we've finally arrived in Cloud Cuckoo Land. This is where we end up saying that we must pretend a girl is a boy simply because she says she is. We have separated our thoughts from reality. Real, objective things in the real, objective world no longer hold sway on our minds. We have gone bonkers.

(Another consequence of the make-believe world in which pregnancy is an accident is that it leads us to the perfectly reasonable and compassionate conclusion that it's cruel to require a woman to be pregnant against her will--since her little insanity made her incapable of knowing sex could get her pregnant--which leads to allowing her to "terminate the pregnancy", to use a euphemism for infanticide. But since no one is in favor of infanticide, we must, therefore, pretend that the infant is not one, or is not alive, or does not exist. This delusion leads us to completely absurd ways of rationalizing our make-believe world. Instead of using the English word for baby, we use the Latin one ("fetus"), and pretend that changes the nature of the baby. We invent arbitrary and make-believe criteria for humanity or personhood or "aliveness" and pretend that since the baby absorbs oxygen through an umbilical cord instead of his lungs, or since he cannot survive in an environment hostile to him, he somehow is not alive (how many dead people do you know with a heartbeat?). The more science piles on evidence of the humanity of the pre-born, the more we arbitrarily raise the bar and invent make-believe reasons that it is not.)

The thing is, at some point between "I want to have sex with that hot girl in the bar" and "a girl is a boy," I would think that people would realize the insanity of their train of thought, and the disconnect it has with reality. But yet people plow ahead, full throttle, never looking back, never stopping to consider where they're going. I find myself wondering, with a good deal of trepidation, what the next piece of absurdity will bring.

As J. Budziszewski points out, sin begets sin, but as Mark Shea points out, sin makes you stupid. We start with a simple sin and end with a simple madness.