A combination of toxic neo-tribalism and evolving communications media has overrun people’s real lives with “alternative realities” that even more dramatically degrade our ability to cope with our age’s challenges.

To begin with, technological advances in the conveyance of narratives have brought us to new territories that are fundamentally different from what our brains have evolved to handle.  The ground under our perceptions of reality first started to become shaky with the advent of movies and television. Since we consume these media in real time via our eyes and ears—our primary means of apprehending what is going on around us—these are highly experiential in nature, and close enough to the real thing to be confused with it.

The problem is not significant at the point when we’re watching audiovisual media.  We know then that we’re seeing an invented story, not actual reality.  But things seem to get trickier when our brains file them in memory for later retrieval and consideration in the process of thinking—especially in situations where the kind of thought that’s called for involves comparing a statement that purports to describe the real world with our own experiences of it, to determine if the statement is of dubious validity, or can be safely accepted.

Do our brains have separate areas for the storage of actual experiences and manufactured ones?  This seems unlikely, since during virtually all of our evolution, there was no such thing as a manufactured experience.  It’s more probable that when we consume experiential audiovisual media, the memory of it gets jumbled in alongside memories of our actual experiences.

There are many areas of life where “virtual experiences” are more numerous for most people than actual ones.  Seeing people die is one of these—as is seeing people be arrested.  In our roles as citizens in a democracy, when we have to evaluate accounts of a death or an arrest (whether as jury members in a trial, or as voters tasked with considering the merits of a proposed course of action in dealing with deaths or arrests), we may unwittingly judge what’s said by its conformance to what we’ve “experienced” in the movies and on television, rather than anything we actually know about real life in these areas.  

This is not a healthy or reassuring development.