Normal men have killed perhaps one hundred million of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.
—R. D. Laing, 1964

 

I grew up skiing in Sun Valley, Idaho. I was able to ski there because I had parents who worked there. My father drove ski bus and my mother was a nurse in the Sun Valley Hospital. I was an employee kid, which meant I could ski free.

The people who supplied my parents’ salaries—the skiers who flocked to Sun Valley—paid a great deal of money to ski there. Often they were more conscious of the cost of skiing than of skiing itself. 

My skiing experience was completely alien to theirs, and from an economic standpoint, inauthentic. I got on the lifts without paying. The ski instructors who rode my father’s bus gave me their old skis and boots every April, and aside from having to learn on skis much too long for me and wear two or three pairs of socks, they came without cost.

It took me some time to realize that riding lifts and skiing landscaped mountains were manufactured, standardized, deliberately expensive experiences. Listening to other skiers in the lift line, I began to realize that for many of them, skiing was real in proportion to the amount of money it cost them.

If you’re working fifty weeks a year, taking the family to Sun Valley means your job, no matter how soul-deadening, makes you good money. It’s proof that you exist, at least culturally.

And if you’re a multi-millionaire, your ability to buy a big house within ten miles of a ski mountain magnifies your cultural reality, a reality enhanced by your ability to keep that house empty most of the time you own it. That some people don’t have a roof over their heads while you have multiple houses gives you substance. If you sell any one of them for more than you paid for it, you’re not just a person, but a smart and durable one, unlike, say, those short-lived and nameless people in tents under the freeway.

But can you go out for a day of skiing and not think about money? If you let the abstract concept of money turn your trip through the moguls on Upper River Run into an abstraction as well, what have you done to your body and its motion through space?

Once you have money, it becomes easier to imagine losing it, along with your job, car, home, family, and skis, and becoming one of those people under the freeway. That’s when you realize that the things in your life that you’ve monetized have taken you a long way from edging your skis out into a line of untracked powder, with your eyes on the point of your next turn, a cold wind in your face, and your muscles electric.

 

I’ve been reading R. D. Laing’s The Politics of Experience again. It’s something I do every few years, usually when I start wondering if I’m crazy or if the world is. Laing rejects that either/or framework, and states unequivocally that the world is crazy, and because I’m deeply entangled with its institutions, infrastructure, finances, customs, and mystifications, I’m crazy too.

Recently I gave The Politics of Experience to a friend, who returned it unread, making me realize what a disorienting and disturbing experience attempting to read it can be. I say attempting, because although I’ve read it many times, I’ve never been able to get through it without my eyes glazing over for pages and pages. Most nights it’s a sleep aid. But meaning does get through, notably Laing’s idea that “humanity is estranged from its authentic possibilities.”

That’s a simple enough sentence, but a frightening one, because if you, as a human, are estranged from authentic possibility, you aren’t the skier or even the real person you could be. Somebody long ago made up the lie that is you so you could get along in a civilization that thwarts or kills human potential.

The fiction of your life was delivered to you in your crib, and it’s become your fate, your career path, your road to ruin. As our more successful citizens demonstrate, success only looks like success. Beyond a level of wealth that guarantees food, shelter, and healthcare, money falsifies your existence, sometimes because it’s there, sometimes because you imagine you need more than what’s there.

As the epigraph above indicates, Laing emphasizes that civilization is a form of insanity, and it enforces that insanity on the human beings who make it up. Every human is forced to abandon a true self and patch together a false self that can function within a murderous psychosis. It’s bad enough that humans are split in two, but it gets worse. The false self, over time, devours the true self.

Think of the simple delight you had in the world when you were a child. Everything you touched was real. Where is that child now? Where is that world now?

 

Something real: an early morning at the top of Baldy, a half-century ago. I’m a twenty-one-year-old child standing in front of the ski patrol hut with five other members of the Sun Valley Ski Patrol, all of us members of the 222 Club, which meets between the time the Patrol arrives at the top of the mountain and the time the first skiers come off the Warm Springs lift. Our name—222—comes from the length in centimeters of our downhill racing skis, lead-filled boards designed to go fast and turn slowly and dampen the vibration of skiing on ice.

The six of us ski out onto the top of Ridge Run, where we line up, skis facing downhill, holding ourselves from going forward with our poles, until somebody says, “Go.” I jam my poles into the ice and shoot downhill in a tuck, quickly going from zero to sixty or seventy miles an hour, avoiding the moguls in the middle of the run if I can, sucking them up with my knees if I can’t, trying not to get any air because a little air turns into a lot of air with skis that fast and that long. They act like Icarus’s wings whether they’re filled with lead or not.

Don’t be Icarus, I tell myself. Authenticity can kill you.

It’s a dangerous but exhilarating thirty seconds. All of us make it through the flats at the bottom of Ridge to the top of Rock Garden, where we stop, glad to be alive in sunshine that warms without setting you on fire, glad that we’ve experienced the real that early in the day and lived to tell the tale.

That afternoon some of us will lift injured skiers into toboggans. We’ll wrap them in blankets and strap them in. We’ll grab the toboggan handles and shoot to the bottom, ignoring any screams that come from our cargo. There, we’ll transfer the cargo to an ambulance.

Once in the hospital, the cargo will become patients, which is medicalese for cargo. Only later, at home, hobbling around on crutches, will the patients regain personhood. “I went to Sun Valley and broke my leg in two places,” they’ll say to their friends, which makes them more real than they would be if they had gone to Sun Valley and come home unscathed. In certification ceremonies, their friends will sign their casts, recognizing and formalizing and authenticating their ordeal.

Maybe that was the experience the 222 Club was after, really.

 

Authenticity seems a simple enough idea, but like a lot of simple ideas, it’s easy to articulate but hard to grasp. Examine it closely, and you’ll find yourself in a world that quivers beneath your feet, where the plainest observations turn into illusion, and where the real slips forever from your fingers.

Here’s Laing, trying to explain why it’s hard to find truth in a world that contains another human: “I do not experience your experience. But I experience you as experiencing. I experience myself as experienced by you. And I experience you as experiencing yourself as experienced by me. And so on.”

And so on translates into an infinitely extensible object lesson in one’s inability to know what’s going on inside someone else’s head. It shows the impossibility of having an honest conversation, or teaching a class, or correcting a friend’s illusions about the world. All you know for certain about other people is how they behave, and there’s a huge gap between behavior and experience.

What are they, zombies? You’ll never know.

 

Laing knew that most people in our civilization are told what their experience is by the PBS Newshour or the BBC or Fox News. They’ve learned how to be a person from sit-coms. They’ve taken their identities from the jobs they hold. If they’ve gone on vacation, they’ve paid money to occupy a stage-set, following a script that casts them as someone having a good time. Their lives have been chronicled by the products they buy, the pedigrees they married, the colleges they got their children into.

There’s a strong cultural impulse to defile experience, to steal it, control it, channel it, make money from it, hijack its energy so it no longer exists for its own sake.

 

Laing, as a therapist, was famous for being able to approach severely schizophrenic patients and enter their world, speaking and listening to them as people rather than psychiatric cargo. Perhaps because he saw personal experience as sacred, he could understand that their language, full of distasteful metaphors made flesh, indicated experience more authentic than any of us nominally sane folks are capable of.

Their false selves hadn’t been able to devour their true selves. Instead, their true selves had refused to tolerate the lies of their false selves. Their false selves had shattered.

Nothing was between them and an insane world. They had responded honestly to that insanity, and their honesty had been the ticket to a locked ward.

Laing considered the experience of schizophrenia a period of hyper-sanity. To be acculturated, comfortable in job and family, well-adjusted, well thought of—this was to present a twisted and defective self to the world, and to live the lie that this self was real. Bad craziness, at the least.

Laing wrote that normal humans are psychotic, because we mistake a cultural construct for who we are. We’ve adapted to a world that doesn’t exist. We can’t experience what does exist without giving up our cultural identity, and for most of us that’s flying too close to the sun.

 

The Politics of Experience ends with “The Bird of Paradise,” a story, as best Laing could recount it, of authentic and possibly psychotic experience. If Laing himself needed to be on antipsychotics, as some of his colleagues have claimed, it’s a crazed story written by a crazed author. If Laing was instead closer to sanity than the rest of us, if he had destroyed his cultural blinders and seen through the cultural lie, if he had learned to embrace the pain of the real, it’s what the world really looks like. 

It contains nightmares, obscene jokes, dogs run over by cars, children with hydrocephalus, lobotomy victims who think they’ve gone deaf because they don’t hear voices anymore. Some of the jokes are God’s, and they’re cruel ones about humans, and they lead to the conclusion that God has to laugh at His own jokes because the rest of us don’t understand His humor. (It’s every divine comedian’s nightmare. He’s dying up there.)

In one scene, Laing writes about being in medical school at the end of the term, in the dissection room with fifty cadavers, when the students, in a frenzy reminiscent of a food fight, start throwing body parts at each other. A professor stands in the doorway, silent until he’s noticed. Then he says, “You should be ashamed of yourselves. How do you expect them to sort themselves out on the Day of Judgment?” 

Laing ends “The Bird of Paradise,” and his book, with the words, “If I could turn you on, if I could drive you out of your wretched mind, if I could tell you I would let you know.”

I’ve never reached the last page knowing for sure what those words mean, but they hint at a vision of a world unseen, one richer, deeper, more real, and more terrible than the one we live in.

Do I think Laing was crazy? Without a doubt. Do I consider him a prophet? Yes. Do I think that The Politics of Experience will be one of the books of a post-apocalyptic Bible, a holy text that exists as a rare source of meaning in a world where catastrophe has destroyed the last vestiges of our cultural selves? I do.