The Problem with Subjective Reality—The Politics of Ice Cream:
Dr. R.D. Laing explains this underlying problem of traditional subjective reality in his book The Politics of Experience.
Basically (although I’m putting it into different terms here) if 51% of people decide that chocolate ice cream is the best kind, that makes chocolate ice cream the best kind, even though objectively speaking there is no best flavor of ice cream. Even if you don’t believe that chocolate ice cream is the best kind, you’re out-voted, and to insist that vanilla ice cream was the best kind would only get you into trouble. If your friend agrees with you that vanilla ice cream is better than chocolate, but neither of you realize the other thinks that, neither of you is going to want to be the first to admit it and risk getting into trouble, so both of you will go on saying that chocolate ice cream is the best, even though neither of you believe that. But if the only flavors included in this culturally-divisive taste-test were chocolate and vanilla, then chocolate becomes the de facto “best” flavor of ice cream on no objective or comprehensive basis at all, but on the basis of 51% of people thinking it’s better than vanilla.
Of course, some of you are going to say, “I wouldn’t care what everyone else thought, if I thought that vanilla was the best, I would say so.” Well I’m not talking about you personally, I’m talking about patterns in societies—sociological forces. Just because you would admit to disagreeing with the majority doesn’t mean everyone who disagrees with the majority is going to admit it, so your minority opinion is going to seem an even greater minority. Because the majority insists that one thing is true and the minority insists that something else is true, at the societal level, the level that’s going to have the most influence on the perception of the most people, the minority opinion is just plain wrong.
That’s what you and your minority opinion are up against, and all you have working in your favor is the satisfaction of saying what you think. Opposed to you will be all the people who prefer chocolate ice cream, plus all the people who prefer vanilla but pretend to prefer chocolate for the sake of staying out of trouble. Because the majority still prefers chocolate, even if everyone who prefers vanilla joined your vanilla revolution, you’d still be a minority, and ultimately you wouldn’t change a thing. All the people who prefer vanilla but side with the people who prefer chocolate are going to make their own lives simpler by eliminating conflict with the chocolate majority for the simple price of denying their taste in ice cream.
Dr. Laing wrote his explanation in the mid-60s, in the middle of the Civil Rights movement, the anti-war protests, the sexual revolution, and the second women’s liberation movement, when America was a much different place than it is now because those four cultural revolutions hadn’t succeeded yet, so hadn’t transformed our society from what it was then into the society we live in now. All of those revolutions succeeded eventually because the less-powerful groups of people that started them were able to affect the course of our culture. They did that by figuring out how to live more efficiently as a society by eliminating conflict by expanding their societal perception of the world.
In effect, those revolutionaries changed our cultural values from “Chocolate ice cream is the best,” to say, “Some people think chocolate ice cream is better, and some people think vanilla ice cream is better”. The people of this hypothetical vanilla ice cream civil rights movement figured out how to conduct their struggle for vanilla ice cream rights more efficiently by eliminating conflict by changing their tactic from trying to prove that vanilla ice cream was better to insisting that they be given the freedom to believe vanilla was better. If 49% of the population believes that they should be given the freedom to think vanilla ice cream was better, and at least 2% of the chocolate-eating population agrees with them, even if for no other reason than because they find it easier to agree with this new argument than to hang onto their former cultural value and the conflict it’s now bringing with it, the struggle now becomes one in which 49% of people insist that chocolate ice cream is better, and 51% of people believe that people should be given the freedom of choice between chocolate and vanilla. A critical mass of people have reached a higher level of consciousness by figuring out how to live more efficiently by eliminating a source of conflict from their world. As a result, they change the dominant viewpoint of their society and their society progresses.
But enough about you, let’s talk about me now. If I know of 31 flavors of ice cream and I think mint chocolate chip ice cream is the best, not only do I disagree with everyone in the society, no one else in the society even knows what mint chocolate chip ice cream is. Because of that, not only will the conclusions that either of us has reached be inconceivable to the other, so will the basis of our respective studies be inconceivable to the other. That is, if you don’t know what mint chocolate chip ice cream is, you can’t see why I think it’s best, and you can’t even see how I could think it’s best. I can’t imagine how you could think chocolate ice cream was the best if you’ve only had two flavors to choose from, because I can’t even understand how you could live with only two flavors of ice cream, let alone what decisions that difference would lead you to make. Your ignorance to mint-chocolate-chip ice cream will affect me and my life, but you and your overwhelming majority have no need to agree that my point of view is even valid. And even if I could give somebody in this increasingly-farcical totalitarian ice cream society a spoonful of mint chocolate chip ice cream to try, and even if they would give me an honest answer about how much they liked it, how could they decide whether it was better than chocolate if they’d been eating chocolate all their life?
(You think this explanation sounds confusing? The Beatles paraphrased Dr. Laing in the first two lines of I am the Walrus, that’s how absurd his explanation sounded! See why I’m using this one instead?)
Even if I come along to try to change the dominant viewpoint of the society after the vanilla ice cream civil rights movement has succeeded, and even if I change my argument to “People should be allowed to like any kind of ice cream they want”, if the entire realm of ice cream consciousness of this world only includes chocolate and vanilla, I’m still going to be running face-first into insurmountable conflict with my new argument. If 90% of the people of this new progressive two-flavor ice cream society are standing around patting themselves on the backs for being so open minded that they have been able to bridge the gap between chocolate and vanilla, 10% of people go on insisting that chocolate is better, and 0% of the people are aware that 29 more flavors of ice cream exist in the world, how am I ever supposed to convince anyone of my point of view?
A few people, no doubt, will be able to extrapolate upon the concept that because people should be given their choice between two flavors of ice cream they personally know about, people should be given the choice to like any other kind of ice cream that exists. Most people probably won’t know what to think, because they’ll still be trying—or not even trying—to wrap their heads around the idea that 29 more flavors of ice cream could exist.
Some people of this supposedly-open-minded ice cream society will be sure to insist that people should only be given their choice between chocolate and vanilla, and will completely overlook how much better their society has become since they resolved the dispute between chocolate and vanilla. What if some of these unknown flavors of ice cream could turn their children into monsters? What if some of these unknown flavors of ice cream could pose a threat to their national security? The people making those arguments have an advantage within the two-ice-cream-flavor society, because their arguments only depend on people being able to relate to the two specific flavors of ice cream that everyone in the society is familiar with. My argument depends on people with a limited perspective of ice cream flavors being able to expand upon that perspective to encompass the abstract concept of ice cream itself.
Suppose I’ve traveled far and wide and visited many different societies that all have different sets of ice cream flavors. Some have more flavors than others, some have many flavors, but none have all the flavors. Suppose that of the 31 flavors in the world I’ve only tried 20, and I’ve only ever met other people who have tried 8 other flavors. There are still 3 flavors of ice cream that I have heard of but have no familiarity with. However, suppose that everywhere I go, people have all agreed that ice cream is good. Suppose that everywhere I go people have been bridging differences between ice cream flavors within their own societies. Suppose there are other people in the world who are familiar with ice cream flavors beyond those of their own society. Suppose those people on the whole agree that there are other flavors of ice cream that are good. Suppose that because of that familiarity there are more people who are able to grasp the concept of ice cream itself.
Suppose there are other people in the world who travel among societies and bring their own ice cream with them to let people of other societies try. Suppose there are people in the world who are trying to bridge differences between individual flavors of different societies. All of that makes my argument that “People should be allowed to like any flavor of ice cream” a whole lot easier to make.
In other words, if I tried making my argument that “All ice cream is good” in medieval Europe, I would’ve been burned as a heretic. Luckily, we live in the 21st century, where global travel, telecommunications, and cultural blending have made people aware of a lot more than just two flavors of ice cream, especially here in America.
Of course, people don’t care about ice cream flavors that much in real life, do they? In real life people are far too busy arguing about sensible things like which religion is the best, or which color of people are the best, or which of two political parties has all the answers. Granted, the world has changed a great deal in nearly four decades since Dr. Laing wrote that book, but not as much as you might think. Even if the majority of people now believe that there are so many different flavors of ice cream in the world that no one could ever comprehensively proclaim all ice cream to be good, the majority of people have still created a de facto subjective reality by agreeing on that. See what I mean?