• by Gord Hotchkiss , Featured Contributor, August 28, 2018

Even without Giuliani’s bizarre statement, we’re developing a weird relationship with the truth. It’s becoming even more inconvenient. It’s certainly becoming more worrisome.

I was chatting with a psychiatrist the other day who counsels seniors. I asked him if he was noticing more general anxiety in that generation -- a feeling of helplessness with how the world seems to be going to hell in a handbasket. I asked him that because I am less optimistic about the future than I ever have been in my life. I wanted to know if that was unusual. He said it wasn’t. I had plenty of company.

You can pick the truth that is most unsettling. Personally, I lose sleep over climate change, the rise of populist politics and the resurgence of xenophobia. I have to limit the amount of news I consume in any day, because it sends me into a depressive state. I feel helpless. And as much as I’m limiting my intake because of my own mental health, I can’t help thinking that this is a dangerous path I’m heading down.

I researched and found that PTSD (President Trump Stress Disorder) and TAD (Trump Anxiety Disorder) were identified by the American Psychological Association.  After a 10-year decline, anxiety levels in the U.S spiked dramatically after November 2016. Clinical psychologist Dr. Jennifer Panning, who coined TAD, says “the symptoms include feeling a loss of control and helplessness, and fretting about what’s happening in the country and spending excessive time on social media.”

But it’s not just the current political climate that’s causing anxiety. It’s also the climate itself. Enter “ecoanxiety.” Again, the APA in a recent paper nails a remarkably accurate diagnosis of how I’m feeling: “Gradual, long-term changes in climate can also surface a number of different emotions, including fear, anger, feelings of powerlessness, or exhaustion.”

“You can’t handle the truth” -- Colonel Nathan R. Jessup (from the movie “A Few Good Men”)

So, when the truth scares the hell out of you, what do you do?  We can find a few clues in the quotes above. One is this idea of a loss of control. The other is spending excessive time on social media. My belief is that the latter exacerbates the former. 

In a sense,  Giuliani is right. Truth isn’t truth, at least, not on the receiving end. We all interpret truth within the context of our own perceived reality.

This in no way condones the manipulation of truth upstream from when it reaches us. We need to trust that our information sources provide the closest thing possible to a verifiable and objective view of truth. 

But we have to accept the fact that for each of us, truth will ultimately be filtered through our own beliefs and understanding of what is real. Part of our own perceived reality is how in control we feel of the current situation. And this is where we begin to see the creeping levels of anxiety.

In 1954, psychologist Julian Rotter introduced the idea of a "locus of control": the degree of control we believe we have over our own lives.

For some of us, our locus is tipped to the internal side. We believe we are firmly at the wheel of our own lives. Others have an external locus, believing that life is left to forces beyond our control. But like most concepts in psychology, the locus of control is not a matter of black and white. It is a spectrum of varying shades of gray. And anxiety can arise when our view of reality seems to be beyond our own locus of control.

The word locus itself comes from the Latin for place or location. Typically, our control is exercised over those things that are physically close to us.

Up until 150 years ago, that worked well. We had little awareness of things beyond our own little world, so we didn’t need to worry about them.

But electronic media changed that. Suddenly, we were aware of wars, pestilence, poverty, famines and natural disasters from around the world. This made us part of Marshall McLuhan’s “Global Village.” The circle of our locus of awareness suddenly had to accommodate the entire world, but our locus of control just couldn’t keep pace.

Even with this expansion of awareness, one could still say that truth remained relatively true. There was an editorial check and balance process that checked the veracity of the information we were presented. It certainly wasn’t perfect, but we could place some confidence in the truth of what we read, saw and heard.

And then came social media, which creates a nasty feedback loop when it comes to the truth.

Once again, Panning typified these new anxieties as “fretting about what’s happening in the country and spending excessive time on social media.”

The algorithmic targeting of social media platforms means that you’re getting a filtered version of the truth. Facebook knows exactly what you’re most anxious about and feeds you a steady diet of content tailored specifically to those anxieties.

We have the comfort of seeing posts from members of our network that seem to fear the same things we do and share the same beliefs. But the more time we spend seeking this comfort, the more we’re exposed to the anxiety-inducing triggers, and the further and further we can drift from the truth. 

All this creates a downward spiral that leads to these new types of environmental anxiety we are seeing. To deal with those anxieties, we’re developing new strategies for handling the truth -- or, at least, our version of the truth. That’s where I’ll pick up next week.