First published, 15th October 2018
What is potentially interesting about the Dunning-Kruger effect is not so much that there is a cognitive bias in those tested but between those at opposite ends of the intelligence spectrum, when perceiving each other. Intelligent individuals may well have a tendency to assume all are as intelligent as themselves. The D-K effect notes something about self esteem but there is also a social psychological or egocentric effect that has not been examined that revolves around the perception of others as being like ourselves. Of course, because of the tested D-K effect, where stupid people regard themselves as more intelligent than they actually are, it follows, that we all of us regard our species as being brighter than it actually is. I suppose that, because we have been the only species so far to have classified all species, including our own, it would have been a predictable inevitability that we should have seen ourselves as the only wise ones. But, perhaps, the apparent sapience of our nature might better be considered (being the possible result of the illusory superiority effect) the result of a self-perceiving delusion. In a post D-K world, we might be better renamed Homo hallucinatio. Perhaps, in the distant future, somewhat far superior beings might dig up our fossils scattered amongst the detritus of plastic bottles and shopping trolleys and name us Homo adrogans. But, for now, we must make do with ‘Homo sapiens’. The wise ones…
Whether we like it or not, our individual experience (of existence) is framed by the infinite non experience of not being. So, one cannot sensibly not be a nihilist, certainly not if one is willing to look that far down or deeply into the well. Or, it is as if non existence is somehow ‘outside’. We can choose to open the windows or keep them shut fast during our all too brief tenancy of this thing we call ‘life’. Though little life is rounded by a sleep, life is, itself, a dream: an unreality constructed by and in our minds located in an outer place that is itself nowhere and nothing. We are such stuff…
But even if we choose to shut out the reality of our inescapable and infinite state of non existence, it is the neo-nihilist’s belief that a chink or two, the occasional shaft of shadow might usefully be permitted to cut into the unhappy illusions of consciousness – perhaps at such meditative times when we feel the need and sense the value of reorienting ourselves within the matrix of self imposed trials and tribulations. When things seem too important to bear, it is comforting, perhaps, to remember that nothing actually matters outside the games we construct for ourselves (or those that are constructed for us by others) which, in turn, we consider to be the inescapable trappings of practical living. Solamen miseris socios habuisse doloris.
In Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, twenty four years of frivolous revelries are not exchanged for an afterlife of everlasting hell, they are themselves hell. Marlowe presents a solipsistic world of the now. Hell, Mephistophilis explains, is no place but the mind:
Faustus: Where are you damned?
Mephistophilis: In hell.
Faustus: How comes it, then, that thou art out of hell?
Mephistophilis: Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it…
So successfully internalised are the events in Faustus’s mind, their dramatic exposure to others is enough to drive an audience equally mad. Early performances did, indeed, do just that.
Hell, an important cultural myth, is not, usefully speaking, a punishment somehow reserved for a time after all crimes have been played out, all the rope has been used up. Hell is not revenge but the contemporaneous state of mind of the mad do-badders that aspire to populate the upper power echelons of society. The return of a growing rash of devil-may-care tyrants, dictators and despots that, it would seem, must return to populate the present, post-apocalyptic/pre-apocalyptic century (a facet of our war-regeneration-war thing) must captivate the audience just as Marlowe’s too numerous devils succeeded in doing some centuries ago. Each tyrant monarch is a Doctor Faustus and wannabe Lucifer selling his soul for fifteen pounds per year to a priest God never paid. Perhaps those who are now caught staring in disbelief, those who want to stay sane, would be best leaving the auditorium at this point. Ladies and gentlemen, exits are right and left and out the back door.