What is “reality”?  It is lived phenomena empirically processed by the brain’s intimate embrace of lived experience.  What is “shared reality”?  It is the collective embrace of empirical experience and data through the lens of common sense.

In Parts I and II of this blog, I used neurobiology and citizen science to help you look at how media/social media bombard and often traumatize adult and children’s brains.  If you have not read Parts I and II, I hope you will do so on www.gurianinstitute.com.  Part III follows on their shoulders to provide stages of the seven stages of what I am asking us to look at as a new social disease.

Calling a broad social condition or trauma a “disease” can backfire.  The more diseases we experts come up with, the more a population resists using the medical model for psychological science.  But I think disease is warranted as regards reality cloaking, if not literally then at least as helpful metaphor.  In Parts I and II, I explored the ways that our brains create rumination loops, potentially dangerous reality cloaks, and systemizing frames as trauma-response to the sensory and emotive bombardment of social media.  Dangers, I pointed out, show up in depression, anxiety, rage and violence that grow from the negativity bias, rumination loops, and trauma in the brain.  It is possible for the connection, even causation, between the systemizing frame and the resulting anxiety to remain invisible for months as the short-term feelings of safety and empathy that loop within the cloaks, frames, patterns, and systems end up promising short term safety and empathy but increase longer term lack of safety and lack of empathy in the brain.

In Part III, I will unfold why I think reality-cloaking has become at least a psychological stressor if not a pathology.  I will provide the stages of this pathology so that you can watch for them in your own and your children’s lives.

 

The Single Frame Effect in Covid 19 Response School Shutdowns

 

In Parts I and II I used examples from both sides of the political spectrum.  Here is another example of reality cloaking that is non-partisan:  Covid 19 School shutdown Response.

In previous blogs and in my books, I have asked you to be a citizen scientist–to study the community and personal battles you and others are engaged in.  Some of them will be righteous, no doubt, but many of them may be laden with reality cloaking, ideological framing in short bursts/words built through social media, and negativity bias projected constantly into the world and re-framed as imposed by a stereotyped enemy.   Social media, we’ve established, is inherently a reality cloaking device because 1) it can become trauma in the brains of people who hyper-use it, 2) its short burst words/images cannot provide reality reflection to the brain in depth, and 3) its algorithmic proliferation through technology affects human dependencies.

Let us now add another element to the reality cloaking process:  the Single Frame Effect.

Because reality is complex and a social-media-driven reality is often traumatic, our traumatized brains pattern-seek in hyper-drive as a way to manage our trauma.  As we seek and find a pattern online, we often put all our eggs in the one basket the pattern seems to reveal, the one frame and one reality cloak we believe in and proliferate in our own social media.

This is the Single Frame Effect that allows us to say to others, “If you don’t agree with me you are part of the problem, you are the enemy.”  When the “others” responds back with nuance, we feel, even if we don’t say it, “You can’t be trusted because you don’t agree with me.”   People who said, “The 74 million Trump voters are racists” operated from a single frame effect, as did others who said, “Biden voters are socialists who hate our society.”   In these political cases, there was only one available frame, “Trump is evil, so you are evil” or “Biden is evil, so you are evil.”

Our Covid response to child education during the pandemic revealed, I believe, another more nuanced example of the single frame effect.   The media’s and social media’s promulgation of rising Covid case and death statistics bombarded us and frightened us, not just some of us but, likely, all of us.  The Covid case and death rates created empathy in us along with fear, and in March and April 2020, workplaces and schools shut down most in person activities, including in person schooling.  Even though, relatively quickly, it became clear from scientific and medical research that schools did not have to shut down because children were generally safe from the virus, did not spread the virus as we thought they would, and masks could be worn to get everyone back in school, severe framing and cloaking had already spread across the country.  Many schools still are not open for in person education.

Without media/social media bombardment, and the constant trauma of it in our brains, I don’t think we would have shut all in person schools down, nor essential children’s and teens’ sports, nor essential child and adolescent socialization, at least not for almost a year now.  The single frame effect that grew collectively from the constant fear-bombardment in media/social media affected everyone in some way, and especially affected people in power in various states and in school districts.  Even now, the single frame effect is prevalent as our fear responses have only dissipated slightly since last summer.  The prevalence of that single frame effect is somewhat surprising, given the publication of the Great Barrington Declaration.

This Declaration, which you can access online, was researched, signed, and published by thousands of epidemiologists worldwide in fall/winter of 2020.  These scientists confirm reality:  “Vulnerability to death from COVID-19 is more than a thousand-fold higher in the old and infirm than the young.  Indeed, for children, COVID-19 is less dangerous than many other harms, including influenza.”  These epidemiologists argue that schools should be open with some mask-wearing and some distancing and with accommodations for at-risk teachers as needed; further, that closing schools is far worse for children than Covid 19 is.  “Keeping students out of school is a grave injustice,” these epidemiologists write.  “Keeping (lockdown) measures in place until a vaccine is available will cause irreparable damage with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed.”

Despite the best science available to our culture, initial single frame effects and reality cloaking in media/social media has become a monolith so large, tens of millions of children have suffered, many of them immeasurably.  Suicide rates are increasing among teens, and many other areas of damage have emerged.  I believe every school administrator and teacher and every parent and child is doing his and her best through this crisis–my point is not to blame anyone.  My point is this: the dangers of reality cloaking, fed mainly by media/social media bombardment, lead to increased suicide rates among our teens, lack of resources and safety for children in under-resourced communities, and many other harms directly linked to lack of in person schooling.

 

Reality-Cloaking as Social Disease

 

Is reality cloaking a new social disease?  Do the harms of the insurrection on January 6, 2021, and harms from extremist positions in 2020, and harms to children during Covid 19 social media blitzes show the development of a disease?

I believe the answer is yes.

The power of media/social media to control us algorithmically, politically, personally, and collectively constitute a disease the symptoms of which are:

*bombardment-isolation

*depression

*anxiety

*limited empathy

*anger and rage

*violence.

Just as reality cloaking in the past has caused religious wars (in some sectors still does), social media-driven reality cloaking causes or significantly influences family destruction, school closure, cancel culture and workplace firings, teacher/parent wars, attacks on our streets, insurrection at our nation’s Capitol, and more.  In each case, lives and livelihoods are lost.   As the reality-cloaking systemizing and framing populate “truths” that only make sense by reductionist framing and stereotyping, our children’s lives are significantly harmed.  When teens and tweens over-use social media on a daily basis, the disease directly affects them with increased mood disorders, suicide, bullying, and violence.

It is time, I believe, to take this disease very seriously.

 

The Seven Stages of Reality Cloaking

 

But even if you do not agree that reality cloaking has risen to the point of social disease, I hope you will find the following stage-model helpful in tracking reality cloaking and single frame effects in your own and your children’s.  Via rumination loops in the brain, each stage accumulates.   Let me use our present gender war as my grounding example, now, of how the seven stages occur in the brain.  You as a citizen scientist should be able to apply these stages to any reality cloaking you see in your life, not just the gender war.   You will also likely see that before each stage kicks into effect, social media use has become a daily even hourly bombardment of the person’s brain.

The First Stage: Fear then Empathy for a Person or Identified Group, felt in response to social media bombardment.   Media/social media algorithmically directs our sensory register to activate trauma-responsive centers in the mid brain, triggering fear and also empathy.  In the gender sphere, an example from the political Left might look like this messaging:   “LGBTQ people and women and girls are systemically oppressed by men, the patriarchy, and white male privilege, but boys and men are doing fine.”  On the other side, it might look like this:  “LGBTQ people are destructive to marriage, children, and humanity so we must argue that they do not exist or should not exist.”  In the first stage of the disease, empathy is still sacrosanct in us, but it is already empathy for, mainly, one group or person, and grows in part from projecting a stereotyped enemy.  While empathy for minority populations and women and girls is not a reality cloak–we likely all feel this empathy and should do so–the loop “systemically oppressed by white men and white male privilege” projects a racist and sexist stereotype and the enemy, “white male.”  The same would be true if the cloak emerged through “Black males are inherently criminals” or, as noted, “LGBTQ people are inherently dangerous.”   All of these show significant fear response, limited empathy, and the single frame effect that projects the stereotype/enemy.

Second Stage:  Embedding the Systemizing Frame into the Reality Cloak.  An example of this Stage 2 embedding appears in, “To bring fairness and equity to women, girls, and minority gender populations, we must re-frame reality to no longer include differences between male and female; instead, we must argue that women and men are the same.”  While everyone of us, I am sure, agree that women and men are and should be treated equally, the systemizing frame of “male/female difference is dangerous to women” flies in the face of what any parent or teacher knows, intuitively:  females and males are different, and women need us to understand who they are as women.  In fact, that intuition is borne out by the field of gender neuroscience.  Male and female brains are different at the molecular level.  But the “no male/female anymore” systemizing frame has become sacrosanct for people who sustain it in media/social media constantly, bombarding their followers with opinions and short burst agitations that neither science nor common sense support.  (For the real science of male/female difference, please see my own Saving Our Sons, The Minds of Girls, and Debra Soh’s The End of Gender).

Third Stage:   Promulgating a Stereotype of Identity as the Enemy.  This stage of identifying and promoting an enemy out of a stereotype comes at a distinct moment in the psychological process of reality cloaking  As such, it sustains stages 1 and 2 and moves them forward, yet it sneaks up on us because, now that we have become part of the social media bombardment ourselvs, we are SURE we would never stereotype.  In fact, we say things like, “Because women and girls are inherently victims of white male oppression, to end oppression and bring fairness, we must notice that males and masculinity are inherently defective.”  Without realizing it, in our limited empathy for our identified group, we have engaged in the single frame effect stereotyping males and maleness.  Empathy is now reduced to the oppressed group whose enemy is promulgated as the primary or single cause of the problems in the group.  Now we have become the very people we are trying to fight against, racist and sexist people, but our frame and stereotype allows us to argue that blaming “white males” (or another group) is not a racist and sexist stereotype at all.

Fourth Stage:  Application of an End-Justifies-the-Means Approach justified by the group belonging and its single frame effect. In this stage, group identification and belonging, tribalized and enemy focused, are fed by the constant barrage in media/social media, inculcating the reality cloak via rumination loop and systemizing frames that might sound like this in the gender sphere, “Because empowerment of LGBTQ people is oppressed by heteronormative people, when you talk about male/female difference as a real thing, you are anti LGBTQ and should be cancelled.”  Or, another simpler one: “Whatever it takes, we must take white men down.”   Bombarded by these short burst words/images in media/social media, our brains not only see a single cause or enemy as culprit but now invite destruction of the other by any means necessary, including destroying lives, businesses, power, purpose, development, and rights.  While in the gender sphere, we can perhaps all agree that some white people deserve targeting for their oppression and violence (Jeffrey Epstein comes to mind, an evil man who is white), but in this fourth stage targeting goes beyond bad actors into Machiavellian tactics against the perceived single cause, frame, and stereotyped enemy.  No political party or person is immune to this stage once the rumination loops attach to specific social media sources that increase our loops, frames, and anger at our stereotyped enemy.

Fifth Stage:  Sustenance of Cloak, Frame, and Tribe with Rage and, ultimately, Hate.   Gradually and sometimes quite suddenly, we feel rage and then hate for the stereotyped and “other”group.  This is not anger at bad actors who happen to have a similar identity (skin color or sex or gender) but hatred of the stereotyped and identified group who now constitute the single frame in our reality cloak of causation and enmity.  Again using the gender war example, self-justification of the anger, rage, then hate of the other (usually someone white or white people as a group) can become, “It’s all corrupt, so any negative action or feeling we have toward white and hetero-normative males is justified because the systemic oppression from these people and their ancestors cannot be fought until we bring all these people down.”  Overall, our males are subject to suicide, depression, purposelessness, and poverty at high rates, with tens of millions of males experiencing little or no privilege, but in this stage of our reality cloaking the facts don’t matter.  The danger of this stage (especially its rage and hatred which to my mind recommend the appropriateness of labeling reality cloaking a social disease) becomes evident to people outside the reality cloak but to people inside the cloak, the dangers remain invisible or, if recognized, are so ideologically framed as to make hate appear necessary for social growth.

Sixth Stage:  Banishment or Isolation of the Other Enemy Group, the Other is Not Needed Anymore.  Not only does the issue inside the single frame gradually or quickly overwhelm tolerance for others and acceptance of a complex reality, the reality cloak and ideological frame insist that the natural human need for these other human beings is not real.   A book like The End of Men by Hanna Rosen reflects this stage in the title, and there are millions of social media posts arguing that males are so defective they should simply be removed from life.  Dangers of this stage have been well documented by myself, Warren Farrell (The Boy Crisis) and many others.  When we pretend males are not needed, they will not only allow their banishment by not bonding with us and helping us in social growth, they will often take revenge on us.  Our reality-cloaking has projected a straw man and stereotypical enemy out of them; pulled us into hatred of that stereotype; then pushed us to try to remove the people from reality itself.   When we are confronted with these facts, we will often ruminate into even more anxiety, agitation, and even rage at the isolated person trying to confront us and thus be heard.

Seventh Stage:  Institutional Entrenchment.  Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of this new social disease is the acceleration of polarization in our social institutions, especially academics, government, and the media by which we can see cumulative cloaking and framing in the previous six stages now becoming institutional entrenchment.   In this entrenchment, social justice efforts are generally paralyzed, and complex social problems find a voice but they don’t get fixed.   I remember numerous conversations earlier this year with liberal friends who asked, “How could Trump have been elected?” When I pointed out how frightened at least half of the country was by the extreme gender positions taken in academics, government, and media institutions, positions often attacking white male stereotypes in single frame effects, my friends often said, “But those aren’t extreme positions, they are reality,” unable to see that attacking white males in constant institutionalized ways backfires.   Similarly, when I have talked with friends on the Right about LGBTQ issues, I have been unable to get some of them to budge from the position that LGBTQ individuals are not responsible for America’s family breakdown.  For them, the single cause effect exists in their framing, and this makes it impossible for them to bring LGBTQ people to the table of social growth.

For two distinct reasons, I have used the American gender war as a ground for exploring for the seven stages of the reality cloaking:  1) I have spent 40 years navigating the gender war in my training and profession, and 2) I believe reality cloaks about sex and gender are hidden drivers of much of what we are suffering in our social trauma today, affecting family court after divorce, incarceration rates especially of males and males of color, workplace issues regarding sex and gender, marriage and family life, schools and academic training in education, the field of psychology, and nearly everything else.   Studying the gender war can be life-sustaining because it can help us see our reality cloaks, then battle against them.   As we do so, we will notice how much influence media/social media have on our sense of sex, gender, race, and social identity.   Reality cloaking is not the only reason people we need at the negotiating table of society stay away from the policy table, but it is one reason–in social media bombardment and trauma, we have banished these people.

The Black Lives Matter movement, I think, could be the present social movement to avoid the trap of reality cloaking.   Our nation must grapple with our racial issues and systemic inequities right now.  But if Black Lives Matter ends up becoming an institutional attack on white male privilege as the single causality, some changes might get made, for instance in the policing sphere, but that causality is too thin to help us fully address systemic inequities.  Black boys, for instance, continue to fall farther behind nearly every other group including Black girls; Black men behind Black women; the lack of solution to this occurs as polarization entrenches  and institutionalizes, because white males are not the sole cause of these issues.   In the gender/race sphere specifically, the damage done to our society by the disease of reality cloaking shows up dramatically as whites and males who constitute many of the people we need at the negotiating table must self-protectively resist working with those of us who are seeking to create systemic change for both sexes, all genders, and all people in need.  While in social media, we might post, “That’s their fault” or “Who needs them anyway, they are the problem,” in real life, “they” are desperately needed.  Without everyone at the table, the violence in America will not stop.

 

Reality Cloaking and Social Media as Tools of War

 

Twenty five years ago, the American Medical Association came to understand violence not just as an “action” but as a disease.  To fully understand the danger of social media trauma, we must understand the violence-aspect of disease.   In both the January 6, 2021 protest in Washington, D.C. and the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in D.C. and around the country, most of the protesters were peaceful, focused on their voices being heard and resistant to destruction and violence.   In the January 6, 2021 rally, for instance, many of the protestors before the insurrection tried to give voice to loss of jobs, lock down unfairness and fatigue, loss of free speech rights, dangers of hyper-political correctness, loss of family rights and others.  In the Black Lives Matter rallies, too, most of the protestors were giving voice to deep racial issues, loss of jobs, economic inequities, dangerous policing practices, minority and family rights, and entrenched poverty.  The disease of violence was not a factor for these people.

However, the people who stormed Congress on January 6 were so completely reality cloaked and internally re-framed via rumination loops the disease of violence was a factor in them.  Similarly, some of the 2020 rioters and looters committed acts of destructive violence.   In all these cases, I believe media/social media bombardment and the trauma it caused in the brain played a significant part in the disease.  The brains of the violent people operated as if inside a video game:  in a video game,  we are in the alternative reality of the game and our brains are happily fooled into believing that the battle-frame of this reality, including its stereotyped enemy, compels violent action in virtual space.  In the game, the violence ends in virtual space, but in real life, once the compulsion to violence occurs, it is not virtual but real and dangerous.

Overall, then, I am arguing that the disease of reality cloaking has these symptoms, the seventh of which is comorbidity with violence:

*Increased depression or anxiety from intense social media use

*Increased agitation, anger, or rage from that social media use

*Internal dominance by racist, sexist, or other types of stereotyping

*Myopic and single effect/single causality answers to complex human questions

*Isolation from the whole while adhering to a smaller group that is reached, mainly, online

*Thoughts of hatred, rage, end-justifies-the-means, and violence following sustained social media use

*Finally, attempted or achieved violence following sustained social media use.

With all of this analysis in hand, I hope you will be able to discern to what extent your own brain and the brains around you are locked in rumination loops that increase rather than decrease negativity bias and trauma.  Even further, I hope you will try to discover whether the systemizing frame and single frame effect has cloaked reality enough to give your own brain or the brain of the person you love or anyone else’s brain a compulsion to violence.

Some key questions might be these:

*“Does the reality cloak and its systemizing frame require that I hate and go to war with another person or group?” (Inability to listen to another person’s point of view would be evidence here:  does your stress level get so high when you talk to anyone outside your frame-group that you can barely function with these others?  Looting, rioting, religious wars like Jihadi wars also fit here).

*”Does the reality cloak and its resulting systemizing frame require my child to hate or go to war with another person or group?” (Bullying, hate crimes against LGBTQ people, destruction of property, racial hatred, and criminal activity among children could all fit here).

*”Does the reality cloak and its systemizing frame require that I or another person hate or go to war with ourselves or themselves?”  (Suicide is an indicator of the disease of violence here, as are other self-destructive actions).

If yes is the answer to any of these questions, you have discovered one of the reasons that social media is a disease:  as it inherently promotes someone or some group as enemy, it increases the negativity bias of blame manifold and thus may generate myopic anger, at least, and, possibly, violence and destruction.  To stay with the gender sphere, let me give another example from my own experience of the cloaking/looping that comes with media/social media bombardment, especially as relates to dangers to children.

When I am asked about gender dysphoria, trans-brains, and LGBTQ brains, I respond in the same way most scientists in the field would respond:  gender dysphoria is real and LGBTQ brains are real, both/and not either/or.  I further respond that all gender dysphoric and LGBTQ children and adults also have male and female brains that appear neurally on a male and female gender brain spectrum.  Thus, male/female and LGBTQ are not in opposition, though media/social media often pit them against one another.   As reproductive neuroscientist Debra Soh explains in her new book, The End of Gender, there are only two reproductive gametes in our stem cells–male and female—which means all human beings, including LGBTQ children/adults have male and female brains on a spectrum.

But in the systemizing frame and reality cloak often presented in social media, if you “believe” there are male and female brains, you are by your “belief,” practicing violence against people who argue there aren’t male and female brains.  When someone in the field disagrees and points out that male/female are gamete and molecule related thus built into our brains, you might consider these people a stereotyped enemy.  Danger for children in this reality cloaking comes from parents who learn on social media that they are doing the right thing by starting hormone and other interventions on tender age children, interventions that can permanently damage the child.  Given that most children who report to parents that they were trans before puberty also report at 17 that they are not trans (most of these children realize they are gay not trans), the biological and medical interventions on these children should be put off until the child is of age to fully choose.

Many of the children who say they are trans at a young age may have gender dysphoria, which is a brain condition often triggered by a combination of genetics, neurotoxins, and/or environmental trauma.   Treatment for gender dysphoria is crucial for these children, as is our general understanding that neuroscience and neurobiology have so advanced in the new millennium, brain scan equipment can track very real gay and trans brains (for more on this, please see Saving Our Sons and The Minds of Girls).   But from within the reality cloak of “there is no male/female, every brain is gender fluid,” it makes sense to parents (and a few doctors, unfortunately) that children should be experimented on and gender dysphoria removed from scientific consideration.  In this area, as it is in every other area of reality cloaking, the costs of the cloak, single frame effect, and resulting activity is potential danger to the child.

 

Reality as the Ground of Invention

 

I have written this detailed, three-part blog to provide you with deeper analysis than quick burst social media affords.  I am hoping this long blog, like my own and other’s books and longer analyses, will aid you in discerning what is happening in and around you, and thus building a society in which we do not let reality cloaks define the very important social justice conversations, debates, and activity our culture needs.  Ultimately, I hope you will move away from media/social media reliance/dominance in either your own our your children’s lives.

The gains from this distancing will not only be health gains but also inventiveness.   In The Pattern Seekers Simon Baron-Cohen and his team track how human invention works and how invention—from crude to sophisticated tools to ever growing language to technologies even Smart phones—occurs in response to reality-reflective paradigms.  When we invent things based on what we actually face in our reality, we invent things and ideas that have longevity.

Too many people die from a disease:  better hygiene and medicines are invented, and the initial inventions are built upon for generations.  We invented these things without social media bombardment in our brains.

When men use their puny bodies to try to kill a mammoth, they have a high mortality rate:  tools like spears, once invented, cut down on the mortality rate and ensure safety for others as well.  Most or all of our useful tools were invented without social media.

Women are treated as second class citizens—society is reinvented to empower and equalize women.  This inventiveness began before our present social media cloaking and continues passionately in our culture.

Minority groups clearly need just as much power in a democracy as majority groups:  laws of fairness are passed and enforced.  As we enter a new decade, we are focusing on the needs of minority groups and will continue to do so for a long time.  Bombardment and trauma from social media are not needed to succeed in our new inventiveness.

Left, Right, Progressive, Conservative, heteronormative, LGBTQ—wherever we fit on the political or gender spectrum, when we succumb to reality cloaks, we are leaving reality’s ground to fight battles or wars with “enemies” who are, for the most part, not our enemies at all.  Rage, anger, violence get expressed in these wars, but very little is invented that has longevity to solve our social problems.

 

What You Can Do Right Now

 

The only absolutely proven effective practice to combat media/social media bombardment and the resulting disease of reality cloaking is to turn it off.  Social media is, at least at this point, so embedded with reality cloaking, we must each take control over it in our lives and in our children’s lives.  If you can at least avoid social media that is purely political (however you lean politically), I don’t think you will regret it.  Meanwhile, you can practice discernment by connecting your own elements in your thought processes and family conversations.   In connecting the six elements with which I began this series into a pattern, I have fulfilled the very human urge to pattern-seek. 

I turned off nearly all social media three years ago, and I feel I have returned to a much deeper inventiveness.  For our children’s sake, too, we must shut off social media as much as possible, especially when children are young.  If you can hold off giving your children smart phones until they are thirteen, I hope you will do so, perhaps inspired by Bill and Melinda Gates who held off until their children were fourteen.  As you stop social media from occupying your child’s life, that child may protest or be angry at first, but within a few days or weeks, the child will notice how much better life is, less anxious, less depressed, less angry; it can feel like the lifting of disease from the soul.

The Nobel Prize winning Polish American poet, Czeslaw Milosz, wrote, “to exist on earth is beyond any power to name.”  The madness and destruction resulting from reality cloaking is perhaps most dangerous to adults and children because it operates as an arrogance always false, always mistaken, in the face of a complex reality.  More humbly, I think, in Milosz spirit, we have to admit that media/social media bombardment is traumatic to our brains and leads to disease.  Once we do that, we will free ourselves in ways we have perhaps not even invented yet.  And certainly, if we ourselves are hooked on social media, we should still be able to save our children from it.