What We Don’t Know

In an essay on “The Obvious” (published in The Dialectics of Liberation), R. D. Laing reflects on the “very low” visibility of social events: “In social space one’s direct immediate capacity to see what is happening does not extend any further than one’s own senses extend. Beyond that one has to make inferences, based on hearsay evidence, reports of one kind or another of what other human beings are able to see within their equally limited field of observation. As in space, so in time. Our capacity to probe back into history is extraordinarily limited. . . . . how things have come to be as they are disappears into mist” (14).

When we recognize that each social event takes place in a context, a network of other social events, the opaqueness of social reality becomes more intense still: “The fabric of sociality is an interlaced set of contexts, of sub-systems interlaced with other sub-systems, of contexts interlaced with metacontexts and metametacontexts and so on until it reaches a theoretical limit, the context of all possible social contexts, comprising together with all the contexts that are subsumed within it, what one might call the total social world system.” Beyond this, there is no further, higher context that will contextualize the “intelligibility of the total social world system” (15).

Even local social contexts become opaque because of the metaphors that govern our perceptions and actions. Laing alludes to his own experience in mental hospitals, where he came gradually to realize that he needed to be dealing with situations and not simply with individuals. Yet, his ability to study the situation of the mentally ill patient was inhibited by the medical metaphor that governed the whole process: “the behavior of [psychotics and neurotics] was regarded as signs of a pathological process that was going on in them, and only secondarily of anything else. The whole subject was enclosed in a medical metaphor.” That metaphor “conditioned the conduct of all those who were enclosed by it , doctors and patients.” And the result was a depersonalization of the person. As the patient was isolated from the system of which he was a part, “it was  . . . difficult for the doctor to behave as a person. A person does not exist without a social context. You cannot take a person out of his social context and still see him as a person, or act towards him as a person. If one does not act toward the other person as a person, one de-personalizes oneself” (17). Insofar as the psychosis was a result of the person’s detachment from a social system, the medical metaphor reinforced the pathology rather than healing it.

With all this uncertainty, we are relieved to be told what’s actually going on. But Laing is rightly cynical about the authorities that claim to tell us. They don’t know any more about the total world system than anybody does: “There is almost nothing we can know about the total social world system. . . . Yet we are so ‘programmed’ to believe that what we are told is more likely to be true than false because we are told it, that almost all of us are liable to be caught out occasionally. We have all a ‘reflex’ towards believing and doing what we are told” (32). The uncertainties of our social situation thus have profound political consequences.

Laing’s conclusion is profoundly interesting. His essay might seem to be trending toward a cynical nihilism, but it takes a turn: “We can put no trust in princes, popes, politicians, scholars, or scientists,” he says, echoing the Psalms. Yet “we may put our trust in a source that is much deeper than our egos – if we can trust ourselves to have found it, or rather, to have been found by it. It is obvious that it is hidden, but what it is and where it is, is not obvious” (32-33). Not the conclusion one expects from a New Left radical.