Commentary
An article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine informs us that the people formerly known as “psychotics” or “schizophrenics” are the latest subculture to seek a re-branding.
They—at least some of them—now prefer to be known as “the Hearing Voices Movement.” No longer considering themselves to be mentally ill or in need of psychiatric intervention, they now insist they are merely believers in “nonconsensus realities.”
Of course, they were bound, sooner or later, to join the ever-growing ranks of such believers. You might almost say that, nowadays, there is a consensus in favor of nonconsensus realities.
The trouble for the concept formerly known as “reality” began not with the idea of consensus but with that of “realities” as a plural noun. If you add to the current consensus about the existence of two, three, many realities, the notion of an equal number of consensuses corresponding to them, you arrive at our current cultural state of contention and division between rival consensuses about what reality is—consensus, like reality, now being necessarily in the plural….