A Threat from Virtual Reality

A virtual reality is an artificial context that uses data-organizing computer technology to let people interact with a program or let them interact with each other. An early definition called virtual reality “a computer-mediated, multisensory experience, one designed to trick our senses and convince us that we are ‘in another world’” (Glenn F. Cartwright, “Virtual or Real? The Mind in Cyberspace,” The Futurist, March-April 1994, 22). Virtual reality can create illusionary experiences of touch, taste, and smell to augment what we experience through our senses of hearing and sight. Besides use in entertainment, virtual reality has been adapted for use in occupational training, including military training. “Virtual,” of course, implies that this perception of “reality” isn’t actually objective.

However, not all actual reality is 100% objective. Reality often has subjective components. Psychologically, much of what is real for us has roots in our primal relationships, particularly in our relationships with our parents or surrogate parents. The poet Ranier Maria Rilke (1875-1926) in his novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910) had his child protagonist, Malte, try to plumb the significance of primal relationships by separating “inside” from “outside.” After hearing adults attribute their inner feelings to outside events, Malte begins to think adults must be able to pull outside things inside themselves. Yet his own experience seems to go

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the opposite direction: “The more I looked outside, the more I stirred up what was [already] inside me” (Ranier Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, 1982, 199). So the child Malte thinks he is more “inside” than grownups, and he thinks of growing up as becoming “outside.” Rilke/Malte writes “I believed that I would be able to tell when life turned around, as it were, and came only from outside, as it had until then come from inside” (Rilke, 198-99).

While still very young, Malte is sent to a school for young noblemen and is treated there as though already an adult. There he starts realizing he can’t actually separate inside from outside. Malte comments that, “If I insisted on believing that my childhood was past, then at that same moment the whole future vanished too.” At that time, he says, “my eyes also opened to the infinite reality of my childhood. I knew that it wouldn’t cease” (Rilke, 200). He then understands that the outside will never replace the inside but will simply be added to it.

However, it’s not that simple, for he also learns the outside can come inside and the inside can go outside. The outside can come inside through role-playing, who your parents and other elders expect you to be, or, as Malte says, “You come, you find a life ready-made, you just have to slip it on” (Rilke, 9). Thus, for the outside to come inside you merely had to control your feelings. According to Malte, “There were Things that were sad, once and for all, and there were pleasant Things, and a great number of incidental ones. If a joy was arranged for you, it was in fact a joy, and you had to behave accordingly. All this was basically very simple, and once you got the knack of it, it took care of itself” (Rilke, 100-101).

However if the outside comes too far inside, that could be scary. Once, while he is still a small boy, Malte gets himself trapped in a make-believe costume. A large corner bedroom of his Danish family’s manor house holds a row of old wardrobes full of formal clothes that date back to the 1700s. He dons many of these clothes until, in the final wardrobe, he finds “all kinds of random paraphernalia for masquerades, whose fantastic possibilities made my head spin” (Rilke, 104).

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Perhaps Malte’s experience that day can help us forecast some future uses of virtual reality. The wardrobe holds many masks. Putting on a mask and dressing almost at random, Malte traipses to a mirror and begins acting the character who he sees—until he capsizes a small table cluttered with breakable objects, including a perfume vial. While trying to wipe the perfume from the rug, he also attempts to wiggle out of the costume but finds himself trapped in it. He rushes downstairs for help but the adults assume he’s acting a part and they only laugh. When he passes out on the floor they still assume it’s all pretend.

So Malte begins to ration and screen what he takes in from outside. Meanwhile, he also learns that what’s inside can go outside. Once, at age four or five, he goes crawling away from his parents to look for the main part of a house long familiar to him which his family is revisiting. However, that main part of the house had recently burned down and what remains is only the wing in which the host family now lives. Still, Malte—and then also his mother—cannot conceive of being inside merely a part of their friends’ house. Crawling in quest of the main part, Malte is noticed and restrained by the hostess. However, as he and his mother then sit and struggle to subtract the rest of the house from their thoughts, the missing rest of the house begins to haunt the other guests as well. Malte feels that something is leaving him and he realizes that the grownups are taking it in. “It was terrifying,” he writes, “to know that [something which grownups couldn’t see] was stronger than all of them.… It seemed to me as if what they were looking for might suddenly break out of me like a rash” (Rilke, 144) and what he especially fears is himself being identified as the source of it. Not until he clings to his mother, does the lost part of the house fully vanish, for both of them.

When we start becoming independent persons, our parents or surrogate-parents are our prime reality. Our interaction with them creates our awareness of being separate. Still, regardless of how separate we may grow, our sense of being real never escapes its connection with that specific, personal primal relationship. The more stress we experience, the more we seem to crave a primal relationship that is present and active.

No doubt virtual reality can itself become a source of

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stress—either through addiction to it or through forced “therapy” (such as in prisons). But I suspect its greatest future abuse will come by using it to escape stress by using it to offer millions of people a stress-relieving relationship between themselves and a “great person” on whom they will come to feel they depend.

To my knowledge, no personality cult has yet offered its followers a “virtual” way to interact with its leader. Yet back in history, when an earlier new technology—radio—brought the voice of Hitler in 1929 to millions of Germans—that was when (and how) Hitler achieved a mass following. The radio in its infancy fostered a sense of personal relationship between Hitler and millions of Germans who loved his voice so much they craved to see and hear him in person. Similarly in Italy, on Italian state radio, Mussolini’s voice became the dominant sound. Not much later in the United States, Depression-era stresses helped to coalesce radio-cults around Franklin Roosevelt and his detractor Rev. Charles Coughlin. Later, in the 1990s, when television became widespread in former Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milošević used it to create a Serb nationalist cult that popularized “ethnic cleansing.”

With time, people begin to ration and screen how much they allow a radio voice or a television image to come “inside” them. As we grow familiar with various media, we learn to ration and screen what we take in from them. On the other hand, peoples’ reasons to ration and screen will surely erode if the 21^st century heightens their stress and thereby heightens their craving for primal relationship. It’s not that virtual reality will necessarily cheapen most people’s lives even though economic decline and environmental woe in the real world do seem likely to cheapen people’s lives by reducing their desirable possibilities. Meanwhile, such decline and woe seem likely to heighten people’s stress.

Adherents of personality cults crave access to their leader. Experiences of personal “contact” with the head of the cult through the use of virtual reality could begin without any formal commitments between followers and leaders, or between either of those parties and whoever controls the technology. Yet that stage might last only until virtual reality grows engrained in our culture (like cell phones have grown engrained), or until many people come to think their lives would be cheapened without virtual reality. This

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may sound like a slow process, but haven’t cell phones “enriched” people’s lives quite quickly? Wasn’t it rather few years before the voices of Hitler and Mussolini came to dominate German and Italian radio and engrain themselves in those two cultures?

Like those personality cults were strengthened by radio when it was new, future personality cults could be strengthened by offering interaction with their “great person” through virtual reality. However, there might be a difference: whereas earlier personality cults justified their existence by changing outer reality—by changing facts like Hitler and Mussolini loved to do—nowadays facts are harder to change. Economic and environmental constraints are increasing the difficulty of making outer changes of a positive hue. If new personality cults focus less on changing outer reality than on escaping from thinking about it, the role of a present and active primal relationship in people’s lives would surely be heightened. In short, only virtual realities that offer a primal relationship seem likely to meet millions of people’s coming psychological craving for an inner escape from outer stress. The moral price-tag of that relationship might turn out to be high.

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