Lt. Reginald Barclay is a diagnostic engineer on Geordi LaForge’s staff, aboard Picard’s Enterprise. Awkward and nebbishy, he is nonetheless very talented and normally great at his job. But lately he’s been underperforming, and it turns out he’s been spending excessive off-duty time in the holodeck suites.
LaForge investigates, and it is discovered that in his holodeck time, Barclay has created an alternate reality populated by caricatures of his colleagues. He has imagined them as people who do not challenge him as much - diminishing someone who intimidates him (Riker), rendering his professional equals as bumblers (Geordi), and dosing those he is attracted to with desire (Troi).
In the end, of course, Barclay learns to let go of his compensatory fantasies and chooses to return to the real world and actually experience some growth. Oh, and he saves the Enterprise in the process. But the episode, for all its amusing bits, makes a solid point about how some of us choose to live.
It is an inescapable fact of neuroscience that our highly-evolved primate brains grant us the power to build models of the world in our head – models that enable us to remember, to decide, and to plan, based on comparisons of what is happening in front of us to what is in our model. This is why we are so successful, compared to other species.
These mental models of the world can never be complete, never be fully accurate, and never the same between any two of us. You have your model of the world, I have mine, and any overlap between them is a product of chance and negotiation.
On the other hand...
This modeling ability is so sophisticated, and we are so good at using it, that we can tweak it to suit ourselves. We can insert our own modifications, creating versions of the people in our lives that have traits and flaws and motivations that we assign them, as Barclay did. We can remake them in any way that justifies our feelings about them and our responses to them, removing our need to fully scrutinize our behavior.
Moreover, we can revise the world itself, rejiggering its workings from the sober actual to our own comfort-hungry illusions, ascribing its dangers and unpleasant realities to dark forces that we can feel brave in shouting down – making ourselves feel safer in the process.
And many if not most of us do exactly that. We tweak our mental models of the world as Barclay built his holodeck life, wishing it into what we would make it if we could: safer, easier, less challenging and confusing, more friendly to our own wants and needs.
This is bad enough, because it weakens us in terrible ways – hampering our performance in the actual world, undermining our relationships, dulling our thinking. But when we huddle up with others who are similarly bewitched by mental model fantasies, we can create collective illusions that generate distorted views of those around us and misunderstandings of the real world, breaking down our communication and fortifying bad thinking. We have names for such huddles; we don’t need to call them out, right?
Barclay had it right: confronted with this tendency to fabricate and inhabit a false reality, we have the option of sucking it up and making the decision to set it aside, and to get our inner mental house in order – to admit that we can never get it completely right, but to likewise commit to getting it as right as possible.
Our resulting inner world won’t be as safe or as comforting or as easy as our Barcley version – but it will be real, and authentically fulfilling.
And we might save the ship...
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