It is often said that schizophrenia is a disorder involving both thoughts and emotions. The ideas I have presented so far involve something in a sense in between thoughts and emotions: the meaning we place in our world, the "sense" we get from events, people’s gestures, even cracks in the sidewalk.

The thoughts we use to form beliefs on an everyday basis do not function by means of only logic and reason. They function, rather, as results of a meaningful interpretation of our world. Something will strike us as significant, an experience or something someone has said, and we will be able to sense what this means, depending upon our socialization or personal experiences. From this process arise our thoughts and emotions: when we get a call at one in the morning, as the phone is ringing, we will feel fear: something bad has happened. Our minds lace the ringing phone with meaning, and the nature of this meaning determines how we feel. The ringing phone will also trigger the thought and perhaps belief: something bad has happened, it must be an emergency, or the person wouldn’t call so late. Someone else, who imposes different meaning into this same situation, will feel anger. Why is someone waking me up? Perhaps it will trigger the thought or belief: one of my friends is up late, and doesn’t care that I don’t want to be bothered.

None of these assumptions about the cause of the ringing phone is quite strictly rational. They are all guesses at things that, if we were purely rational, we would simply suspend judgement on. But our minds automatically form beliefs and notions all the time about things that are unknown, and our minds do not seem capable of completely suspending judgement on the things that are important to us. These thoughts, and the emotions associated with them, arise out of the meaning we impose upon the ringing phone. What does the ringing phone really mean? It means nothing more than a stone or a stick means—it is not a proposition or made up of representative language. But we perceive meaning in it, depending upon our culture and personal experiences. This capability to perceive accurate meaning in events, gestures, and images—"accurate" being defined as within the parameters of how the culture at large would perceive it—is what I believe is the fundamental failure of the schizophrenic brain.

Another example of how an infused meaning in events can bring on even powerful emotions. Right at this moment (7:02 pm, January 30, 2002) the Olympic Torch is somewhere passing through my city of Denver, on its way to the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics. I’m sure many people are coming out of their houses and apartments to see it pass by (alas, I am shut up in my apartment in my pajamas, writing down silly ideas and missing out on a momentous event). That Olympic Torch, I’m sure, will give many people who see it pass by overwhelming emotions. What is it really? Some jogger jogging by with a torch. But the meaning our culture infuses this actually value-neutral jogger with is incredible. So incredible, in fact, that many may expect grander emotions than they actually experience, when they look, and somehow pick up on the fact that it is really just a jogger carrying a burning stick. But many more will be overwhelmed with emotion, solely due to the meaning imposed on the event by our society, which they believe they could never experience without actually being there. Thus, if a schizophrenic cannot infuse his everyday life with the same meaning, and to the same degree, as the rest of society, this could be a source of "abnormal" emotions, either inappropriate or nonexistent.

So it is no wonder that the schizophrenic’s emotions are affected as much as his thoughts. The things that bring most people joy do not bring him joy. He has a hard time becoming motivated. If joy and motivation are socially constructed, as I have argued in previous chapters, the schizophrenic has a hard time becoming socialized to react to things the way the rest of his culture does. The things that bring us joy would not bring, say, a Tarahumara Indian joy either. But the Tarahumara Indian, if he is not schizophrenic, will have his own sense of meaning in his world, and the things that mean joy in it, to fall back on. Once the schizophrenic is on medication, and has lost his paranoid belief system, he will still have a hard time finding joy in things because, though he no longer spontaneously infuses his world with altered meaning, he still cannot infuse it with accurate meaning to the degree that the rest of the culture can.

Schizophrenics commonly are not motivated to engage in personal hygiene to the same degree as everyone else. Since they cannot perceive the same meaning in personal hygiene that others do—since they cannot find the pleasure in it that others experience, or the pain others experience when they lack it (which is, after all, socially constructed)—they have a hard time motivating themselves to do it. This is not necessarily irrational. In other cultures they shower once a week, and do not care for their teeth. The practice of personal hygiene, especially to the degree that this culture engages in it, is not necessarily based on logic and reason. And even if it is meant to bring about health, which would be based a biological necessity, the means by which people are motivated to do it is not the threat of bad health, but the meaning this culture assigns to it, the socially constructed pleasure in doing it, or the socially constructed pain in not doing it. Since they are unable to perceive meaning in actions the way the rest of the culture can, they are also not as subject to the socially constructed pleasures and pains that arise out of this meaning.

The mystic will sometimes say evil, good, pleasure, and pain are illusion. This makes sense in the context of my thesis: if pleasure and pain are at least partly socially constructed, due to our webs of significance and conceptual frameworks, and the mystic regards these as illusion, it makes sense that good and evil are also illusion to him. But I do not agree with him that a socially constructed reality is a "false" one. It is, rather, the world humans create for themselves, the reality they have come to know and must live in. They create its "truth" and "reality" all on their own. Socially constructed pain is still pain, whether the sufferer knows it is socially constructed or not.

The schizophrenic, throughout history, has been an alien in every land. His mind is incapable of infusing everything with the socially constructed meaning that the rest of the culture does. Since the meaning we see in our world is the source of both our thoughts and emotions, it is no wonder that schizophrenia is a disorder of both thought and emotion. He is not "irrational" for not engaging in the culturally bound activities the rest of the culture is motivated to engage in, by socially constructed pleasure and pain, any more than the society itself is motivated to engage in them by reason. He is not irrational either if this means an inability to think in logical patterns. Rather, his irrationality springs from his inability to infuse his world with meaning, which is the process by which we each create the world we live in, and so he spontaneously generates his own meaning, and these in turn lead to delusions and paranoia. The delusional belief system has its evidence for him: it springs from the meaning he sees in things, which affects his perceptions of them, and becomes the spontaneous creation of his own, private world. Just like a man’s belief that the phone ringing at one in the morning means there is some sort of emergency, experiences in the schizophrenic’s mind, when infused automatically with inaccurate meaning, lead to beliefs. These beliefs are put in logical order just like any logical system. This does not keep them from being irrational, however, since their source was an experience that was infused with inaccurate meaning.