Consensus Reality III

Saying these novellas are about consensus reality doesn't say much, so can we do better? Here is my attempt. The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny and Where Have You Been, Sandaliotis?  present opposing secular heresies regarding creation, providence, human freedom, and social meaning. On one hand, we see consensus reality as the result of absolutizing determinism in Armageddons. On the other hand, we see it as pure social constructivism in Sandaliotis. By placing two extremes side by side, Lafferty turns the reader's attention to what matters: human freedom and how consensus reality can erode agency and meaning.

In Armageddons, the shared world originates from the brute facts described by the Devonian "Equations," a form of mathematical Logos. To appreciate the rigidity of this system, we can turn to Devonian's own words: "The mathematical and organic formulae comprising the 'General Equation' indicate that the Interaction Index of the Enclave... will be keyed onto a single individual... If the single key individual is withdrawn . . . that time will collapse with it." This illustrates a nightmarishly overdetermined reality, one that menaces Enniscorthy Sweeny 's personhood. It's a world that can be deciphered as neatly as a theorem. This might seem odd, but them's the rules the novella plays by.

Because every thought follows fixed causes, people given similar inputs and incentives end up with the same mental picture of the world; institutions then ratify that overlap as public "fact." Determinism supplies the causal why of belief-formation, while the resulting consensus is the emergent what: shared reality is the predictable product of rule-bound minds acting in concert. The crux individual is special, but not that special, despite appearances. Why? Because the system's laws are complete, but they are singular: they pivot on one coordinate, Enniscorthy Sweeny. Think of a spreadsheet whose every cell is a formula referencing A1: the sheet's contents are fully determined, but delete A1, and the sheet returns #REF!

Conversely, Sandaliotis provides the opposite form of consensus reality. Here, the world is nighmarishly underdetermined, shaped by ambient fog and collective belief, with no underlying Logos to ground it. Manufactured belief (with some diabolical intervention), rather than any inherent order, brings reality into being. One of the novella's best lines comes from the engineer, a minor character: "Everybody believes in the lavender fog when it is first in their eyes . . . and it creates reality for those who believe in it." All this is to say that Sweeny anchors consensus reality in a rigid, freedom-destroying Logos, whereas Sandaliotis treats reality as a fluid artifact spun into frictionless existence by attention, greed, whim, paranoia, revenge, deviltry, and desire.

These novellas, then, are very different models of how consensus reality might work. Positioned as funhouse mirrors opposite each other, they are a closed circuit of secular metaphysics and social performativity, each exposing the limitations of the other. Recognizing this contrast clarifies how each narrative addresses providence and human freedom, the shared feature being a conspicuous absence of anything divine in either.

In Sweeny, time is the main point. It seems superficially fluid but moves forward as a predetermined sequence we find disclosed by poring over the textual fragments Lafferty gives us as readers. The surprise is discovering that, amidst all that apparent disorder, lies a hellishly claustrophobic ordering logic. The "Crux-Individual" appears free but follows a script embedded in Devonian's equations. Ennis seems like a creative agent and a great artist, but he is merely executing the system's commands. Here, consensus reality is a straitjacket.

In contrast, Sandaliotis portrays a simultaneous rather than sequential reality, one that is dependent on consensus for its fragile existence. This system, too, fails, with freedom collapsing and truth becoming whatever the collective decides it to be. Both satires illustrate how consensus undermines human dignity.

Lafferty intended these two novellas to be read together. They're complementary cautionary satires of worlds that sever objective truth from communal and subjective action. Both dissect a consensus reality to show how absurd it becomes when taken to the logical extremes: scientistic social determinism or soft "sociology of knowledge" constructivism. At the same time, they are also anxiety dreams about the real power that consensus has in our lives. They're a kind of dialectic that reaches a dead end, but there is an implication in both, namely, what would be needed for a way forward.