Imagining “Reality”

Quite a number of perceptive thinkers have been aware of the need for more integrated lives and existences -- even before the Internet; that’s what Don Quixote is all about, and more recently in literature, Walter Mitty. That is the mentality still separating fiction from non-fiction -- of which obviously, fiction has precedence, or the classifications would be reality and non-reality.

When the Web was first catching on in popularity and we were learning all the wonderful things one could now do, one of the exercises was to create a homepage and online identity -- and the standard was that everyone would create an entity other than who they really were -- as though anonymity was actually the objective of this enhanced capacity to get to know the world, others, as well as oneself better -- which has always been the meaning and purpose of any fulfillment in life.

But as the world became more specialized and fragmented in the last century, what occurred instead was the possibility of many increasing their multiple realities and personalities, or at least, manifesting them so they became more obvious as the contradictions in many lives. When that became more apparent, liberal hypocrisy became a de facto standard of many people’s lives -- in saying one thing, and doing something else entirely.

People would talk about the increasing “homeless” problem while “flipping houses” -- and saw no contradiction or even connection in that -- that real estate (housing) speculation made housing prohibitive to many -- and ultimately, many would simply refuse to play the game as captives of that special interest.

All these quandaries are connected -- but taught as unconnected phenomena in our schools, universities and media (journalism), and so it is quite the norm for a person to hold mutually exclusive, contradictory “truths,” and think nothing of it, because that is the “political correctness” of the day. George Orwell described this as “doublethink,” which has become the language of mass media culture -- “you ‘d better believe it because we tell you to believe it, and tomorrow, we’ll tell you something else.”

Journalism actually perpetuates this dichotomy by legitimizing the “objective” and the “subjective,” in what they dismissed as “anecdotal” reality, which is actual, real life experience. However, the academics have turned that paradigm upside-down in claiming that only their theories and explanations are the “real,” and people’s actual experiences are illusions of “incorrectness.”

Obviously the former should not take precedence over the latter but they should merge and integrate to reflect one verifiable reality -- using imagination productively rather than merely creating sand castles in the sky -- like socialists of a previous generation, who have in actuality, been the bane of humankind in imposing their “nationalist socialisms” on their unwilling populaces.

No matter how “enlightened” these self-proclaimed think they are, a free and healthy people must be allowed to choose their own right path after being given accurate information -- and not the distorted information to “choose” what a few demagogues demand that they believe and do. That is hardly an improvement over the previous generations’ totalitarianisms.

Such people have always claimed the authority of knowing best what is good for everybody else -- if we just allow them to do the thinking for everybody else (as God intended). In both the old and new media, it is still commonplace to see such coercions, manipulations and deceptions -- but only in the new, is it possible to see something else beyond -- to truths that actually make sense.