Reality? Ha!

 I'm writing from an angry, tired, place at present. This world is too much and I'm sick of it. The problem is that "the world" is a nebulous thing for me - and it's certainly not the same as the planet. Likewise, "reality" seems to have very little to do with the science. If it did, there wouldn't be a tug of war between health (based in science, and vital for staying alive) and economics (a giant game of who's got the biggest financial dick to swing - that seems to only apply to nations). That so many countries have opted to prioritise the fiction of economics and productivity over the facts of the pandemic, and climate change, on so many occasions simply reveals us to be a narcissistic species; one that can't envisage a planet without us, even if that might be all for the better. 

All my life I've been told that "reality" is important, but it always seems to be based on a set of fictions that don't exactly scan with my own experiences. It's true to say that I'm an embittered idealist, and that in my natural state I want to believe that as individuals we're generally good, even if I'm less sure of that in when applied to groups (where I'm conscious that the loud, and the stupid, triumph because they offer simplistic solutions to complex problems). Unfortunately, the more I see of humanity, the less sure I am that my idealism isn't misplaced, and the more I want to retreat to a treehouse in a woodland setting and live there with a cat and a dog - and most importantly, with no humans. 

I'd love to say that its me, but really it's you; you and your damn reality. You and your damn pettiness and ignorance coupled with your tendency to paint huge swathes of the world with brush strokes so broad you can project your prejudices onto them. 

Your loudness doesn't help either, frankly. Nor, your assumption that your opinions hold value. 

The issue here is that "reality" is a mixture of projection and received wisdom (aka a story). As Anais Nin said "We don't see things the way they are, we see them as we are", so how much of what we see, and think of as real, is simply our tendency to project ourselves out into the universe and assume that we're "normal"? And how much is just us being caught in a set of fictions that reinforce a pre-existing set of ideas that we've been surrounded by since birth? How much of what we take as "natural" is simply what we're used to? From concepts of beauty and gender, all the way to how we should live (and what life should be like), or the value of money, we have been indoctrinated from birth. The fact that these ideas are usually out of date is only more damning, and its ridiculous that the mainstream of society seems to be unaffected by advancements in our understanding of, well, anything. Instead, we snap back to the status quo faster than a Batman comic after a traumatic run. Reality, like entertainment, deals with the illusion of change.  

Sapiens author, Yuval Noah Harari, points out how much work is undertaken to maintain our macro fictions in this video: 

Furthermore, reality is usually subjective, as my own embittered idealism reveals. It's a matter of a number of things - ranging from our own attitudes towards others, the news we take in, and the amount we can let ourselves think outside the usual constraints of the trap we're caught in. It's all very well satisfying the material needs (as defined by the Hierarchy of Needs), but we are more than simply appetites and even animals dream. I don't know how people rationalise the idea that its only the physical that needs to be taken care of - and I don't mean we should be introducing ideas like God or other fables like that to people's lives, only that we should encourage thought and imagination. These things are vital, and we have a tendency to brush them under the carpet. We even castigate people for trying to improve themselves that way. 

 

Is that because we're a troupe species, trapped in a hierarchical structure that doesn't really serve us anymore? Or is it because we're so used to being told what to thought by news media and our social bubbles? It often feels as if human thought is a race to the lowest common denominator, without nuance and refinement (this post is probably guilty of it). Worse, it feels as if that's encouraged, and that the focus on STEM subjects (that's Science Technology, Engineering, and Maths, fact fans), will only encourage this demonisation of anything that doesn't bear into the material realm.  Science needn't be the enemy of imagination, but so often it feels as if it is. I suspect this is another facet of "reality", in a hegemonic sense. It creates a needless division that says you can have imagination or you can live well, and that the people who successfully use their imaginations to make their living are the lucky ones who should be held in awe. 

This idea seems to feed into the set of people who'll pay out stupid amounts of money buy the latest phone or TV, but begrudge buying artists' outputs, preferring to pirate it instead. Their argument is that because the creator enjoyed the process of creation, their work should be free. So in "reality" work becomes a life sentence of toil, where we must keep our heads down and graft for uncaring bosses. Is that some sort of twisting of the Religions of the Book? If so, I feel safe in saying that our God is no longer the Biblical one, but merely Mammon.

Or would be if they weren't both fictional, and fulfill a primitive need to imagine that bigger versions of us are somehow in charge.

What I find interesting is that at a time when all of life is, theoretically, at our fingertips, and when Feminism is reaching into intersectionality, acknowledging that we're not simply one thing, so many of us seem to be reaching for just that simplicity of identity. Admittedly its divided into "goodies and baddies" far more, and there's a scramble for the extremes because, again, nuance is bad and we must all be one thing or another. It seems pretty ridiculous to me, in the same way that all attempts to universalise experiences are, and bullying n the way that we are repeatedly told that we must either pick one side or the other. But then, extremists never could brook dissent, could they? Why should our modern versions be any different, simply because they're (largely) American?  

The nonsense we find ourselves in will only be resolved when we admit that we are all human, and that our differences are superficial.. We are all victims of a system that seeks to divide us, to control us, and limits our understanding and our empathy. 

We call it reality.