The Reality War
Revised May 24, 2017.
The world is not as it seems. Something is wrong, and I know many, many more people feel this now than when I wrote this piece over a year ago. There is a fairly simple explanation hidden behind seemingly impossible to overcome barriers that prevent serious consideration of this understanding.
Many of us are caught in what could be fairly called a kind of magic spell; I’ll explain this more deeply soon, but for now, consider that people see the mechanism of reality from different perspectives. We assemble our understanding of our thoughts and experiences. I believe there is a singular, unifying explanation, but it will take me a little while longer to thread that particular needle.
There are different houses of “magic” — science, the esoteric, religion, creativity — all these things go deeper than most realize, certainly not like Einstein or DaVinci or Socrates or Gandhi — some see the interconnectedness of reality more than others — and appear as wizards or geniuses or saints to others.
Those same but different definitions of similar observations makes us blind to the largest problems facing us. We face a critical juncture, witnessing our own inability to reconcile thousands upon thousands of years of history, ideology, science and philosophy (including religion) in the relatively tiny amount of time man achieved global communication.
We are all biased towards the complex networks of systems we adopt and change over the course of our life, beginning with the doctrine taught by our parents, each of us, our always evolving individual worldview.
From the moment we learn the definition of words as a child, complex metaphors are created for how we experience the world. We attach words, symbols, memes, to nameless ideas and feelings we experience. This process is different for each, and yet there are predictable patterns.
Therein lies the catch — those patterns look different depending on your perspective, just like a sculpture looks different when viewed from the side vs. the front.
Some of these perspectives can be effectively changed or reinterpreted, but some of them are nearly fundamental to the thing we’d call our soul — “who we are” — the bedrocks upon which we build our psyches.
Sometimes we rebel, destroying and rebuilding these fundamental beliefs, and other times we simply adopt the way we were taught in childhood and see no need to change.
Far more people now than a year ago will admit we are facing a monumental communication problem within America and our entire species at this pivotal moment in history. It seems those who seem to understand the depth of this discord mostly throw their hands up and say “we’re powerless to change it,” or even worse, complain or even demonstrate against what they dislike rather than offering a better, more realistic vision. I am trying to move from the former to the latter.
I don’t agree with those who think we are powerless, especially in the past few weeks. If we can find a way to see the core issues that underlie so much discord, I still believe we can work towards an ultimately win/win scenario for most of mankind. The first step is finding a way back to any kind of shared reality, reversing this ever-escalating polarization.
Some of these ideas seem impossible to implement — laughably naive, even, but can we put the impossibility of execution aside for a moment to consider them? First we must admit we have a problem, then consider possible causes, consider possible solutions, and present a vision that is adaptive and clear.
The hardest part, of course will be designing any kind of implementation, because this will be a multi-generational effort require work and sacrifice in an instant credit, instant gratification age.
These are big ideas, but the massive problems we are ignoring will take big ideas to address.
- The entire world financial system might need to be rapidly restructured, as it makes no sense whatsoever for an efficient means of regulating supply and demand, resource distribution, and positive working environments for all. The Petrodollar — and the backroom dealing surrounding the relationship between the United States, Russia, Saudi Arabia, is precariously unbalanced, and is the ‘invisible hand’ behind most of the world’s strife. While secret backroom dealings comprise some of the danger, technology, US domestic production, and complex historical geopolitical landmines are converging as the values of Russia’s exports are falling. It’s a pretty good guess as to why we just greenlit the largest sale of military hardware ever to a country that supplied 15 of 19 hijackers on 9/11, not to mention its probable funding.
- Humans are changing rapidly, and the disparity globally between those with multi-generational intellectual nurturing and competition vs those with manual labor skills is as wide as it has ever been, and these divides are both within towns and between countries.
- Our global education system, especially in the United States is no longer viable. It is yet another ‘industrial complex’ — in a country filled with industrial complexes, far more than just the military one.
- Holding ideas hostage through patents and copyrights may have been necessary in the old economy, and protection and reward of innovation is still important, but the “first to the patent then lock away for years” is an absurd model. And rather than reducing the length of these protections consistent with the acceleration of humanity, we are moving the opposite direction.
- America needs to have a very difficult open discussion about many social issues between countries, religions, gender etc — and we cannot be either arrogant liberals, nor unchangeable conservatives in the discussions — we must work hardest to hear the parts of the controversies we may not understand.
- We need an ideological starting point, to know where we’re at: We need clear answers from all our leaders about their beliefs when it comes to literal interpretations of religions in the modern era without these words becoming a declaration of war. It should be easy for us all to say what we actually believe considering our constitution— why can’t we?
If some of our elected representatives believe we are experiencing an end-times scenario according to the book of Revelation, I’d like to know officially. I want to know what they BELIEVE — and we should all want this, no matter what we BELIEVE. That’s the point — it’s a belief — not a fact.
We live in a time where many are under the spell of a belief that anything can, and must be proven to be taken seriously, yet now more than ever, uncertainty is part of our existence. Reality can be completely manufactured:
We live in a world where Edward Snowden, former NSA operative, now fugitive in Moscow might already be no more believable than a Pixar character. Electronic reality can be faked, any security can be breached, and many believe whatever they read on the internet as fact. We are hooked up to a constant stream of whatever opinion we find most comfortable.
This is an existential crisis if ever there was one, but we can’t stop, step back, and look at the whole thing. We are caught in an unintentional war for reality at the largest scale imaginable.
We increasingly self segregate into niche worldviews thanks to “the algorithm” and more recently, have been encouraged to actively dismiss any ideas as “fake news.”
This has created a critical vulnerability in humanity on so many levels we still don’t know how much this distortion of reality affected our recent election — or most terrifying, which parties were behind it?
There is a war for reality itself, and on the one hand, we’ve always been a part of it, yet it’s never been easier to manipulate and deceive on such a massive scale at such a rapid pace.
Something is very wrong here, and we need each other’s help. The dissolution of anything resembling a shared truth can only lead towards chaos.
The first step is to admit we have a problem, and the easiest way to take it is to acknowledge that the entrenched political parties disconnect is masking one of two things: The real truth is being actively hidden from us, or those in charge really are more ignorant than we are.
The second step? This requires crossing a difficult personal threshold — We must accept that any of our most deeply held certainties MAY be wrong. We must be open to changing our minds about ANYTHING. Until we can each offer that ourselves, we have no right to expect that from anyone else.
The third step: Get together and have difficult conversations, especially with people who are not like you. Try to HEAR them as much as possible. Sometimes it is not. I often have difficulty with this, and I’m a downright hypocrite when it comes to certain members of my family. We have our own reality war.
And that is my final point — This all begins at home. How can we expect to change the minds of strangers if we cannot find shared reality with our own loved ones? I am still searching for the reality in my own life where this is possible. And I have a plan. It’s just taking more time than I was expecting.
But for better or worse, over the past 14 months, the world has come far closer to the things I’ve been saying, like this facebook post I wrote about Edward Snowden on January 15, 2014.
“There are far bigger threats in china and russia, and cybersecurity in general that we should be focusing on. And the way of doing that is not at the cost of our rights to privacy.”
I had no way of knowing a little more than 2 years later, I would stand on the stage at Johns Hopkins university and speak directly with Edward Snowden, asking a question that would become downright prophetic not only in 2016, but even moreso as time progresses.
But that’s a different story.
