Tag: reality

Perception Vs. Reality

If you only get your news from the mainstream media, you would be tempted to believe that global conditions are relatively stable right now. 

Yes, there is a war between Russia and Ukraine, but the mainstream media is assuring us that Ukraine is winning that war. 

Other than that, the mainstream media seems to think that everything is just fine.

Of course the truth is that our planet is facing a whole host of extremely challenging problems at the moment.  The UN has warned that we are entering the worst global food crisis since World War II, inflation has started to spiral out of control all over the world, the war in Ukraine is making our supply chain nightmares even worse and an absolutely horrifying bird flu plague is killing millions upon millions of chickens and turkeys.

But if you flip on one of the corporate news channels tonight, they will be focusing on other things.

And you probably won’t even hear them talk about the food riots that have suddenly begun erupting around the world at all.

For example, a “curfew” has just been imposed on the capital of Peru after a series of extremely passionate protests that were sparked by rapidly rising fuel and food prices…

Peruvian President Pedro Castillo announced a curfew for Tuesday in the capital Lima and neighboring port city Callao, after demonstrations across the country over fuel prices caused roadblocks and “acts of violence”.

Protests had erupted across Peru in recent days due to a hike in fuel prices and tolls, during a time of rising food prices.

Is this the first time that you have heard about this?

For many of you it will be, and that is because the mainstream media in the U.S. is largely ignoring this.

In Sri Lanka, severe shortages of “food, medicine and fuel” have caused a full-blown economic collapse and tremendous chaos in the streets…

In Sri Lanka, where an economic crisis is growing, more than 40 lawmakers walked out of the ruling coalition today. That leaves the government of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa in the minority in Parliament. There have been new calls today for both the president and prime minister to step down after the entire Cabinet resigned on Sunday. Shortages of food, medicine and fuel have sparked countrywide protests, and security forces have fired tear gas and water cannons at protesters marching on the president’s home.

Most of you have probably not heard about that either, and that is because our largest news outlets are being really quiet about it.

But USA Today wants to make sure that you know about a new promotion that McDonald’s is running: “McDonald’s brings back Spicy Chicken McNuggets to select restaurants for a limited time”.

More than ever before, our perception of the world around us is shaped by the corporate elite.  Americans get more than 90 percent of the “television news” that they consume from just five giant media corporations, and so that gives those corporations an incredible amount of influence over how our society views reality.

For example, far more Americans are talking about “the slap” at the Academy Awards than about the fact that North Korea just threatened South Korea with nuclear war…

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Philip K. Dick Theorizes The Matrix in 1977, Declares That We Live in “A Computer-Programmed Reality”

In 1963, Philip K. Dick won the coveted Hugo Award for his novel The Man in the High Castle, beating out such sci-fi luminaries as Marion Zimmer Bradley and Arthur C. Clarke. Of the novel, The Guardian writes, “Nothing in the book is as it seems. Most characters are not what they say they are, most objects are fake.” The plot—an alternate history in which the Axis Powers have won World War II—turns on a popular but contraband novel called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. Written by the titular character, the book describes the world of an Allied victory, and—in the vein of his worlds-within-worlds thematic—Dick’s novel suggests that this book-within-a-book may in fact describe the “real” world of the novel, or one glimpsed through the novel’s reality as at least highly possible.

The Man in the High Castle may be Dick’s most straightforwardly compelling illustration of the experience of alternate realties, but it is only one among very many. In an interview Dick gave while at the high profile Metz science fiction conference in France in 1977, he said that like David Hume’s description of the “intuitive type of person,” he lived “in terms of possibilities rather than in terms of actualities.” Dick also tells a parable of an ancient, complicated, and temperamental automated record player called the “Capard,” which reverted to varying states of destructive chaos. “This Capard,” Dick says, “epitomized an inscrutable ultra-sophisticated universe which was in the habit of doing unexpected things.”

In the interview, Dick roams over so many of his personal theories about what these “unexpected things” signify that it’s difficult to keep track. However, at that same conference, he delivered a talk titled “If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others” (in edited form above), that settles on one particular theory—that the universe is a highly-advanced computer simulation. (The talk has circulated on the internet as “Did Philip K. Dick disclose the real Matrix in 1977?”).

The subject of this speech is a topic which has been discovered recently, and which may not exist all. I may be talking about something that does not exist. Therefore I’m free to say everything and nothing. I in my stories and novels sometimes write about counterfeit worlds. Semi-real worlds as well as deranged private worlds, inhabited often by just one person…. At no time did I have a theoretical or conscious explanation for my preoccupation with these pluriform pseudo-worlds, but now I think I understand. What I was sensing was the manifold of partially actualized realities lying tangent to what evidently is the most actualized one—the one that the majority of us, by consensus gentium, agree on.

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Orwell’s 1984 As Manual For The Woke

On learning that Twitter sanctioned Rep. Jim Banks for daring to refer to Assistant Secretary of Health R. Levine as a man (and that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene also referred, but without sanction, to Dr. Levine as a man) I turned, for insight on this peculiar assault on the concept of objective reality, to a classic novel on the nature of totalitarianism:  1984, by George Orwell.  Here are, I believe, relevant passages from the novel, from a torture scene, with torture applied to Winston Smith by O’Brien.

O’Brien to Winston Smith, undergoing torture: 

“Who controls the present, controls the past…” Signet Classic (paper), p.248

This is what Critical Race Theory is all about.

O’Brien to Winston Smith, undergoing torture, on the nature of reality:

“Only the disciplined mind can see reality, Winston. You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see  something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external.  Reality exists in the human mind,  and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes; only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party.”  Ibid, at p. 249

The Party says R. Levine is a woman; therefore, he is a woman.

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