I have been told that reality is a matter of perspective, which begs the question “does reality change with perspective or just our perception of reality?”. Is something “real” because we believe it to be so, or is that just individual perception altering our sense of reality?
Our national identity has jostled around over the years since our country’s birth, with the ever present tug of certain wealthy folk trying to manipulate circumstances in their favor. This has left me questioning the nature of certain realities in life. Is our nation what it aspires to be or what it allows itself to become, and in turn, am I what I aspire to be or what I allow myself to become? And ultimately, am I truly what I perceive myself to be or is my perception altering my sense of reality?
When one begins to explore these questions under the light of our current political circumstances, it’s easy to drown in the sheer quantity of new questions this produces, and even easier to get discouraged by how difficult finding understanding/answers appears to become. However is this not the natural plight of all large complicated things; to be difficult to build, comprehend, and defend the sanctity of?
The moment we began to build massive societies, we created the inevitability of this complication. The moment we began to seek deeper understanding of ourselves physically/emotionally/spiritually, individually and as communities, we guaranteed the certainty of great complexity in whatever we would find/come to understand.
This is to say, the complexity which discourages us is natural, both in form and our reaction to it. We could never have advanced as people or societies though, if we had not strove to exceed those natural limitations, overcoming our fears, and comprehending that which only great study/thought could reveal. We have been trained to think only a special kind of person can understand the greater concepts in life, but I’d argue as Albert Einstein said “if you can’t explain it simply, then you don’t understand it well enough.”
Perhaps the fine details are saved for particular minds, but i believe we all can understand the greater concepts, if they are explained the right way. Our perspective of such things needs to be changed. Or maybe a better way to put it would be, that it needs to be naturalized. That which has influenced/altered it needs to be removed.
One of the most terrifying pieces of knowledge humankind has uncovered, sitting on the same level of destructive power as the atomic bomb, is that of the mind, our study of psychology and sociology. To wield/uncover such knowledge without a regulating morality or set of ethics can only encourage those who would abuse it, to do so.
Throughout human history there have always been those who sought to control the masses through various means, but no form of control is more thorough nor complete than convincing people they are doing what you want for their own purposes and of their own volition.
As I have questioned my perception of reality, I struck a wall of misinformation, attempting to lead me away from what I was trying to understand. I found that big money manipulates the perception of the masses, through everything they own and operate, as well as through the politicians and elections they buy. So people will act in a controlled fashion, producing the end result those in control desire.
This is the reason why so many mistake the class/wealth distribution war, for all the other issues which stem directly from it. In order to blame something for the issues they perceive, they have to understand what is causing them. So these wealthy special interests have attacked our dictionaries, encyclopedias, schools, and all our sources of seeking out information. They have begun to alter our very means of learning the deeper truths behind what we see.
They are cutting off our ability to learn from what is already known, by forcing us to question even the sources which used to be trustworthy. Are our textbooks giving correct info? Depends on the state and who wrote it, and even who sits in the white house. Is google search giving us a credible source, or a biased one? Usually biased, per search algorithms designed to intuit what we want from past metadata. Are our teachers giving us accurate information? Depends on the teacher and their own ability to comprehend reality passed the misinformation flooding it. We certainly don’t pay teachers enough to encourage the best and brightest to enter the field, so good ones should be considered the exception, not the rule.
Are our role-models giving us good information? Not likely when our role-models are taken from people uneducated in that which they are informing us on. Are our educational channels telling the truth? That depends on the intentions of those that own them. Anyone with money/means can “educate” in that fashion, and now with the internet, facebook, twitter, and youtube, this removes the need of the money part.
What in the world can we trust to give us information now? When I ask questions and seek answers in the vast well of human knowledge gathered throughout history, what can assure me my source isn’t manipulating the information somehow? Do we all now have to start from scratch each time, learning/experimenting personally, in order to be sure what we know is the truth? When we allowed rich special interests to take over the government, we granted full access to manipulate our “official” sources indiscriminately, wherever it suits them. Example, Trump with climate change.
We have no assured way of knowing the information we are taking in is 100% accurate or true, other than to base an assumption off the source’s education and demonstrated set of morals/ethics. This has left the whole of society reeling in uncertainty, unsure what to think or believe, as their country declines with the slow theft of all its wealth. Unsure what to do about it, even if they see passed all the misinformation, because those causing all these issues now control both the entire system and our only means of policing it.
We are an ant, in comparison to them being Godzilla. The ironic part of this is that if the masses could join in common united cause, they would be Godzilla, in comparison the small number of rich special interests being the ant. In order to do that though, if it’s even possible at all, we would need the ability to communicate a united message to all people, and they would need the ability to perceive the truth accurately.
We have the means to communicate that message, but the people have no means to accurately assure they are perceiving the truth. Forcing them to make a judgement call that automatically divides the group, ultimately defeating the purpose of the whole endeavor.
If perception truly is reality, then we have no means of sharing the same one. This will impact not only our ability to learn from each other and our past, but also our very means to communicate with each other. For you to read this, we had to previously agree that each word used here, has a specific meaning we all have access to knowing. Therefore I believe that there is a reality to things which exists despite our perception of them.
I come to this conclusion, because we have nothing without believing it to be true. We would have the ability to question, yet no ability to answer, and certainly no ability to share answers with anyone else. I have come to understand that things gain a shared/mutually agreed meaning, through group perception of them. This also implies that there has to be a shared context of what is being mutually understood. Therefore, if what we are being told appears to be in stark contrast to the reality we can readily perceive, its worth questioning what we’re being told.
The confusion from misinformation in our society has gotten so extreme that many people can’t even agree on right or wrong anymore, good vs bad. This, despite the fact we all have a shared context for these concepts. From the moment we are born we begin to interpret and learn from our environment. The most natural behavior we can learn is to interpret our environment through our personal experience of it.
Without the intervention of listening to good advice, we learn not to touch the stove, by the harm we suffer in touching it. We now have the opportunity to make the connection that others who touch it would likely suffer the same result. The golden rule isn’t just a nice catchphrase, it’s derived from the most natural means we have to learn right from wrong, and good vs bad, in the context of other people. So they can have different meanings if you are alone, but would almost always have a shared meaning around others.
Barring a mental disorder, we all have the ability to learn from our experiences this way hardwired into our genetic code from birth. Its part of our most primal survival instincts. You can imagine how difficult it would be to procreate, if people didn’t want to be around you. To say nothing of safety in numbers, which you wouldn’t have the benefit of. For the infinite amount of different minds and views and perspectives, we are all running the same machine with those minds. Nothing could exist in nature without the cooperation and combination of various things.
We are all made up of molecules which have to coalesce in the form and being of “us”. Our organs have to be in a particular place in our bodies, performing a specific task, otherwise our body would die. Just lifting your hand to your face requires a huge number of bodily functions to go off in just the right order, at just the right time, to be interpreted by this machine of yours in just the right way.
There are far more shared contexts of our experience and interpretation of life, than some people give human beings credit for. Who can blame them though, when the places they trust to inform them keeping hammering away on how different we all are, and how our neighbor is to blame for our circumstance?
For example, our emotions have an underlying purpose many people don’t always pick up on. They are there to inform the mind/body, to help it proliferate, educate it, and warn it. Guilt can be a natural warning you’re doing something bad. Pain warns of present harm to the mind/body, and can educate it against future harm. Love forms attachments necessary for protection and procreation. Happiness feeds the mind/body, making personal connections easier to form, and motivating continued efforts towards survival.
Even the opposite states of our emotions exist to give reference to each other. Our emotions don’t have to divide us just because they are fueled by so many different experiences and personalities. As with so much of life, they exist in both states, different yet similar. The way we view the world and our personal environment, as well as our place and relation to them, shapes not only our reactions to everything, but can be the wall standing in the way of what we all individually seek, whatever that may be.
To find common ground, we have to understand the necessity of common context. So it’s important to know that everyone will have a different perspective, but that doesn’t mean they don’t share a common context. For example, if multiple people live in a community they may perceive things differently on a personal level, but their common context is the society they live in, at the very least.
They may all view the criteria of good vs bad in a different light, but they have a shared context in the form of the community they live in, and the fact that it serves no purpose to have a community, if their goal isn’t working together so that they ALL might prosper from the existence of that community.
So therefore, anything which hurts their community is bad, and anything that helps it is good. In turn, that means that anything that hurts the individual in that community is bad, and anything that helps them is good. We must also realize that hurting one group to help another is illogical. That, in relation to the community, would be like chopping off your leg to help your arm. It’s all attached to the same body, so hurting one part to help another...just winds up hurting period, and doesn’t accomplish anything but digging a pointless hole you’ll be forced to address eventually.
So who are we as a nation? Who am I as a person? Our ability to interpret differently has made these questions nearly impossible to answer, because we are letting them con us into getting caught up on the wrong details. All they have to do is prove the existence of differing perspectives, and suddenly we don’t know what details are important anymore. In other words, we don’t know what makes up our reality anymore, because we let them convince us to question the wrong aspects. “Question everything” doesn’t mean everything is questionable.
For example, the PC debate has nothing to do with being too PC or too little, it has to do with taking the time/effort to be a decent human being to those you interact with. That is all. That is it. Our political parties would REALLY like us to believe otherwise though, so we can argue with our neighbors over what counts, instead of with those making a problem out of it. So who are we as a nation?
We are, as a nation, what we allow ourselves to become, because if we take no responsibility for letting it get this way, then we have no control over steering it in a different direction. We can’t take credit for only our successes, because then we can’t learn from our mistakes, which will condemn us to endlessly repeat them.
Like giving unlimited power, over and over and over again, devoid of regulation, to those with the MOST motivation and the MOST capability to cause harm on the largest conceivable scale. Seriously, what has caused us to avoid making the most important law, ever to be needed in order to have a functional society? Laws have no purpose, if they don’t apply to those who will cause the most harm in breaking them.
I find myself asking what it entails to be a genuinely “good” person. I have found that life fights a natural state of “good”, because life exists in an ever neutral state, oblivious to the human definitions of “right” vs “wrong”. To me, this means that to be “good” it takes a conscious effort to be so, otherwise you sit in a neutral place inbetween.
This by default means however, that you fall on the bad end more readily than the good one, because it will always take effort to be good, but being bad can be accomplished through nothing more than the decision to do nothing. This unavoidably breaks down the spectrum of behavior into good, bad, and really bad, in my mind. No neutral. This means that I am what my actions make me.
It is time to take back our minds, our country, and our reality, from those that have abused and destroyed every society created since the beginning of recorded history. We will never advance as a species, and we will slowly continue to lose our grasp of reality, until we finally say the worst crimes/criminals should be dealt with first, not ignored entirely.
Society, in part, exists to make the regulation of those who would intentionally cause harm possible, not to enable those that destroy societies, and then provide them with a free slave labor force. That would make utterly no sense at all. Why join a society that only exists to abuse you? You wouldn’t. Welcome to what a small group of rich people have turned America into, and you get BORN into it. There is no choice. This is now our reality.
After deep reflection and a great deal of research, I have found there is no issue that doesn’t directly connect back to the influence of big money. So no matter what the question, whether it be what constitutes reality or even our own perception of ourselves, dealing with the influence of big money has to be the first and most relevant answer.
(all artwork done by me)
Good post, and welcome to the community. I agree that or society is having an identity crisis. I view it as a transition...a transition between who we were and who we are going to become. Our country (the U.S) has changed a tremendous amount in the last 10 years and promises to change just as much the next 10. In fact, looking back at history, I am not sure that residents of different eras didn't feel the same way. It just so happens that we are here, now, at this moment and in this reality and it feels chaotic. But I'm not so sure that previous generations didnt feel the same way. I will upvote and follow.
Great response and thank your for the upvote and follow. I did the same after reading a few of your posts. I'll go through more of them when I get a chance, but I loved what I saw. Great analysis and thoughts on Clifford's Ethics of Belief. I'm chewing on it at the moment and plan on sharing my own thoughts.
Thank you for the comment! Clifford's Ethics of Beliefs is one those concepts that resonates with me, because I do think it is beneficial for us to examine and investigate beliefs and I do think that our beliefs manifest themselves into action at some point, so they will have repercussions on those around us. However, I find it challenging to allow myself to find someone's inaction immoral because they did not investigate their beliefs enough. Who is to be the judge of this? That's where my issue is.
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STOPHi @drawncollusion, thank you for this article and you artwork. You are asking a lot of excellent questions and I too, have many of the same questions. Yesterday, I wrote about an integrative philosophy: https://steemit.com/philosophy/@contemplate/integrative-philosophy-introduction In it I am trying to develop a framework and means to bring people together and to also contemplate your question of what is real? Your article illustrates many of the reasons why we remain asleep, how our filters (both born with and learned) are keeping us from asking the bigger questions.
Thank you for the reply. I'm checking out your article now, and I look forward to writing my thoughts. I read your I robot article though and i'll have fun responding to that one. I have been contemplating and mulling over the idea of AI for quite some time. In fact, my two favorite topics right now, not attached specifically to how we live, are AI and our growing/new understanding of ancient human history.
I look forward to hearing about your thoughts. I am also interested in AI and ancient history, there is a lot of mystery there.
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