I've been letting this diary gel in my head for a little while now, but the recent election of the new Pope gave me the impetus to actually write it. Before you start rolling your eyes, no this diary is not all that religious per se (even atheists shouldn't be too put off by what's in here I hope), it's more philosophical and, to some extent, political. It's more about my most recent thoughts on the Big Picture of what's really going on underneath all this crazy bullshit we've been dealing with in accelerating fashion over the past several years.
It starts with a single question: Given what you know about the possibilities of modern science and technology, combined with the multitude of possible ulterior motives of people in power (be they politicians, corporatists, or leaders of dogmatic religions)... does the concept of "truth" have any relevance anymore in the physical world?
Much more on the flip.
With sufficient effort and resources, any sensory media can now be faked with little-to-no variation off of what it would be if it were "real". Virtually any image can be photoshopped. Almost any motion video can be conjured through repeated application of the former. Just about any sound can be synthesized. For anything beyond what our biological senses can perceive in our immediate environment, nothing can be absolutely guaranteed as "real"; all we can do is accept or reject these things through consensus.
Now I'm not going to go off trying to justify "crazy" conspiracies like the idea that the U.S. didn't land on the moon or things like that. The more salient point is, with the technologies already available today, and the right resources and desire for collusion, wouldn't something such as a fake moonshot be perfectly viable today? Whether anyone would do it or not is not the point, it's the fact that we could, if the desire of sufficiently powerful people were to put it in motion.
Look at the Lord of the Rings movies for example. With the exception of a few "obvious" shots (mostly involving a digitized Orlando Bloom in an elf suit doing something wacky), those movies were an incredible example of what we can do in movies now. If anyone could watch those films 50 years ago (let alone centuries or millenia ago), they would have no idea, no idea at all, that Middle Earth and all its mythical inhabitants weren't completely and totally real, like they always existed and all we did was find them on a long-lost continent and start recording what we saw or something. Our ability to fake entire realms of existance has gotten so good now, suspension of disbelief isn't all that tough to achieve. But it's not just limited to entertainment. On the contrary, it's frikkin' everywhere.
So how does this relate to our present crazy situation? Simple. If we can fake everything, and hence "truth" in this world depends on consensus acceptance, then what we perceive as truth and "reality" depends entirely on who we choose to have a consensus with. I'm challenging the very essence of the phrase "reality-based community" here as being dependent on our choice of community, because without that community consensus there's no real hard justification anymore for what reality you're based in in the first place.
This is why wingnuts/zealots/etc can be so hard to talk to. It's not just that they're ignorant of reality, they're literally not in the same reality as you. They are surrounding themselves with a consensus reality that has increasingly little relationship to "ours". We can cite "facts" to dispute these people, but as my brother once said, "anyone can make up their own facts". We know this isn't true in a common frame of reality (where anyone can make up their own opinions, but not their own facts), but in this situation he's exactly right. Nowadays anyone can massage any data any way they like, frame polling questions any way they choose, cite research from anyone anywhere in the world based on data that cannot be confirmed nor denied (except again by consensus)... it all becomes a big blur. I had a political argument with my parents a few months back and we eventually had to agree that our entire foundations of reality were different; none of us could cite any factual evidence that the other could not question beyond a reasonable doubt. All of us were right, and none of us were, depending entirely on who we decided we could trust our basis of reality on.
Hence back to the "people in power" thing. In a political and corporate context, It's Rush and O'Reilly and Coulter and the like who are trusted to define the consensual basis of reality for the wingers. While we consider them as being deluded and us being more well-grounded in "reality", we admittedly still have a consensual basis for that reality, that being the world of other liberals and scientists and historians and the like. Sure we have a large population in this consensus (especially worldwide, although in the U.S. we're hurting), but it's still a consensus.
The more that people are overworked and underpaid and end up spending less time involving themselves in the world and more time in front of their TV or other passive media, the more that their involvement in their consensus reality (whatever it may be) is given up and handed over to others, in particular whoever is in control of that passive media. This isn't merely a matter of raw "ignorance", it is a willful surrender of one's reality to that which is defined by an outside force. The opposite extreme are those who give up modern civilization altogether and go "off the grid", where their reality becomes entirely defined by their own experiences and nobody else's. Most of us live somewhere in the middle.
So now the Big Picture.
As technology gets more and more advanced, and mass communication and hence mass consciouness becomes more pronounced (at what prior point in history could you talk to virtually anyone anywhere at any time?), I think a lot of our craziness these days is due to an inevitable singularity in consensus reality. This may sound "new agey", but bear with me. In prior centuries/millenia, individual families and tribes would have their own consensus that was manageable and independent. As tribes grew into communes grew into states grew into nations, this consensus got progressively more fractured and hard to control, but the lack of easy communication kept this from being a major issue in day-to-day life, since the local consensus still retained much of the focus. Only in the past century has this changed, and only in the past decade or so has it become inescapably pronounced, with the Internet and cellphones and globalization and a corporate machine that runs nonstop at nanosecond granularity.
The end result of this is that all of our consensus realities are rapidly being thrown together into the mix for the first time, splitting and recombining at a record pace. This has never happened in recorded history, and it's happening at an accelerating rate, coincident with the acceleration of technological progress. This is causing our small hairless-monkey brains to have to either A) form a new consensus compatible not just with a family or tribe, but a world of six billion people, or B) go completely batshit insane from the effort. By force of habit and due to the rapid rate of cultural change, most people seem to be following the latter approach, because they don't know of any other way to be (the rapid splitting and combining of these realities creates friends and enemies faster than you can keep track of them). You can't really blame people though, since the former approach is nearly impossible, unless you do one thing:
You accept a global consensus of there being no consensus, finally understanding that truth in the physical world is subjective to one's own experience and companions in that experience, and stop exhausting yourself trying to explain the details of your reality to those who don't reside there and never will. In this new meta-"consensus", there is only one real arbiter of truth, and that's you.
Understanding this is no longer just a matter of academic philosophy. On the contrary, it may be the only way to keep yourself intact, as the outside world grows progressively more insane. Feel free to try and bring some of your closest friends and family into the fold of your reality, but accept the limits of what you can do and take comfort in your efforts no matter how things proceed, because you can only so far. Once things go over the edge, people have to do this on their own. At the current rate, the "edge" should be in a decade or less, probably much less (it's possible we've already reached it, I don't know, once you get your mind out of the maelstrom it's hard to tell).
Now I could take the discussion even further and align this singularity of consensus reality with other things like Peak Oil and religious Armaggeddon prophecies and the like, but I won't. For those of you close enough to my own reality to understand what I mean in all this, you can connect those other dots however you like (for my part, I have, and those dots were definitely worth connecting, but I won't spoil it; figuring this out yourself is essential for it to sink in the right way).
Physical reality right now is completely crazy. But once you go beyond the addiction of consensus, you enter a sort of "meta-reality", where reality is just another manipulable construct (where you manipulate your consensus however you see fit). From this vantage point, the world becomes much more tolerable, relaxing... and incredibly hilarious.