56. On Reality vs The Plausible Narrative.

Dearly Beloved,

I recently felt the need to rebut the comment of someone who wrote that “Politics is all about plausible narratives rather than truths.” If we believe that then reality is lost to us; it is an ultimate statement of relativism. There are truths and there is reality, however difficult they may be to discern at times, and anyone who tells us otherwise is trying to confuse us so that they may impose their own version of “truth” and “reality”.

The issue of the nature of reality has become an issue of major importance because of the goings on in the USA associated with the Trump presidency. The foundation of all this seems to be an inability to comprehend reality. Some 35% of the population of the USA seem to have accepted the lie that President Biden did not win the election so Trump should remain as President. Unfortunately that is not the only misconception as many also believe in the grim and bizarre Q Anon conspiracy and others that the US is ruled by alien, shape shifting reptiles. Of course such conspiracies are always unsinkable hypotheses. Part of the Q Anon conspiracy is that information is provided by an unknown person in the part of the US intelligence service which manages nuclear weapons so he/she is unavailable to back up the information set out on Q Anon websites. When you say I can't see any reptiles, the reply can only be “of course not, they are shape shifters manifesting as human beings. Similarly if you say “I can't see the “deep state”, the ubiquitous root of so many conspiracy theories, the reply is, “no of course not, it's too deep to see....”

So what is going on here? Well perhaps there are two elements. The first is that modern life is lived amongst huge complexity. To manage that complexity it is necessary to continually make difficult decisions about reality, decisions requiring understanding of that complexity and based upon data which changes hour by hour. An example is the management of the Covid 19 epidemic where some people propounded the view that a lock down was needed to prevent the spread of the virus and reduce excess deaths so that the health services could cope and others were promoting the opposite view that economic activity was more important and lock downs should be abandoned.

Confronted daily with floods of contradictory information, it is not unreasonable to feel both left behind and  a sense of grievance. People are continually telling us things about life which we see no particular reason to believe. Furthermore we live in a competitive society so the continual imposition of the ideas of others involving things we do not understand is painful and we are made to feel irrelevant and vulnerable. 

One escape route is to reject the views of the “experts” and to produce and propound our own "facts", our own ideas about how the world works, and the more unsinkable they are the better because that ensures that it is difficult for others to challenge them. If we are able to do that our position in society is transformed and we find ourselves on top of the argument. Furthermore we can congratulate ourselves on seeing a reality not available to others. If we can find others who believe the same thing, then all the better – perhaps Q Anon's motto “Where We Go One We Go All! manages to combine the elan of The Three Musketeers (remember “All for One and One for All”) with the comfort of companionship for those who feel lonely and misunderstood in our demanding society.

There are no easy answers to all this but if we can avail ourselves of the compassion of the example of Christ then we can start the healing process by embracing others rather than rejecting them because we don't like their professed beliefs.

Peace,

Paul.

Completed 19 January 2021. Revised 9 November 2022.

Photo: Paul Munton.

Fen Drayton Lakes in Winter.



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