What If ?
Seated in Starbucks this morning, marveling at the blue sky outside my window. Sunlight streams into the room whenever someone opens the front door entering or departing. I have more leaves to rake from the grass, and I am thankful to have yet another opportunity before the frost comes. The frost will come hard plunging all into winter, and then whatever remains to be done outside will have to wait for months.
Nature is a dance of opposites: heat and cold, winter and summer, with the in between months labeled spring and fall, the most agreeable. Spring is the season for planting, for the inception of new life. I’ve read that lambs are born in spring, the lambing season. Fall of course is the season of harvest when the produce of the Summers growth under the sun is gathered in.
This morning I wrestle with the intellectual conundrum of how it is possible for individuals whom I know well, and I have no reason to believe are beset by psychological/neurological pathology — could fully, without reservation buy into the Trump agenda, standing in full-throated collaboration with the President. Perhaps the dedication to this malevolent cause started out as an exercise in pragmatism: conservative policies are business friendly, and thus portend a better return on my retirement portfolio, etc. Who does not from time to time feel the insecurity common to all of us, and wish for a paradise, a return to Eden? And what if this longing is so persistent that one fails to fully appreciate that offer of a “cure” from the friction of life dispensed by a politician have to be short of the truth; and what if the buy- in progresses until……….
What if Reality in itself is incomplete? What if the Real is not a matter of “getting it right” of coming up with a more or less congruent mental representation of how things really are? What if reality at bottom is nothing but a void? What if reality is a matter of a network of relationships, of how we chose to relate to the elements at hand, and this concatenation of relationships becomes the Self that we mistake as an underlying fundament, the enduring “I” that I believe myself to be? What if the underlying void, the nothingness-of-reality allows for a phenomenal reality to be fashioned out of the stories which we tell ourselves and which we come to believe? Whereof this Thinkpad laptop, and this liquid-proof, holiday themed-graphically interesting cup of Starbucks coffee? Can I conceive a world where neither of these exist?
Could not the same be said of social structures, “democracy,” of “Trumpism”? Emphatically yes!
Seems to me the incompleteness of Reality, the absence of “bedrock,” the void, allows for a “world” where children are separated from their parents and placed in cages at our southern border, a “world” where intellectual achievement is devalued and de-funded, a “world” where Nature is understood as a resource to be plundered/monetized, a “world” where the aggrandizement of power outweighs the increasing atmospheric and oceanic heat load which will tip Nature into a state inauspicious to many species. And so on.
In 1959 Richard Feynman gave a speech, There Is Plenty of Room At the Bottom about the void. I just downloaded a copy and look forward to reading it. By all means JOIN ME
Could these days be the concluding pleasant days of Fall?
I am indebted to Slavoj Zizek for these ideas.
4 thoughts on “What If ?”
I diagnose an overdose of philosophy reading, Jerry. Put down that bilious Nietzsche and go play with some children and/or dogs, who never doubt where reality lies. Heck, go change a diaper! What could be realer than that? With that foundation, the rest comes into focus.
Maybe more such direct confrontation with the physical experience of other beings is what ideologues need to jolt them from airy ideas into tangible reality.
Wish that an overdose of philosophy, like drinking too much milk, might be the cause of my unease with the world as I find it. I can appreciate the reality of children at play or the romping of a dog — but I still have a role to play in an adult world that is more complex, and more dangerous than that of children or pet animals. They have the benefit of being cared for and of relative ignorance.
Nietzsche helps. And he was a proponent of direct confrontation with physical experience and a foe of Platonic idealism, and of institutions that hurt people by systematically lying to them the church being a prime example.
Isn’t philosophy, at its most basic, an attempt by a creature with limited abilities (where the central organ of comprehension is hold up in a sensory deprived cranium) to understand the world, ourselves and the why’s and wherefore’s of existence? You are certainly not the first, nor will you be the last, to question the malleability of what we refer to as reality. To me, as much as I would like there to be solid ground under my feet and an indisputable bedrock of something we can refer to as truth and the “real” world, I can’t wrap my head around the disparity with which we humans view our environment and the justification of what I subjectively view as abhorrent behavior. It does seem as if there must be parallel realities just as many scientists believe there are parallel universes existing in the same space where we live and breathe. How else can we explain Devin Nunes or Steven Miller or Donald Trump or millions of others who firmly believe in a reality that, to many others, can’t possibly exist? Some proclaim with certainty that the world is flat or that some dark conspiracy is poisoning our species through “Chem-Trails”. Of course, this is utter nonsense to those who study science, yet these people are entrenched in their beliefs and will not budge. What “reality” do they live in that allows for what appears to be a highly dysfunctional perspective? I don’t have an answer and, unfortunately, I don’t think any of us do have that elusive answer.
What “reality” do they live in that allows for what appears to be a highly dysfunctional perspective?
That indeed is the question which may only be answerable by those who can look back at this time, after a hundred years or so have passed. Presently we are inside of this nightmare, even as were the Germans in the late years of the Weimar Republic when the Hitler brought the status quo to an end by initiating government by decree. There seems to be a general, wide-spread malaise that has infected our people. We are a affluent first world country and are manifestly unsatisfied with what we have for many reasons. With the election of Trump enough of us have found a venue for expressing our nihilistic point of view, that is our willingness to destroy our institutions, and take untold multitudes with us into the maelstrom of chaos.