The Reality Bubble

Reality really is relative, as described by both Psychologists and Physicists. Fairly recent theoretical discoveries in M-Theory (String Theory for those keeping score from home) seem to indicate that every moment that passes in our lives can be perceived in three dimensions; as I look around my dining room right now, I see a Maroon-Bellied Conure approximately two meters in front of me and a stove three meters to my right. If I wish to get up and go down the hallway, my objective reality can perceive the obstacles along my course of travel and plan accordingly. Yet, at the same moment, everything is also being projected, in two dimensions onto the surface of the expanding wave-front of the cosmos. However, since I am still typing this, I have chosen not to get up. Yet not just the events of me continuing to type are being projected onto this expanding surface, but even the act of me getting up to check out the refrigerator have also been projected nearby. I am still typing, yet in an endless fracturing of the possibilities of space-time, I did indeed get up to check out the left overs from last night's dinner. I can not perceive that reality, yet it did, both objectively and subjectively occur elsewhere. It occurred elsewhere and else-when, though it is impossible for me to either see (since the 2-d projection is retreating, at some times, faster than the speed of light) or otherwise perceive that event.

Reality sure can be a hoot, can it not?

People have a reality bubble around them that is not necessarily based on objective reality, rather it is based on highly personal subjective reality. Many call this a "world-view", I like to think of it as a "reality-filter". The filter is specifically designed and created by the individual to promote a stable psychological gestalt of self. Events of self reflection and introspection can sometimes lead one to alter their filters and thereby alter their perception of reality. I believe that this is something most people do as they grow older and mature their self-image. There are plenty of ex-hippies who protested the Vietnam War, protested the draft, and told the government to stay out of their lives (you're oppressing us, maaaannn), yet are now the same ones that send our young men off to war (who, by and large are quite willing), propose a new draft in the interest of fairness ( Charlie Rangle), and are now telling me that the very air I exhale is a poisonous and toxic material. Boy, have their filters undergone an alteration. When I ask these individuals (common folk like me that just happen to be the supporters of those individuals) the answer I get back is a perplexing look, hand gesticulations, and a sentence that trails off that usually ends like, "but this is........different". Right.

What I have trouble understanding is how an individual can be intelligent enough to develop economic or political theories that, when practiced in the real world (yes, I know, reality can be rather odd) produce failure, misery, and death squads; then proudly tell the American people that we just have not been doing enough of that economic or political theory (specifically Keynesian economics and Statism). Hello, can we recall Cambodia, Vietnam, China, Russia, and even the French Revolution? Can we recall Weimar Republic Germany, Zimbabwe (Rhodesia) or Argentina; heck, even the PIIG nations of Southern Europe. Germany just had the best economic upswing in 20 years and STILL posted a more than doubling of their budget debt! How long does or can this go one before people figure it out and think to themselves that spending away the future of your children for self-gratification (or aggrandizement) today is not the right way to go? Perhaps trying to control how a person lives, eats, dresses, consumes, or yes, dare I say it, breathes, may not be the best things for us to be doing?

What is their motivation for the destruction of the American way of life? What can possibly appeal to our political leaders about the European and Asian concepts of Communism and Statism? Power, the lust for glory and historical remembrance? Can we be so base as that?

According to my wife, yes. We can be and, deep down, most of us are. Having grown up on the other side of the Iron Curtain, her reality is frequently at odds with mine. She sees my world view as being unrealistically optimistic and incredibly simple at times. She sees the military as a tool of oppression, not liberation by those in power and she sees those who serve their careers in the military as being good for nothing productively else in society (present military excluded, of course). Should I try to alter her subjective reality? No. Actually, upon self-reflection the vast history of our culture has indeed been one of oppression, power and plunder. America is a unique experiment, blessed by God and given an opportunity to be the exception, not the rule.

The time has come where America is at an historical evolutionary cross-roads. We can either stay true to our heritage or we can follow the well-worn path of central control of both the material and the imaginary (thought, creativity, expression and the like). The Progressives have done their level best to slowly destroy our heritage and make it easy for us to accept the chains of Statism. We have been lulled into a waking dream and pulled, step by step, decade by decade down the path of Statism and it is only a very, very short step to complete the process. We are waking up to the danger and have been stirring since the times of Ronald Reagan, but we have been pulled hard lately and maybe enough people have not been awoken.

The subjective reality for me is grim. I am afraid for where this country has been going and what the 60's liberals have done to both my future and those of my children. The objective reality is that we will just have to live with it and change it where it is within my power to change. Progressives and Statists (is there a difference?) are getting their subjective and objective realties to line up. I have to wonder if the masses of them will not, when they are older and have seen yet another failure, a large and impressive failure on the scale of the United States, alter their perception filters to see what they and those like them wrought upon the world?

Perhaps, perhaps not. Maybe there is no single reality that is "right" or "correct". Maybe things just "are". In Quantum Theory, human thought is able to affect the outcome of experiments that are "either/or" results. I wonder if enough of us thought a certain way we can affect reality and get things to turn our way in the end. You know, I believe that this is possible. A wise man, more than 2,000 years ago caused a book to come into being and he said something along those lines. What we call "desires" today, they called "prayer" then. If enough of us pray for deliverance, then deliverance will come. Now, this is very odd that science can discover, or theoretically outline something that has been the exclusive realm of religion for millennia. The Catholic church is correct to say that science and religion (today) do not have to be mutually exclusive. Just as Issac Newton, who edited a bible or Albert Einstein who stated that the perfection of the Universe could not have been an accident.

I think it is time for me to go study my reality filters and perform some more introspective tune-ups.

The Stoa is open.

--Zavost