Reality Check

'The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.' - George Orwell

'There is a reason why they don't want people in churches, bars, and large groups in private places; This is where information is passed, and this is where revolution begins.' - Unknown

Most of us would never think to question the nature of reality. Reality simply is what it is. Isn’t it? Most have never even thought about it. Most would never even consider thinking about it. Why would you?

But suppose, as a thought experiment, reality bears only a fleeting, arbitrary relation to experience. Suppose reality is just a construct; simply a lens through which we perceive a world which is really just a chaotic mess of stuff. What if ‘reality’ is just a tool for making sense of the external world?

Furthermore, what if reality is socially determined by factors like what is popular and fashionable? Or in a more authoritarian setting, what is permissible?

And what if this lens we call reality should begin to crack? What happens when what we accept as ‘reality’ is no longer adequate to explain our experience in a way that makes sense to us? What happens when the tool is no longer fit for purpose?

I quote once again from my friend Jim Shepard who sums it up nicely here.

A feature of American society is the "consensus opinion". Americans are in a hustling, fast paced acquisitive society; they go between work and home and they have to depend on the newspapers to tell them what the correct "consensus opinion" is so that they will get along, keep their jobs and social contacts. But over time cracks appear in what is assumed to be the "consensus opinion", "Public opinion". This is inevitable because in a mass commercial society things change, work changes, events move, recessions happen. Some people start to notice that the received, "consensus opinion" no longer fits the reality they live in. The newspaper starts to sound like platitudinous, vacuous falsity. People whisper among themselves. They go along and pretend to agree at the workplace. But then they start to realize that they aren't alone in their doubts, their colleagues and neighbours begin to realize that they've all been pretending to agree. The new consensus builds silently underneath the old. Until the day comes when some newspaper dares to print the new idea and people realize this is truly their opinion. The new consensus takes fire and the old consensus, which seemed so solid just yesterday, collapses in one day.

I don't know how many have noticed, presumably not many, but today the US capital, often acclaimed as a paragon of democracy and self governance, is under military occupation, surrounded by a razor wire perimeter fence and guarded by thousands of military personnel. Official media is calling it the “green zone”, a term commonly used to refer to the heavily fortified centre of the Iraqi capital and centre of the international presence in that country since the 2003 US-led invasion. Meanwhile liberals are waving their rainbow flags, rejoicing that the authoritarian Orange Turd has been vanquished and that democracy has finally been restored in the land of the free.

I actually had a friend say to me last year that Trump should be locked up for crimes against reality. He was being funny, or so he thought. It says something about where we've come as a society that the Biden Administration has announced it will be appointing a ‘reality czar’ to keep us safe from misinformation. This surely raises the question though, misinformation according to whom?

This week Liberal MP Craig Kelly is under fire for suggesting we should be looking into long established and proven effective drugs like Ivermectin and Doxycyclin for the treatment of Covid 19, rather than rushing the rollout of an insufficiently tested vaccine for which there is no long term data. Despite peer reviewed evidence of the safety and effectiveness of these treatments, and their widespread use in many parts of the world outside of our myopic political and media bubble – places like India, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa and Slovakia – the consensus opinion is that Kelly’s claims are ‘dangerous conspiracy theories’ which have been ‘widely debunked’.

Now I don't like defending Craig Kelly anymore than I like defending Trump. He is an obnoxious loudmouth whom I would even describe as ‘toxic’. But I do believe that people deserve a fair hearing and not to be cancelled, dismissed and ridiculed when something they say conflicts with the consensus view. Whatever happened to debate? I guess it went the way of science. Science used to be something we did. I.E. put forward an hypothesis, test it, form a theory, look for countervailing evidence, put forward a new hypothesis, repeat. Nowadays science it is something we are told we must 'trust'. Has it even occurred to anyone that scientists, just like politicians, can be bought and paid for?

Let me drop a metaphor on you.

There are a few people I know outside of social media acquaintances, a small handful, who have shown themselves capable of critical thinking and honest self reflection. Most however are all too eager to join the pile on when it comes to calling out dissent. Some even going out of their way. “Why would you believe this nonsense?” "This is just a conspiracy theory." "This has been 'debunked'". Such refrains are usually accompanied by name-calling, with many popular flavours to choose from including 'anti-vaxxer', 'transphobe', 'misogynist', 'homophobe', 'anti semite', 'tankie', 'fascist' etc.

I suppose at the end of the day this is just a defence mechanism. People have good reason for not wanting to have their reality challenged. More so the ‘consensus reality’. Imagine waking up one day and finding that everything you thought you knew about the world wasn't true at all? Imagine finding out you were wrong about things which you were deeply invested in? Wouldn’t you be inclined to double down?

I get it. When you squeeze your eyes shut and wear a peg on your nose it's easy to pretend it's a warm summer shower while politicians, media, colleagues, friends and even family piss in your face from sun-up til sunset.

But if you happen to be someone who prefers to walk around with their eyes open, maybe because you like to know where you're going and don't want to step in dog shit, it stings and it stinks.

I’m sorry for that. It was crude and perhaps unnecessary. The truth can be like that sometimes.

Here's another truth bomb. The 2020 US presidential election was stolen in broad daylight. 

“Why do you believe this, Sean?”

Umm… honestly? Because every US election is rigged! But in this case, how about because I watched the vote count in real time and noted the statistical improbability of late votes in four states being almost 100% in favour of Biden? How about because the average voter turnout was 67% across all states except those states affected by this so-called 'blue-shift', in which it approached 90%? How about the fact that Trump was actually popular among voters for clear reasons - like the fact that the average American family, pre-pandemic, was earning about $95 a month more than four years previous, the biggest rise in real income seen in the last 30 years? Or that Trump’s rallies had massive turnouts while Biden barely pulled crowds in the hundreds, where he bothered to campaign at all? I mean, I could list a litany of reasons. How about the fact that the Ukraine-gate story was actively suppressed across legacy and social media in the weeks leading up to the election?

The real question for me is why won’t the media investigate the evidence of election rigging instead of saying it has been disproved? Why won't the media and the courts give the claims of voter fraud a fair public hearing? 

As CJ Hopkins writes "They know exactly what they are doing … which is teaching us a lesson, a lesson about power. The name of the lesson is 'Look What We Can Do to You Any Time We Fucking Want.'” Or perhaps more familiarly “They know we know they're lying, but they keep lying to us, and we keep pretending to believe them”.

Today that venerated organ of public opinion-making Time Magazine has come out with a story headlined “The Secret Bipartisan Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election”

"'It was all very, very strange,' Trump said on Dec. 2. 'Within days after the election, we witnessed an orchestrated effort to anoint the winner, even while many key states were still being counted.' In a way, Trump was right. There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans" ... "it sounds like a paranoid fever dream – a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information."

THIS IS THE SAME MAINSTREAM MEDIA WHO HAVE CONSTANTLY DENIED ALL ALLEGATIONS OF ELECTION RIGGING!

If one thing should be clear to us, it's that the thin veil of consensus is beginning to fracture. It surely can't hold up much longer. To paraphrase Robert Duvall, I love the smell of stale piss in the morning. It smells like victory.