Fantasize Me
It seems the more we hear talk about an apocalyptic future the more we embrace fantasy. Comic book characters, mythical saviours, and magical creatures populate our movie and television screens. Even our best selling books are full of superheroes and mysticism. However, if fiction isn’t your idea of escapism there are alternatives. You can mindlessly shift to a stream of incredibly hyped sporting events and constantly fill your days with magnificent, almost superhuman athletics, brilliantly displayed in quick-cut collages of replays and highlights. They even come with colour commentators weaving tales of glory lost and found. If neither of these excites you, why not revel in the fashion and foppery of the advertisements, designed to dazzle an audience with artistry, beauty, some titillation, perhaps embellishing your hidden dream of taking centre stage in a life full of adulation and flattery.
It’s all there. We can leap through the looking glass twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, and feast from an ever-growing assortment of devices. We live in a world adorned with visual and emotional banquets purposefully created to engage, entertain, and gleefully channel us away from any in-depth examinations of present day realities.
Are we seriously attempting to imagine our lives to a better place? Can we truly escape all those dreary, haggard looking, doomsayers by hiding in a fishbowl of surrealism? Or are we just addicted to the dopamine fix we get from watching stories where all is safe and beautiful?
According to science, (that great party-pooping purveyor of blandness), human society has crossed a threshold and morphed into a merciless beast slowly devouring the natural world and leaving behind a trail of rotting, venomous waste. If that’s true, how will these incredible fictions and artificial realities help us? I believe in evolution but I can’t find where this fits the model. Where is the self-preservation in this? Where is the motivation that incites us to overcome the adversities?
For hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, we constructed religions, national identities, metaphysical beliefs, even false histories, all to sooth our anxieties by offering a future filled with security and excitement. Such constructs told us the good guys eventually win, evil is punished, and justice is universal, although, sometimes, we have to wait until the afterlife for it to sort itself out, which is unfortunate but, somehow, acceptable. One way or another we have allowed layers of foggy assurances to convince us that our future, perhaps a bit muddled is, ultimately, secure. It’s a comforting thought, and that seems to be adequate.
Rejecting realism allows us to build a protective bubble where only positive ideas are welcome but every day this grows more difficult. Instead of questioning and opening up our minds the common response has been to reinforce barriers, cocooning to hide from the evidence.
Admittedly, change is difficult. It’s annoying and scary. Our leaders say they recognize this but instead of taking a true leadership role and fixing the problems they take the popularity route and offer to save us from the changes. They keep telling us everything will be alright and we give them the benefit of the doubt because that’s what is easier.
Unfortunately, the only real way out is through truth. But truth is painful, so truth becomes a falsehood and falsehoods become reality. Perhaps this is how evolution reaches its ultimate peak. Humanity has finally achieved a level of self-indulgent entitlement founded on the sociopathic abuse of all other living things, offering those of us in the First World an opportunity to exist within a play land fantasy that ends in the surprise destruction of our species.
Just a Picture