The world is like a ride in an amusement park. And when you choose to go on it you think it's real because that's how powerful our minds are. And the ride goes up and down and round and round. It has thrills and chills and it's very brightly coloured and it's very loud and it's fun, for a while. Some people have been on the ride for a long time and they begin to question: "Is this real, or is this just a ride?" And other people have remembered, and they come back to us, they say, "Hey, don't worry, don't be afraid, ever, because this is just a ride." And we kill those people.
Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups--and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudoworlds right into the heads of the reader, the viewer, the listener... So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudorealities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.
What normally operates day by day is the quiet dominance of certain ideas, the ideas we are expected to hold by our neighbors, our employers, and our political leaders; the ones we quickly learn are the most acceptable. The result is an obedient, acquiescent, passive citizenry-a situation that is deadly to democracy. If one day we decide to reexamine these beliefs and realize they do not come naturally out of our innermost feelings or our spontaneous desires, are not the result of independent thought on our part, and, indeed, do not match the real world as we experience it, then we have come to an important turning point in life. Then we find ourselves examining, and confronting, American ideology.
2 Comments:
I half expected the holy spirit to cause her to pass out from lack of oxygen. Hehehe
By
sauceruney, at 6/01/2006 12:43:00 AM
Oh, that was wonderful! *I* just about passed out from lack of 02 toward the end!
Where do you find this stuff???
By
Mac, at 7/15/2006 06:33:00 PM
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