The human machine is not perfect when it comes to accessing real reality. It takes in reality in the form of light waves, sound waves and other forms of energy. Then it uses that raw energy to manufacture sights, sounds, touches, and other sensations that vary depending on the nature of the brain doing the processing.
This is why I never see what you see. I never hear what you hear. I never feel what you feel, even if the source of the sensation is the same. What we perceive is a mental translation of what is actually there.
The reality our minds give us is a hologram of real reality. Do you see? Seeing is often not so much believing, as believing is seeing. We do not see things as they are. We see things as we are.
We are addicted to seeing things the way we see them. One of the hardest things to do is break away from the dependency of a long held view; to change perspective; to get real when we think we already are. Your current perspective is like a drug that you always want more of.
The developers of Facebook and Google aim to get us high on whatever we are into. When you hit “like,” or click on a page, or search a topic, you feed these sites information about the version of reality that you like best; your favourite drugs. They feed back to you, more content that fits in with your world view, what you like, what you believe, how you think, more support for your version of reality.
This feels good, to have the world you have created in your head validated and reinforced. It feels like you are in touch with reality. You may feel smarter. But you become more and more isolated from varying opinions and perspectives and less challenged to think creatively and innovatively about the things you think about. It’s called the filter bubble. In our filter bubbles, we become more and more convinced that we are right.
Ordinary people can do amazing things when under the influence of the drug called “I am right!” Under this feeling of “I am right,” we are strong. We are bolder. It is called by many names: confidence, knowledge, conviction, faith.
Versions of reality
When we attach ourselves firmly to a version of reality we will go to war for it. Persons with the most warlike tendencies will even kill and die for it.
It is the story of the Bible versus the Koran, Abraham’s inheritance versus Isaacs, Socialism versus Capitalism, Science versus Religion. What we are really fighting for, is power, the way Dr Wade Nobles defines it:
“Power is the ability to define reality and have people respond to that definition as if it were their own.”
There is power in controlling how people see things. The battle is for our minds. This is the power of the institutions: political, religious, commercial, academic. They are like drug lords. Under them are smaller entities, political parties, churches, businesses, schools, whose job it is to distribute the drug of a particular point of view.
Politicians, priests, entrepreneurs, and professors, peddle it on the street to the masses, traditionally rolled up in a newspaper or the leaves of a book or through the hypodermic needle of the electronic media. The internet is an even more powerful delivery system.
In most cases, “I am right,” really means, “the people who gave me
the world view that I subscribed to are right.”
This is not necessarily bad. In order to live together in peace and cooperate, we need to believe in the similar versions of reality. And unless your name is Adam and you are the first man, or you do some mystical practice that allows you to perceive truth without using your brain, you got a lot of your reality from someone else.
In this sense, we are all drug users. The paros and druggies, however, are those fanatics and fundamentalists who can’t accept that their version of reality is not the only valid one.
Islamic extremists have been successful in using the internet to recruit because the internet is a great tool for producing extremists of any kind.
The filter bubble has the potential make us all extremists. Many of us have the potential to become the worse type of ideological paro: the type that went on Crusades, that landed with Columbus in the so-called New World, that formed the Nazi party and that will market deadly products for the sake of profit.
In the pre-internet age, our filter bubbles were physical. We were confined to the books we read, the people we met and the places we travelled to. The powers that be exercised control by limiting access to information and restricting movement and associations.
The irony is that in the virtual age where we have virtual access to so much more, our bubbles can still be so limited.
Power remains in the hands of the traditional dealers of reality as we continue to enjoy our drug of choice even more than before because we have a never ending virtual supply.
This is, unless we actively seek freedom by looking outside of the prescribed sources and progressively exposing ourselves to challenges to our mindsets. The key to growth and development in most things is challenge and breaking down the old to make a foundation for the new. The internet can be a source of enlightenment. It is, however, just as likely to be tool of further enslavement.
Adrian Green is Communications specialist and a recovering ideological addict.
Email Adriangreen14@gmail.com