Alienated from reality

[Magical Realist]

We live in a world where reality is gradually dissolving into gawdy images and jarring sounds. Images now used as tools for shock and distraction, glib and flashy gestures void of expressiveness and personal relevance. For the better half of the 20th century mankind has been undergoing an increasing alienation of his spirit from his immediate experience, which is the only place where reality touches us. Simulation and mass marketing and the virtual reality of money and media isolate us in bubbles of detached fantasies and desouling games of compensative stimulations. We crave a return to the real--to the raw emotions of hope and passion and creative power . But every where we turn there is artificiality and pigeon-holing and a blurring together of patterns into one self-neutralizing and repulsive sludge. How do we get in touch with the Real again? Do we even want to? What if the Real is not all it's cracked up to be? A grey wasteland of desperate clones and hollowed out zombies that numbly shuffle along in a daze of unquestioning disempowering indifference.

"Is any of it real? I mean, look at this. Look at it! A world built on fantasy. Synthetic emotions in the form of pills. Psychological warfare in the form of advertising. Mind-altering chemicals in the form of... food! Brainwashing seminars in the form of media. Controlled isolated bubbles in the form of social networks. Real? You want to talk about reality? We haven't lived in anything remotely close to it since the turn of the century. We turned it off, took out the batteries, snacked on a bag of GMOs while we tossed the remnants in the ever-expanding Dumpster of the human condition. We live in branded houses trademarked by corporations built on bipolar numbers jumping up and down on digital displays, hypnotizing us into the biggest slumber mankind has ever seen. You have to dig pretty deep, kiddo, before you can find anything real. We live in a kingdom of bullshit. A kingdom you've lived in for far too long. So don't tell me about not being real. I'm no less real than the fucking beef patty in your Big Mac."---Mr. Robot

[Image: Alienation6.jpg]

[C C]

In a way it's still the age-old competition among the sensible ("now, here"), the intellectual or reflective ("delayed, distant"), and aesthetic (beauty, ugliness, etc). There's some kind of original "reality" as immediately or locally given in perception; but a vaster ranging, inferred "reality" and domain of graded values slowly outputted by the procedures of systematic thought (reason) and quasi-arbitrary imagination (art). The intellectual enterprise is still creative even if when claimed to have uncovered something that's more valid or "real" than the everyday circumstances. Ironically, though, after thousands of years of turning ideas and concepts into concrete situations and obeyed regulations, we're now living in an empirical, direct environment that's largely invented -- a product of the slower, drawn-out theorizing / artistic side. Our "fantasy" world has become so pervasive and intrusive upon the "now, here" that today animals have to cope with its furniture, who normally would be oblivious to the intellectual dimension.