Fantasists

We have been brought up as fantasists. Our culture thrusts into our eyes and ears the images and sounds against which we hammer our faces in conformity and compliance, ‘it could be, it should be ME!’  Any intrusion into these fantasies is ill-met with rancour and resentment. ‘You can’t tell me what to do, I am an individual, just like you…’ Indeed, just like us all, sheep in a row.

We have become so afraid to experience reality we now try and live through hyper-realities; take a look around the next time you are at a concert, see how many people are watching through their cameras instead of through their eyes directly at the performance. Mediating lenses and screens and filters and apps colour our world view and the view of us by the world; it is as if we we feel compelled to advertise ourselves to feel in control of ourselves, to feel we matter, maybe just to feel? We are moving beyond being just consumers to being products and thus consumed by others. It is virtual cannibalism. The same might have been said about yesteryears cameras. But now the stakes are higher; digital delivers a higher definition with which to confuse realities; fantasies appear more real as boundaries between mind and the world disperse in the ever increasing pixel count.

The continuous narratives of soap-operas are still in fashion. Our conversations, arguments and emotions come word-for-word from t.v. screens. It used to be distinct, but now one could be forgiven for asking, ‘What came first, life or the soap-opera?’

Enter stage right the even more carefully scripted and choreographed conflict-driven reality programmes. These orchestrations of life bleed into our own, appearing like real life recorded by flies on walls, flies so expert at producing, directing, ‘fixing’, make-up and hair it is easy for us to forget that they are really running the show.

Our ‘modern’ existences blur between us and soap-operas and reality t.v. leaving nothing authentic; it is an anaesthetic to help us avoid living our own lives. Instead we are drip fed by hyper-others around whom we construct countless and unending scenarios of intrigue We weakly lip-sync that we know it is all rubbish, but nonetheless snuffle it all down at the trough regardless! Food makes the flesh and sows the spirit, and swill is neither nourishing nor edifying.

Little do we realise that even whilst acknowledging the falsity of the dance that we watch and follow with an obsessive fixated fervour, and beyond the magazines and entertainment ‘news’ devoted to the masquerade, there lurks deeper and more worrying trends. These trends are the distortion of values and morals preached by the inauthentic realities we are immersed in; they become dangerous corruptions seeping into us and have already been at play for some time, whittling away at our once real sensibilities. There is a gnawing at our core, a chiselling away at the soul. There is in mankind a part of us that wants to be above, over, better, at the least not as bad as ‘them’ – an arrogance to assume we are different in the first place. If we cannot raise ourselves above others, the least we can do is to lower them beneath us. This is fed by the fantasies we consume and regurgitate, we need to go on a collective diet.

The irony emerges here that even those of us who (claim to) recognise the sickness of it all become contaminated with it in this respect: our ‘holier than thou’ debasing of others. Others whose flesh we have bitten and which provides the ‘righteous’ stage across which we skip hand-in-hand away from the genuine ‘good’ and the genuine ‘right’ we thought in our pockets. Our aloofness makes us oblivious to their loss; the moment we think ourselves better than others is the moment we are not.

We all in some part take solace in the drama and plight of this fantasy-world constructed about us and in so doing we lose ourselves. We lose ourselves in order to avoid the bind, grind and entrapment of daily life. But it is because we submit so easily and follow like sheep the paths of indoctrinated ‘individuality’, that we are corralled by life into the mundane and the morally impoverished cage we helped build. Turn it off. Put it down. Walk away. Try to live life for real.