Posted by Luke in For a while now I have been thinking about the bigger picture. When I think about the bigger picture I usually think for a long time about things that most people find boring. Here are two things I have been thinking about recently:
1. Did I imagine most of my life up to this point
2. If 1. is so how much of it is delusion and how much of it could I call ‘reality’.
At this point you may be thinking, what the hell is he talking about? But bear with me whilst I type this and work out what is I am trying to say. Let’s elaborate on what a delusion is… no I am not quoting Dawkins.
a mistaken belief
If I believe that what I believe is not true then I am mistaken? If I am deluded, then I am believing something that is not so. Yet in most things I have ever done I have found myself believing things that weren’t true simply because it was reasonable for me to do so. It was the best explanation I had at the time. I call this, as of now, 10:25pm Australian Eastern Standard Time, the wonder of delusion. So why is a delusion a wonderful thing.
Two reasons:
1. It is the doorway to another meaning – all delusions if they are followed through to their natural conclusion are often shattered. This means when my delusions fade or change shape as I perpetually reinterpret them, I recreate myself and thereby determine new beliefs. These new beliefs, if they ‘anchor in me’ create a new template. Hopefully it is an improved version of my old belief. That is, I have learned. Delusions are strong, and not to be mocked. But, in starting a sentence with a conjunction I am being serious, you need to challenge your beliefs to see if they are real. But what of faith? Faith that is not tested is not faith, it is merely the assumption of faith or a shell of faith. To have faith means you believe because of something, not blindly ‘my parents told me this,’ your faith may be ancestral, logical (athiest), didactic (fundamentalists) or it could be in the fabled spaghetti monster. A delusion therefore is the point of entry through which we engage, it is the doorway to something grand.
2. Not all delusions are good and they don’t always lead to better things. As something can be wonderfully good, or wonderfully bad a delusion can be horribly bad. Yet, it’s a wonder people believe in things that drive them all the way to harm. The right thing to do is to understand. It’s not to make stupid arguments based on rationalism. No, the answer lies in meaning. The question is – delusion – why? Interpretation – why? I have no idea. Yet, in all the beauty of the world (and I have seen one of the wonders – the Great Barrier Reef), there is nothing so amazing about delusions. Whole societies are built around them, fashion is made and sold on the back of delusions, men and women with ‘delusions of grandeur’ romp through out cities becoming successful entrepreneurs. Delusions drive us, they make us act. It’s wonderful!
Back to my original statements. Yes, I have imagined my life up to this point, it’s precisely where I ended up. Did my imagination include writing this blog post, I doubt it. Yet, if I could sense the inward forces of delusion, could I harness them in such a way to solve my problems? Are they the sum total of my problems? Strategically, in this ‘Dickian’ rant (referring to the late Philip K. Dick not the only kind – take your mind out of the gutter!), what am I saying? I don’t know. Reality is not really an elusive idea. It’s my experience, it’s what happens, it’s phenomena. What I think about what happens are the delusions, and herein lies the kicker, they urge me to act. Funny, how the delusions I have, the actions I take are cosmically interlinked to make up the sum total of fraility, insanity and random acts of shouting that is… me. Yet as I ponder this, I sense my delusional candicacy is well beyond the capacity of myself. Is God deluding me? After all, Faith is the evidence of things NOT seen –> but seen somehow. Sensed? Felt? Discerned? Reasoned?
Evidence is what we want. Facts. Facts. Facts. The fact is, Holmes might say, the fact is elementary. It is inductively discerned. Why, you ponder on the delusions of men and women and you gaze. A case in point: ambition. The greatest delusion of them all. We work so hard, to get promoted, we use people. It’s a fact of working (there I go again) that you have to sell your soul to get ahead. If I wanted to research Simulacra (simulations of reality) like I wanted to originally do you think any University on earth would support me? I wanted to understand the simulations we create in organisations… the routines, the fakeness, the politicalness, without having to resort to drilling down. No, I wanted to use this bizarre French construction to understand our delusions. Instead I picked Soft Systems Methodology. Why? I can’t even remember!
What matters really?
Children? Career? Money? Housing? Pants? What matters is what matters because you think it matters. Are you a conservative voter? Are you a liberal voter? Are you a swinger voter… those terms are delusions… designed to get you to BELIEVE something. Then your faith evidence causes you to act. You act on it and then you make choices. Herbert Simon was one smart dude, but he missed a key point about human beings. They don’t think in linear patterns, they don’t define problems logically, they create answers because they want to solve things they find interesting to solve. What matters is what matters. We solve ‘what matters’.
Ambition: The driving force of your death and ultimate loss of legacy
When you die and the maggots come for a meal (unless you are burned) guess what? People might be sad for a while. When we buried my wife’s great grandfather there were about six people at his funeral. Now, he was a nice man but guess what… I don’t remember him all that much. All I remember is that I got into an argument with my wife right after he died. To this day I can’t even remember what about! Ok, I am wondering off track but here’s the point: what legacy? What purpose? What destiny? DELUSIONS! I can’t tell you the amount of people I have met you are in the late 60′s that still don’t understand what life is about. I don’t know and it’s frustrating. I thought relegion had an answer… it just gave me more questions. Too many to answer?
Ambition is the greatest delusion of all. ‘The man’ has you believing that you can work for a living and be happy. Now, I know of people who work and are happy but they often do not know why. They work, they live, they die. There life does have meaning, of course it does. Go to graveyard, look at the tombstones, the people there are dead. They once worked their whole lives to get a house, or to feed their family, or to live a life. You know what, they are dead. DEAD DEAD DEAD. The illusion of purpose and meaning has escaped them, they no longer have to wade through the slush pile of delusions looking for the key to unlock the reason for their own existence. They have found nothing in the grave because they are gone. Ambition got them to death. Your job has meaning, it does, it means you’re not yet dead. When you retire you can sit around thinking about how great it was to have the falsehood of purpose in your brain as you thought about your next promotion. There comes a time when it stops meaning. What then? Another delusion?
Underbelly: A case in point
Of the things I have watched, there can be nothing more brutal and delusional as the gangster life portrayed in Underbelly or the Sopranos. We can shoot whoever we like, take all the drugs we want, buy prostitutes etc. It’s delusion. Old hollywood movies are best at this. They delude us with a sense of how wonderful life was in the ‘good old days’. You don’t think people had sex problems back then? Of course they did, they had a boatload of sex problems! Hollywood has deluded you into thinking life was simpler back then. It wasn’t. It caused a lot of the problems we have today, if you follow the ideals of cause and effect and generative mechanisms. Each generation created a knock on effect for the next to interpret and act upon. Beliefs are very powerful things, they appear (to me) to exist. They are causal. The effect my actions, create havoc in my life and force me to believe nonsense I know isn’t true.
In ending this, if you read this far, can I say well done. The mind that produced this is highly flammible and likely to implode, given time. Maybe I have been reading too much short fiction (Steinbeck, James and Trollope – I should put that book away it’s not helping me) BUT I do feel deluded so… everything’s fine. Act normal I might notice.
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