Back when I was a kid, waking up to Saturday morning cartoons was how the weekend officially began. It was a place where a child’s imagination could suspend all of the rules of reality from a safe distance and laugh at the impossible outcomes of the hapless characters trapped in the reoccurring mischief of an absurd world. So when Wile E. Coyote would run off the edge of a cliff, he didn’t begin to fall until he looked down and realized his predicament – as if reality only kicks in when we recognize it. Little did I know that my Saturday morning entertainment was preparing me for the absurdity of how a future cultural zeitgeist would attempt to obscure reality.
In Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The Gods of the Copybook Headings,” – Kipling reminds us that all of the illusions that the gods of the marketplace are selling us will inevitably be dispelled by the axiomatic certainty of reality. We can only pretend that we somehow have the power to forestall the effects of reality, but that can only set us on an unyielding collision course with the true nature of our own limited existence. Inescapably, our frame of reference is contingent upon our perception — which may or may not offer us an accurate assessment. Therefore to whatever degree our assessments are inaccurate is the degree we are at odds with reality.
And this is why our perception of reality can create a cognitive dissonance within how we experience reality – leading us to believe we are experiencing things that aren’t even actually happening. In this way, our perception makes us vulnerable to the manipulation of our fears and desires . . . and to anyone who would leverage those emotions against us in furthering their agenda. Because if you can gaslight someone’s perception of reality long enough, shaming them into doubting their intuitive understanding of reality, you can get them to accept ideas that defy all logic and reason. This is how cultural narratives seem to take on a life of their own.
We are all social creatures, prone to the vagaries of groupthink – especially the groupthink associated with tribal expectations. But like the boy who could plainly see that the emperor wasn’t wearing any clothes – like that intuitive child within us (who watched all of those Saturday morning cartoons), we begin to smell the noxious fumes of the gaslight burning and begin to realize the deception. But because learning that we’ve been deceived invariably comes with some measure of shame – very often, we’d rather just put the whole thing behind us rather than face our own foolish complicity with our deception.
Now, it may occur to you to ask, “So, who turned on the gaslight?” Because you likely already experience people in your own life who justify all kinds of logically dubious things, attempting to convince you of the merit of their thinking. And if we follow history back, all along the way, we find notable cases of how the perception of reality was being convolutedly shaped to justify all manner of atrocity. And if we go back far enough, we find ourselves in the Garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve decided that they should be the final arbiter of how good and evil would be determined . . . and this is when we began to abandon reality in favor of our own self-affirming narrative — and ever since we’ve been trying to convince each other that our own perception is correct. So then, let us humbly confess that we need God to lead us into all understanding.
. . . and if we’re humble enough we can imagine peace like a river in the midst of the dissonance.
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