When the President tweeted a picture from his days with the WWE of him beating someone up and superimposed the words CNN on the face of his victim, I shrugged. I don’t think I entirely cared or was surprised. He’s that guy. However, that guy is going to have a lasting impact on what we call decorum in our world. He has billed himself as a ‘Modern President’ and exposed a culture that still, at the root, is about allegiances and a story it wants to tell. I feel like the entire world in in that place right now. It was evident in the Arab Spring and the Brexit and Trumpxit’s that are very much connected. It exists in the way that Manny Pacqiuao lost a boxing match when he landed twice as many punches as his opponent and connected at a much higher percentage than his opponent but was fighting in his opponents home nation.
We have separated from reality and begun to spin ourselves around dispersed non-realities which match the ideas that we want to believe in. Author Lisa Cron wrote, ‘We see the world not as it is, but as we believe it to be.” There was a moment late in the Bush II presidency where I thought that the world was on the verge of both recognizing and counteracting that philosophy. We were going to see the world as it is, if only briefly. Instead we closed our eyes even tighter against the reality and allowed those doing the talking to spin a narrative that gave us cause, blame, and even a way out. Cron also writes, ‘From birth, our brain’s primary goal is to make causal connections–if this, then that’. This is the basis of modern advertising, which is the basis of modern politics and decision making. We convince ourselves of cause and effect and create from that causality a world view that is not entirely real. The result is a world that is on the verge of moving on from common sense, and moving towards open ignorance of anything that is possibly wrong with it.
Once we move on, then what?