Don’t Cede the Territory of Reality

You can only have so many friends.

For how long have the people of the Rich World devoted their strongest focus and allegiance to imaginary things? It brings to mind distasteful theoreticians like Guy Debord and his Society of the Spectacle — I think it’s safe to say his predictions on that subject have been borne out. The online discourse every day involves the challenges and questions that we’re dealing with in our real lives, but imposed upon fantasy worlds instead of our own.

People write about this, often in an anti-Woke mode, listed among the signs that the Left has gone insane. That’s not my intent here. This is an article about Reality vs Fantasy, how the latter can be crowded out in one’s mind by endless imaginary realms.

Our minds and our personalities, our selves if you like, what are they? It’s mysterious — because of the way our brains are structured, we are unfathomably complex and ever-changing. Part of what’s going on in there is an apparatus for interacting with the world. An operating system. Our ability to know people, for instance — the Dunbar Number tells us we can only maintain relationships about 150 people at a time. We can know those people’s names, the basics of who they are and how they behave, and crucially how they all fit together and what those relationships are like. Now think about how many fictional characters from Game of Thrones or Star Wars or Harry…