Humanities Co-Dependency With Willful Ignorance
Illusion is the mockery of truth, an actual deception that comforts the soul while ignoring any realities there may be, in some vain attempt to not face the trials and tribulations that are life. Truth is wonderful and, at times, can be cruel, terrifying, painful, or even agonizing, but these are all a part of life, things that all humans must face, yet, some want to fumigate truth with illusion. We must allocate our existence with truth, or we deny our consciousness and become beasts, like the lion that feasts on the gazelle merely because of an instinct to survive. Rather than a conscious, sentient being, aware of who they are, what they are doing, how they are doing it. Most of the world shrouds itself in illusion, mainly through religion, so humanity seems to strive for illusion, but why hide from reality?
Throughout human history, many have struggled with accepting reality. Many have tried to tackle it, one, in particular, being Jean-Paul Sarte, a French philosopher. He said that, from his work, Mysticism of the Absurd from Nausea, that “that we are only an appearance” (Sarte, 1993) and that reality is “absurd” (Sarte, 1993), while he babbles on about life and how he and everything around him is nothing. Sarte seems to be unable to handle the harshness of reality, the fact that we are bags of meat with no purpose, nature is chaos, and everything is meaningless; but the truth is, that’s reality. Albert Camus, a French Algerian philosopher, in his work “Absurdity is the Divorce Between Reason and the World,” also claims that the human condition is “absurd” (Camus, 1993). He states that humans deny death by making sense of the world, even though there is no sense to make of it. We cannot abandon reality in some attempt to escape the deathly grasp it has on us by masking it with illusions.
Thanatophobia, or a fear of death, is a familiar concept that comes up in the face of masking reality. The fact that one’s brain will eventually stop working and we will cease to exist for eternity is so unabashedly horrifying to some that it has single-handily crippled human existence to the point of creating entire illusions, like religion, to cope with the fear. Some will argue that delusions are necessary for the human condition as if lying to ourselves is a legitimate response to handle a situation. However, it’s by far the most crippling thing we have done to ourselves as a species. We evolved, became conscious, thought about death, feared it, created religions and other things to deny death, discovered science, are proving that the very things we started to deny death aren’t true. Now we fear death more than before we found out that we die because we decided to reject death rather than face and accept it. The reality is, all living beings face a linear path from birth to end, and we’ve had thousands of years to get this and move on, but instead, we have denied it, and therefore have put ourselves in an inescapable hole, trapped by the masquerades we have created.
In Robert Nozicks’ 1974 book Anarchy, State, and Utopia, he created the thought experiment “The experience machine,” in which he asks to imagine a machine, much like virtual reality, that could give you all of the pleasurable things you want out of life. Scientists have figured out a way for you not to distinguish reality from the machine and then ask if you would prefer real life or the machine? (Nozick, 2013) In a study by Frank Hindriks and Igor Douven, they found that most of those in the study did not want to be hooked up to the machine and would instead take a functioning pill. (Douven, 2016) These findings are odd when most of the world is religious, which is essential “the experience machine” Nozick created. Karl Marx even refers to religion as the “opium of the people,” which is a drug that induces pleasure. Society claims to want reality, but they want the machine they have created.
Is it not dangerous to live in a constant illusion to reject the very thing in which we exist? If one must create illusions to hide from reality, what does that say about the human condition? Can we not survive without illusion? Maybe evolution has conditioned humans to use fantasy to cope with the harsh realities we must face. However, it would seem that our intelligence has advanced to the point that we are realizing the very illusions we were given, haunting the masses. Science is tearing those illusions at its seams, i.e., by exposing superstition as nonsense or proving that the Shroud of Turin is fake (Dickman, 1988). Illusions are but a temporary fix to a permanent problem, and in contemporary society, people are starting to take off the veil and experience life for what it is.
Reality is truly harsh and can cripple, like finding out that bump you thought was a pimple, and shrugged off for years, is cancer, and since you did nothing about it, it is now malignant, and you’re going to die in a few months. On the other hand, reality can also be excellent, like realizing that you are in love. No matter how reality presents itself, there should be no attempt to hide it, as this implies that we cannot face the truth.
People have tried to balance truth and illusion throughout history as if the two aren’t mutually exclusive. Illusion may be suitable for magic, but when it is used to deny reality, it becomes a pointless gimmick that causes more harm than good. Santa Clause, for example, is meant to bring happiness and joy to children, but we all deny the fact that we are lying to our kids. Kathy Mckay, a co-author of an article published in the journal Lancet Psychiatry that raises the question of a child’s moral compass being permanently thrown off-kilter by lying about Santa, said, “If parents can lie so convincingly and over such a long time, what else can they lie about?” (Mckay, 2016) Again, illusions breed problems when the reality is brought forth, thus confirming that we must entrench ourselves in reality.
Religion seems to be the ultimate illusion humankind has brought upon itself by convincing ourselves that a god exists and that we will pass on through death and live in eternal happiness. Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, said that religion is” comparable to a childhood neurosis” (Freud, 1927) and called it “foreign to reality” (Freud, 1927). So why do we need religion? What purpose does it serve? It has done nothing but cause Violence, hatred, and death. However, because it promises an afterlife and has a few morals attached to it, society holds onto it as if it’s the ultimate guide to life, unable to realize it has been destroying humanity since its creation. Fredrick Nietzsche said that “God is dead” (Neitzsche, 1993) and implied that society might never recover from this death because society needs to cling to some illusion. However, since his statement, society has become more secular, in more industrialized nations, and has become less and less religious. A pew research poll has shown that 49% of Millennials 18–29 are religiously unaffiliated, Atheist, or Agnostic (Research, 2019). Regarding morals and overall quality of life, they are doing rather well. According to Steven Pinker, society is the closest to world peace than we have ever been in recorded history, in his 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined (Pinker, 2012). We seem to be breaking free of this illusion, proving that we can handle reality without illusion.
Truth is the foundation for why humanity has survived for as long as it has. For some reason, we keep trying to resurrect illusion, even though it has caused nothing but harm for society and held it back as if we don’t want to drop the security blanket because it’s what we used to. But the younger generations are proving we don’t need that security blanket and that facing reality is rather fitting and necessary for society to progress. Illusion may help people cope, but it’s the equivalent of having a horrible marriage and taking a trip somewhere as if the problems won’t be there when you get back. Illusion is a temporary fix to a permanent reality, and how we have denied it for so long is baffling, and through history, we can see what it has done to society. Humans can live with truth, and we should strive for it as much as possible. We hide our dying loved ones to hide the truth they are dying, so we don’t have to face our mortality, but it probably would be a lot easier to accept if we encountered it head-on. Religion has given people hope to come back as an eternal spirit. That is so ingrained in society that if older generations have to face this harsh truth that they decompose in a box and become carbon, it will be detrimental. However, they put themselves in this bind because of them. We have shrouded ourselves in illusion for so long, and maybe it was fitting when we were intelligent enough to ask questions but not witty enough to answer them. However, now that we can answer them, we realize that these realities, good or bad, are a part of nature, and we will endure them as long as we are a part of nature. Animals, as far as we know, don’t have the capability to contemplate reality, so it would seem that we are facing this alone as a species. As the first ones to do it, we can hopefully set the stage for other species that come after us and hope that they will see that shrouding yourself in illusion is a virus and the decay of a species.
Bibliography
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Nozick, R. (2013). Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Basic Books (Reprint Edition).
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Research, P. (2019, March 31). Religious Landscape Study. Retrieved from Pewforum.com: https://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/age-distribution/18-29/generational-cohort/younger-millennial/
Sarte, J. P. (1993). Mysticism of the Absurd. In J. a. Westphal, Life and Death (p. pg. 60). Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company Inc.
