Dear Friends,
It seems to me, we have, and are, building a world where no one need come in contact with reality at all. Fantasy is an imagined idea. Virtually all of the highest paid professions today are based on fantasy. Lawyers, bureaucrats, university professors, even accountants and business are based on fantasy. The reason I say they are based in fantasy is because they are all founded by ideas, and, (although I detest the term), in A Priori fashion. Therefore, those professions are fantasy, the imagined ideas of those who invented them. Moreover, we are ever further removed from that which keeps us alive. By removed from reality I mean, slaughtering an animal if you want mutton, digging in the ground if you want peas, weaving cloth for your clothes from the thread you wove from flax, starting a fire to stay warm, building a shelter and all the other things that must happen for a human being to live… the reality of life. The farther away from reality one lives the more one lives and works in a fantasy. So, we work in fantasy, live in fantasy, and those who most live in fantasy, are the ones who rule the world.
The law could be anything and it would be called just, indeed it has been radically different in other places and times, and is always called the height of justice by those who practice it, there and then. Meaning, law is only based on ideas, those ideas could be anything, they are therefore fantasies of what the founders believed justice. As in law the ways of structuring a government are as numerous as stars in the sky, all of them ideas of what right government were by their founders, but very few have ever produced the good fruit… of liberty, prosperity and equanimity. Since every form of government is merely an idea, or was one at sometime, they are all fantasies, the imagined ideas of the founders. While they are all fantasies… only a select few are good. The same argument goes for journalism, academics, culture, etc… All these professionals work in a fantasy.
Living in a fantasy is as easy as going to the supermarket to shop, riding down to the Cape on a day trip, turning on a light, reading a book, sleeping in a bed, flying to Paris in spring, turning on the heat on a cold winter night, flushing the toilet, turning on the bathroom fan, watching television, playing golf, riding around the course in a cart, whiling away time on a computer, etc… All of which remove us from the reality of what it takes to physically meet those needs ourselves. The less we understand about what it takes to keep us alive, reality, and the more we mindlessly rely on modernity to meet them, the more we live in fantasy. At the supermarket you can get fruit from across the planet, out of season or grown organically so as to be more in touch with the food. Flushing a toilet is far preferable to the alternative, as is the use of toilet paper, a bidet removes the user even further from the reality of what he or she is doing, enhancing the fantasy.
Living in a fantasy, distant from reality, allows foolish ideas to get merit where, when looked at in the cold light of reality are absurd, a reality most of our leaders are as far from reality as the stars are from us. It isn’t their fault, if everything you live in, work at and spend free time in becomes who you are. Ignorance of reality allows someone to believe things possible that are not, it fosters a holier than thou attitude and living in a fantasy allows one to live in a way impossible, if not for the fantasy world they live in. Sadly, those who are the least in touch with reality are the ones who rule. Bureaucrats, who’s only touch with reality, is when their daughter scrapes her knee and the nanny cleans it up, and reading about it in her report, they are the ones who decide exactly how you and I should do… everything. Lawyers, judges, professors, teachers, journalists, they all work and live in total fantasy. Their lives have no more relation to reality than pulp fiction. Add to that, every day, fewer and fewer people are in touch with reality, or grounded if you will.
Before mathematicians had quantified the physical world people believed in magic. Since they had no idea of what makes a thing fall, that electricity exists, etc… they believed in mystical forces that could be exploited to make the world as they wished it to be. They mixed potions, chanted to various deities and carried all manner of talismans upon them, but to no avail, why, because they were living in a fantasy. Their disconnection from reality created for them, a fantasy, it allowed them to believe the absurd, belief in magic. Their fantasy was based on their ignorance leading to superstition, magic, today the fantasy we live in is based on our ignorance, leading to superstition, progressivism. Only farmers, hunters, people who build things and engineer things, people who have more than a passing knowledge of what it takes to keep a human being alive, are actually grounded in reality. Like a physicist understands why a talisman will not work, a grounded person knows why a policy will not as well. The more our world moves away from reality, I fear the ever greater outcome, because we have become so mesmerized by the fantasy world we live in… is that we as a people will step off a cliff into cultural, societal and economic oblivion.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
