Fake Humans, Fake Realities, and Self-Forgery
How false government narratives (aka, propaganda) create fake versions of reality and encourage inauthenticity in people.
The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.
- Philip K. Dick
It's absolutely astonishing what people will believe. In the age of so-called fake news, where apparent conspiracy theories and internet scams abound, the safest bet (at least regarding Internet and phone scams) is usually just to assume it's all bullshit. In the case of news and government proclamation, it's a little more complicated, if only because we've been trained all our lives to trust these as legitimate sources for truth - organizations and institutions that are there for our betterment and with our best interests at heart.
The last nine years in Canada have brought that love story to a sad demise. While it's understandable that media, people, and governments will get it wrong every now and then, what's not understandable is when it happens over and over in what seems like a deliberate manner.
I've been following and writing about three main issues (and their approved narratives) for almost a decade now and I've noticed they have a couple of common threads tying them all together. To clarify, this isn't to say that these are necessarily the most important issues to all Canadians, but the way they have been handled by our government and media is in my estimation, a crucial litmus test for what we can expect from these institutions in other areas going forward. It is this observation that makes issues like these the most important ones facing our country today.
The common threads connecting these three issues (and there may well be more) are:
Their main purpose is to divide the populace along cultural and ideological lines, and
The narratives attached to the them are objectively false.
Much of the problem lies with the way these issues are presented. Generally it involves a stated position with a simplified narrative with only two possible sides and a demand that you choose one of them without asking for too much clarification.
These issues with their official positions are as follows:
Climate Change is an existential threat to human survival, and therefore must be mitigated by any means necessary;
Trans-women are literal women and should be accepted as such in every conceivable way, without exception;
Canada is a genocidal nation as evidenced by hundreds of “unmarked graves” and therefore apologies must be continually offered and reparations paid to rectify these damages.
All of these issues have been politicized and used to create division and none of them are up for debate.
Like all good propaganda, these positions are reiterated ad nauseum from every corner and every media source until they are simply accepted as truth by the people who hear them day after day.
Since each of these issues is a huge topic on their own, I only want to do a very rough overview of how they interact along these threads of division and falsehood. These statements will apply to all three of the issues.
Those who support these positions generally do so from a position of superiority where their view is the only logical and acceptable one and any disagreement at all is simply evidence of ignorance and some sort of unholy affiliation with the “far-right", whatever that is.
This is why you've never heard of a scientific debate on whether or not man-made CO2 is really destroying man's chance of existing on the earth, even though governments the world over are implementing costly policies based on precisely that assumption. You also will rarely (if ever) hear any discussion of how a man who claims to be a woman is now literally a woman (whether they have had any type of surgery or not), even though we hear this statement somewhat regularly from our very own Prime Minister - even on International Women's Day:
As far as the Canada is a genocidal state trope goes, this is another topic that is simply not open to debate, nor to any mention of actual facts. The simple fact that there has not yet been even one body unearthed since this extremely serious allegation was made, should be more than enough to put the issue to rest, yet it lives on. And the fact that there is now a private members bill on the books that seeks to criminalize residential school denialism for those “condoning, denying, downplaying or justifying the Indian residential school system in Canada or by misrepresenting facts related to it" and sets out consequences of up to two years in jail should give everyone pause. As I said, debate is not allowed. Even though some of the exceptions mentioned in the bill are that if the statement is true and relevant to public interest then denialism wouldn't necessarily apply, it’s already been made abundantly clear that simply stating what I have stated here (true and relevant) is not acceptable because my facts misrepresent their facts and I'm obviously downplaying the significance of residential schools (in their opinion).
All three of these issues have as their most vociferous defense, not facts, or science, or reliable research, but words like: Climate Denier, Transphobe, Hater, Science Denier, and Residential School Denier. Simply designating any opponent or disagreement as such means it is no longer necessary to mount a defense or even form a coherent argument because these individuals are not even worthy of the time it would take to do that. Simply the possibility of being labeled as such is responsible for large portions of the populace either keeping their mouths shut, or paying inauthentic lip-service to these ideas whether they believe them or not. This eventually numbs them to the truth and they become what Philip K. Dick called “fake humans”.
The only way these issues can be defended if an argument is to be made is by changing the universally understood meanings of words like woman, genocide, and even science. After the covid panic, the term “follow the science" will never mean the same thing again.
I opened with a quote from Philip K. Dick and now I'm going to close with some more insightful words from him - words that probably have much more relevance and significance now than they did in 1978 when they were first uttered:
But I consider that the matter of defining what is real — that is a serious topic, even a vital topic. And in there somewhere is the other topic, the definition of the authentic human. Because the bombardment of pseudo-realities begins to produce inauthentic humans very quickly, spurious humans — as fake as the data pressing at them from all sides. My two topics are really one topic; they unite at this point. Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves. So we wind up with fake humans inventing fake realities and then peddling them to other fake humans. It is just a very large version of Disneyland.
And so, my three topics are really one topic intersecting at the points of lies and division. The longer this goes unchecked, the further down that hole of fake reality we will go until we finally just accept everything, and question nothing. At that point we may not even realize that we are indeed living in a huge version of Disneyland where our words and realities are curated for us in order to keep us all speaking and thinking in an acceptable fashion. We will then have become forgeries of ourselves inventing our own fake realities to pass along and infect others.
Indeed, I believe many of us are even now existing in this pseudo-reality.
Stop the madness.
