RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – This gringo has been spending too many hours trying to discern what is really going on in this crazy world in which we live. If we were in Wonderland, looking over Alice’s shoulder and into her looking glass, like Alice we would be seeing a reflection that bears little resemblance to what we think should be there.
We would be visiting an “unreal world of illogical behavior” that might look surprisingly like our own. One of our biggest problems today is the difficulty in knowing what is real, what is distorted, and how to tell the difference.
Imagine the bathroom scale reports that you have gained hundreds of pounds when you know that you may have had a second serving of pasta and an extra glass of wine at dinner but your weight couldn’t have changed that much.
The easy answer is to get a new scale but what if that new one also shows what your reason and experience tell you is a false weight? After a while, the shock of not knowing what is real (as in ‘real news’ vs ‘fake news’ and ‘objective reality’ vs ‘conspiracy illusion’) has the tendency to be flattened to the lowest common denominator. And that is often a product of how many times the truth or the lie has been repeated, shared and by whom.
“The consequence” wrote Paul Barrett, deputy director of N.Y.U.’s Stern Center for Business and Human Rights and quoted in ‘The New Yorker’ “is that we begin to inch our way towards the mire that Russians are in, where ordinary people lose their ability to tell truth from untruth, and even cease caring about it.”
That we have continually to ask the question if what we see and hear is true or false is a scary scenario, the product of today’s distortions of reality, to at least a great extent conditioned by the ‘reality TV shows’.
These have enjoyed enormous popularity throughout the world since they first appeared in the late 1900s and made Donald Trump a media star.
Worldwide the television genre called “reality” show or “real life” show has been very successful for many years. In the United States, for example, shows as Survivor, American Idol and Amazing Race are in their 10th to 20th seasons. And it isn’t just on American TV that these programs are a success, as the personal lives of all of the competitors are discussed in detail on the Internet, via Radio shows and even in print media… In Brazil this “reality” popularity isn’t any different.
The fact is that much of what we are asked to think of as ‘real’ has been carefully scripted by producers intent on gaining maximum audience exposure; as many as three sets of camera crews shoot the action to be sure of having the most spectacular bits to cut into the final shows.
‘Reality’ is certainly a relative term that is increasingly losing its meaning, opening up the world to mass delusion, moving us further and further away from uncensored reality.
It is as if today’s leaders use ‘Through the Looking Glass’ as their playbook, and when making pronouncements, follow Humpty Dumpty’s statement: “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more, nor less.”
We have always expected world leaders to tell the truth — at least most of the time. That’s the way it used to be but it isn’t any more. According to The Washington Post Donald Trump has now made more than 12,000 false and misleading statements since becoming president in January 2017.
It is estimated that this is an average of 13 untrue claims for each day he has been president. A Capitol Hill comic suggests that the only positive result of this is that the leap in the number of fact-checkers who have had to be hired by media, is a major factor in Trump’s admirable new job totals.
“Bolsonaro Lies as the Amazon Dies” headlined ‘The Brazilian Report’, writing about the president’s denials of the size and number of fires. ‘Politico’, commenting on Bolsonaro’s argument with French President Emmanuel Macron states quite unapologetically, “The president can only conclude President Bolsonaro lied to him at the Osaka summit”.
Other than bloviating press conferences, many of Trump’s lies have been spewed out on Twitter, which appears to be the main source of information for the growingly illiterate population of under 40s in the U.S and throughout the world. What can’t be said in 280 characters obviously isn’t worth saying.
Much of what is Tweeted bears little semblance to any constant truth. According to ‘The New Yorker’ faced with the real possibility of impeachment, “Trump, in fact, was so publically agitated about this swift and unexpected turn in his fortunes that the week of September 23rd was the single most active tweeting week of his Presidency. Trump sent out two hundred and forty tweets to his followers that week.” How many bore any relation to the truth is difficult to measure: certainly not many. The street artist who wrote: “Twitter is garbage and I am a raccoon” sums up our fascination with the medium.
Recently, broadcasters in the U.S. have had to refuse to carry certain political advertising because its fact-checkers said the claims were demonstrably untrue. Said a CNN spokesperson of two Trump commercials: “Our company accepts political and advocacy advertising across the political spectrum. Advertisers must substantiate all factual claims made in their ads. We cannot accept this ad as it contains statements of fact that are not true.”
There is no doubt that we are surrounded by problems which appear to have no solutions unless we can address them from a humanistic position of truth. The toxic atmosphere in America discourages the search for liberal education and understanding.
Brazilian society has just hit a roadblock with the publication of new laws which remove the educational requirement for the teaching of sociology, philosophy, arts, physical education, music and Afro-Brazilian culture.
There are serious questions being asked now by thinking people around the world as to whether there will ever again be the resumption of confidence in those institutions that, until very recently, the majority accepted as the foundations of democracy and peaceful government. Some say it is just a matter of time: others posit a more pessimistic scenario leading to some new world order.
Gazing into Alice’s mirror we all wish for some clarity; however, no matter how hard we search for it, we may discover only what Gertrude Stein wrote: “There is no ‘there’ there.”