Reality
| Defined by Philip K. Dick as "that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.” |
Reality is.
“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.”
Philip K. Dick (1972) [1]
Manipulation
- Full article: Propaganda
- Full article: Propaganda
“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. George Orwell made this clear in his novel 1984. But another way to control the minds of people is to control their perceptions. If you can get them to see the world as you do, they will think as you do. Comprehension follows perception. How do you get them to see the reality you see? After all, it is only one reality out of many. Images are a basic constituent: pictures. This is why the power of TV to influence young minds is so staggeringly vast. Words and pictures are synchronized. The possibility of total control of the viewer exists, especially the young viewer. TV viewing is a kind of sleep-learning. An EEG of a person watching TV shows that after about half an hour the brain decides that nothing is happening, and it goes into a hypnoidal twilight state, emitting alpha waves. This is because there is such little eye motion. In addition, much of the information is graphic and therefore passes into the right hemisphere of the brain, rather than being processed by the left, where the conscious personality is located. Recent experiments indicate that much of what we see on the TV screen is received on a subliminal basis. We only imagine that we consciously see what is there. The bulk of the messages elude our attention; literally, after a few hours of TV watching, we do not know what we have seen. Our memories are spurious, like our memories of dreams; the blank are filled in retrospectively. And falsified. We have participated unknowingly in the creation of a spurious reality, and then we have obligingly fed it to ourselves. We have colluded in our own doom.”
Philip K. Dick (1972) [1]
An example
| Page name | Description |
|---|---|
| Truth | "No government, no big organization, will pay for the truth" (George Orwell) |
Related Quotations
| Page | Quote | Author | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| "Post-truth" | “Reality is under assault. Verbal confusion reigns. Truth and illusion have merged. Mental chaos makes it hard to fathom what is happening. We feel trapped in a hall of mirrors. Exposed lies are answered with other lies. The rational is countered with the irrational. Cognitive dissonance prevails. We endure a disquieting shame and even guilt. Tens of millions of Americans, especially women, undocumented workers, Muslims and African-Americans, suffer the acute anxiety of being pursued by a predator. All this is by design. Demagogues always infect the governed with their own psychosis.” | Chris Hedges | 30 January 2017 |
| Consensus trance | “Nine tenths of the news, as printed in the newspapers, is pseudo-news. Some days ten tenths. The ritual morning trance in which one scans columns of newsprint creates a peculiar form of generalised pseudo-attention to pseudo-reality... My own experience has been that renunciation of this self-hypnosis, of this particiption in this trance is not a sacrifice of reality.” | Thomas Merton | 1968 |
| Totalitarianism | “The first thing every totalitarian regime does, along with confiscation and mutilation of reality, is confiscation of history and confiscation of culture. I think they all happen almost simultaneously."” | Azar Nafisi |
References
- ↑ a b http://deoxy.org/pkd_how2build.htm How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later