An Hallucination as Big as the World
Reality is like real estate, everyone wants to own it. A stable and secure reality from which to make an argument defending the awfulness of Father God, for example, or the nonexistence of consciousness for that matter; or at the very least Man’s inherent self-interest and of Nature red in tooth and claw, the survival of the fittest; a nice parcel of biological reality upon which we might justify our extreme wealth (when most everyone else is poor and starving because less fit).
Man—and by that I mean men—likes to define reality by what you bang your head on, a dump truck, or rifle butt, a western butte or billiard ball, as when Dr. Johnson kicked a rock like it was Bishop Berkeley’s idealism, “I refute it thus.” Reality, according to Man, is hard—a hard, physical, phallic reality; resistant and also difficult; “to kill or to be killed in the old dumb battle for real estate; an eye for an eye and zero-sum; the reality of war (as if war were the ultimate reality—Father God’s apocalypse).
In the meantime—between the wars—reality may produce a sturdy material that, through hard and difficult toil (performed by others), may be turned into an Apple Store, or munitions factory, or even a McMansion in which to drink hard alcohol and pursue an opioid habit—a legal hard drug to be had at any pharmacy, if you can prove you are in pain.
But do not talk to us about psychical reality! for it invalidates our argument. Physical reality is what we want! The harder the better. Measured by the the man of science—the hard sciences, please—who, not so long ago, enjoyed cutting up the still-living family dog. Science and sadism have always been in bed together and it’s no wonder that the facts of life are so hard and cruel—depending on your gross revenue—lest how do we justify all our murder and extortion? The keepers of this old cruel 17th century European reality, basis for science-world and real-estate alike, assure us that it is the only reality, the dominant material reality for all time, policed by scientists with their hard facts, and the police with their hard boots; a reality to threaten with—as opposed to being, perhaps, only the reality of dominance?
The Searchers, 1956, John Wayne creeping on the Comanche
