I'm stuck in a quandary. A quagmire, even.
Are illusions good, bad, both, neither?
I've been in love with illusions. But I may have fallen out of love with them.
Most of our lives are at least partly illusory. There are explicit illusions, in the form of art. There are implicit illusions, in the form of culture and identity.
Even our model of the physical world is an illusion. You don't see the world when you look at it. You see reflections of light. You hear reflections of sound. You cannot apprehend directly, only indirectly. Your brain collects evidence, and builds an approximation. It can be fooled. That's why art has any effect on us: it simulates the information we get from your environment.
When we recognize an illusion for what it is, it loses some of its power. Not all. We may still find the ideas it presents compelling, influential, suggestion. We may also still respect and admire the craft and artistry of the illusionist.
But some illusions are deceitful. When we recognize that an illusionist has been trying to deceive us, to misguide us or confuse us or manipulate us, without our consent, then we should rightfully be angry. We should rightfully question the extent to which we indulge in illusions.
We should also be critical of people who seek illusions, not for real insight or inspiration, but specifically for the sake of having their delusions reinforced. Those who assert that the illusion is real, while the evidence of the natural world, its careful analysis and implications, is false.
But nearly everyone believes convenient and comforting falsehoods, and they demand an endless stream of deceptive illusions to provide testimony, however disingenuous and dishonest, to keep their delusions alive.
I have grown jaded of the entire illusory project, including art, because very little of it is not more-or-less dishonest. Most of it, in fact, is very dishonest. But not in obvious ways. So much is motivated by a false understanding of the world, filtered through self-serving superstition, vanity, and ideology.
Such work is the opposite of insightful. It obscures our understanding, wrapping us in comforting blankets of fantasy.
I'm tired of liars, and those who want to be lied to. Which includes nearly everybody.
We want to believe that we are important, and good. That our society is fundamentally good, in our self-serving concept of it. We are tainted by confirmation bias: we only look for evidence to support our positive self-image, even if such evidence is contrived. We ignore contradictory evidence, which reveals our true accountability, our crimes, and our guilt.
Everywhere you go, everyone you see, everyone you talk to, all people are wrapped up in egoistic fantasies. When you can no longer ignore the universal dishonesty and deception, it makes it difficult to be around people. It is hard to be in the company of liars. Especially those who lie to themselves. Especially when they are so bad at it.
Likewise, their self-serving artworks. Whether it's disingenuous, cynical artists, or grateful, deluded audiences, the art serves mostly nefarious purposes.
Humanity is not great. Humanity is not special. Of course, we have little choice but to believe we are special and great; this assumption is instinctive, as it is with all forms of life.
Life inherently assumes it is more important than anything else. It derives from biochemistry itself: the necessity of chemical reaction. Biology is chemistry, life is biology, and humanity is life.
But the wild animals are honest. They do what they must; they take what they need. But they do not need art, or myth, or fantasy to justify it. They do not need to explain themselves.
Maybe it's less that humans are dishonest than that they are so pathetic and insecure, and need to rationalize everything they do, because they are so afraid of each other. But moreso, because our appetites are extreme. We want more than we will ever need, precisely because of this power of imagination, of delusion, to see ourselves both with more, and with less.
The predator is hungry, so it hunts. When its belly is full, it is content.
Humans are never content. Our belly is infinite, because we know we will need to eat again tomorrow. We cannot be satisfied with one place to shelter, or one litter of children, or even one mate: we crave infinite security and infinite reproductions, lest our dream of ourselves go extinct.
It is a perversion, a sort of illness, which separates us from the other animals. It is not admirable.
But admiration is beside the point. A dispassionate viewpoint will acknowledge that humanity is a product of nature, like all things. It is neither good, nor bad, and cannot therefore be "perverse", because "perversion" is an illusion created by the ideology of purity. There is no purity. There is no perfection. These are invented fantasies, too.
I am simply tired of fantasies. At least, tired of those fantasies which no longer work their silly magic on my silly brain. I can see through them, into the artifice, both the mechanical and the conceptual. I can see the strings, and the tricks of the light, the faulty logic, and the false premises. I can see the deception and the dishonesty. And I don't like it.