Saturday, July 26, 2008

The Reality Delusion

Source: Canada.com


Ever ponder the nature of reality and your place in it? Did you see The Truman Show and think 'Oh yeah, that's so true'? Well according to Joel and Ian Gold, you could be a deluded lunatic.

Laugh if you want, but the "Truman Show Delusion" is a very real condition. That's the name they have assigned to what they call the signature mental illness of the YouTube era. The whole thing is that you think you're in The Truman Show, but now they say it's got something to do with YouTube aswell. It's a really interesting article, and they talk about the inclusion of new technologies into schizophrenic delusion. They contrast this delusion with the Capgras (family replaced by doubles) or Fregoli, (someone is persecuting me) delusions, but the difference is that those delusions centre around one or a few individuals but The Truman Show delusion involves the entire world.

It's similar to The Matrix Delusion which has also cropped up lately, and it seems that the delusions are heavily cultural. In other words, they are influenced by culture. On the other hand, films like The Matrix and The Truman Show are really archetypal and universal. The messages are things that resonate with people and seem to tell us something we all know about the human experience. Otherwise, people should have the Finding Nemo Delusion and we should see delusions based on anything and everything.

This makes me think of parallels with the extra-terrestrial phenomenon. The form that aliens take is somehow influenced by culture. To us they appear as little green men, but to American Indians they are something else, and to Egyptians they look like something else again. No doubt that psychiatrists chalk it up as just another delusion, but culture seems to dictate to a large extent how we see things, metaphorically and literally.

The problem with calling all these things delusions is: what if it's true? The Truman Show and The Matrix are great metaphors for our predicament in life, but could it be possible that they're actually true? I don't know, but I'm not ruling it out. According to a friend, an illusion is something that isn't true right now, but a delusion is something that can never be true. It isn't much of a stretch to imagine that there could be a set of circumstances in which The Matrix and The Truman Show are real. Experts define delusion as a fixed false belief.

A Dr Stompe talks about someone who thinks they are part of the Matrix. Apparently, this person said "that the world had changed, that there was an unreal quality in the world." Well I would echo those sentiments; the world has changed and there is an unreal quality in the world, but I don't think that's such a radical statement. I don't know who's deluded or what, but these 'doctors' certainly sound a bit nutty.

1 comment:

Andrew said...

Cool picture by the way. I love the Truman Show, very creative and relevant to how people feel nowdays. The music in it is also really good!

If you think about it there are two possibilites. One is that someone/something put us here and is watching over us, which is quite reassuring, but also quite surreal. Or two we are just here from atoms and evolution etc. and our existence is just a fluke, which is scary because that would mean when we die, that's it, eternal blackness, or we just purely cease to exist.