Your story began at your birth and continues as long as your legacy remains. You turn a new page every day. Whether you have control over your narrative, good fortune or bad, is an open question. Your story is yours and no one else’s. As Margaret Mead said, “Always remember that you are absolutely unique (sic). Just like everyone else.”
Of course, whatever you encounter registers through your senses; hence, as Plato argued, your reality is projected to your brain (It’s all in your head). Happiness and sadness, internal experiences, come from what we tell ourselves, the conditions and stories we repeat. What we reason is real and is found on the stage of the mind. That’s one view. Aristotle’s view of reality finds its place in the concrete world and then transfers to the mind. It may be an oversimplification to say Plato’s view of reality is abstract while Aristotle’s view is empirical. Okay, sure, sorry, it is an oversimplification.
Consider, though, for a moment your role as an actor playing yourself. The blocking and the lines are your choosing. As an apt example, Donald Trump has spent a lifetime bending reality to fit the narration he prefers, the one he invents. “This is what happened because I say it happened,” is his schtick. He goes with his gut because his feeble powers of intellect do not support whatever discharges from his mouth. Once he concludes Obama was not born a US citizen, that a group of young Black men was guilty of a crime in Central Park, a weather system is moving the direction that he wants it to go (Sharpiegate), Hillary Clinton is an evil agent of chaos, and whatever else he invents along the way, especially the one about winning the election in 2020, he then refuses against all evidence to change his mind. Once wet cement dries, it will never again be malleable. Done deal. Trump says, “Everybody knows I won the election.” Well, no they don’t, but a good number of his followers line up for a ticket to his theater while many of his lemmings line up near the jump-off verge of the cliff. Most mindful citizens know he lost the election, but Trump, the declarer of truth and nothing but the truth, declares what is real, what is false. His lies take root, and he will never say he’s wrong or sorry because only losers apologize. Losing is not an option.
Nothing erudite about how we conclude what is real and what is not. Using our senses, the doors and windows to the world around us, we build what we consider real and subsequently construct the landscape. That’s the way it works, right? Of course, our sensory perceptions are limited. In a recent prize-winning book An Immense World by Ed Young, the author advances the notion we easily fool ourselves in believing our senses grasp all there is to know. Of course, our senses are limited. Other creatures, he shows, sense so much more than humans can garner. In some ways, we are solipsists, that is anything outside our thinking is unsure. The landscape, the people and world around us is merely a setting we create. We are the directors of the theatre of the mind.
Before getting carried away with casuistry, I admit the Greeks, Plato in particular, tabbed reality as something beyond what is physically experienced by the senses. It also included the world of ideas. In context of current events, fabrications and exaggeration may form what is real. Not only Trump and his followers claim falsity is truth, but a growing crowd round the world conclude their certainty is the greater reality (dominant world views in China, North Korea, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and so on). More, myth and religion play important roles in what people conclude is fundamentally real.
I suppose, reality is a rumor. Nothing more. Too much of a muddle to find a concrete truth. But one truth is certain: Trump is a harmful liar. That’s truth. My truth.