True or false? The world in which we live

True or false? The world in which we live
January 8, 2002
By Peter Stair

Over break I tried my first fat free potato chips. They were tasty. They were cooked with a chemically engineered lipid, called olestra, which our taste buds recognize but our enzymes cannot properly digest. They are emblematic of our time: The Age of Illusions.

On my way home I took my first pilgrimage to Las Vegas, the mecca of the Age of Illusion.

It is a place of smoke and mirrors, flashing lights and seductive smiles. It is a place of windowless casinos, where the realities of night and day are lifted. Human companionship is offered as if it could be bought and hapless gamblers are made invisible. It is a place where Believers are encouraged to believe the illusion that there are short-cuts to personal and financial success. It is a desert which nonetheless gives the appearance of plentitude, where fountains gush, wastes are whisked away to some seemingly infinite dump and, if you gamble, drinks are ostensibly “cheap.”

Mirages.

Extravagant as Las Vegas can be, it is a brilliant satire of our culture.

At Stanford and elsewhere, we increasingly live in a world of 90 degree angles, concrete ground, cultivated gardens and fake flowers. Fruits have brand names, as if they were manufactured. Toilets and garbage trucks flush away our excrement, as if it simply disappeared. And, as we build our cities into the clouds, entertainment is our most common source of information. Living in illusion, we’re buffered, detached, ignorant of the vital feedback we need from our environmental support systems.

Socially, also, we’ve become more sheltered from each other. Computers and mobility separate us from the people we live with, just as cement and sewers separate us from the ground we live on. Instead of interacting with the people around us, we can use our cell phones to interact with people more distant. Instead of talking personally to someone, we can e-mail them. And when we feel sexy, we can have “virtual sex.” Less grounded and intimate in many relationships, we increase the likelihood that we’re living in delusion.

We’re inundated with opportunities to live in unreal, virtual worlds. We spend an increasing amount of our time playing on our computers and watching our televisions, meaning we spend more of our days interacting with neither the non-human world, nor humans themselves. In this world, we often actually prefer information that is specifically unrepresentative of reality. Our journalists tell us more often about unusual events than about broad trends. Our entertainers give us special effects and melodramas. Magazine covers are mostly digitally altered, airbrushed photos. We can pretend we’re video game characters who perform physically impossible feats.

Now, when we do interact with other humans, we increasingly talk about this virtual world we’ve created. We talk about our gizmos and games. We gossip about people we don’t even know, and who probably don’t really exist: personas with permanent stage names, like P. diddy and Kramer. Even when deciding whom to be our leaders, we talk about candidates with “image problems,” people without the “media savvy” to “perform” the role properly. A memorable slogan of our times is “image is everything.”

So what happens to us, as we construct the illusions of our age? As our world slowly becomes un-moored from reality, we risk a painful crash down to reality. Speculative bubbles burst. Enron goes out of business. The Titantic crashes. Liars get trapped. Terrorists follow through on threats we’d ignored. Illusions are dangerous.

But, more than that, it’s just not as much fun to live in fantasy. Picture someone at a dance party who’s flailing around, moving far too quickly and out of sync. That’s you and I. We can become so deaf to the music of the natural world that we lose our ability to dance to it, and, since we don’t hear the same beat, we have a harder time dancing with each other.

Sheltered in our cities, we can more easily believe we’re prospering, because it is easier to dismiss problems like global climate instability, nuclear waste, species extinction, soil erosion, collapsing fisheries and falling water tables.

“What environmental problem?” We can say, “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

Sheltered by our computers and our televisions, we more often take our social cues from non-reality. My father, an emergency room doctor, tells me that more people, confronted with unusual circumstances, are emulating the actors they see on TV. More fly into rages, threaten lawsuits, or command dramatically, “do everything, doctor!” They are making their world a TV world.

When we take too many cues from non-reality, we have difficulty interacting with reality. Alejandro Martinez, director of Stanford’s Counseling and Psychological Services, told me last year that she’d seen an “unprecedented number” of room-mates and dorm-mates having trouble getting along. She theorized that students who grew up with computers might incorrectly expect other humans to be just as pliable. Are we more often becoming social misfits?

Yet, despite the dangers of illusion, many of us at Stanford are working to further virtualize our world. Every time we work primarily for a credential or grade, we de-emphasize our value for actual growth and cast a vote for the world of appearances. How often do we plan or describe our life as if it were a resume?

We are programmers who will design the most exciting new video games. We are journalists or marketers who will work in an enormous and growing public relations industry, an industry that serves primarily to distort our information. We are teachers who will teach illusions. We are engineers or product designers who will further shelter people from the “discomforts” of reality. We are artists who will devote our talents not to elucidating deep truths but to the art form of the Age of Illusions: advertising, an art-form that seduces us into believing that buying something is always the solution.

We are illusionists.

But why feel bad about who we are when we can also work to spread clarity. Aware that cities are not the world, and that movie characters are not actual people, we can receive information more skeptically. We can practice trusting our own experiences more often, and words less often. We can become more experimental. Then we can become more creative in how we go about our daily lives. Psychologists call this awakening process “self-actualization.”

There is a difference between authentically connecting with our natural world and being safe from natural perils. There is a difference between being honest with other people and being rude. But I’m not so concerned about demarcating the boundary.

Because I think we know true connection and honesty when we feel it. And they feel so good ! I know the dissatisfaction of an entirely false smile, or a day spent in an office building, or a day writing e-mails. But I also know the feeling of looking into someone’s eyes and truly connecting with them. I know the feeling of communing with a tree, understanding its slower pace of living. We know how authentic, fresh and right these experiences are.

The real world is a beautiful place to live.

Peter Stair is a junior studying human ecology, honestly. He’s not sure what he thinks about currencies and the gold standard. To be frank, he struggled to find an authentic tone in writing this column. For those interested in shedding illusions, he recommends a visit to a nearby organization called Magic, Inc. He is sincere in wanting to hear your feedback at pstair@stanford.edu.