Embracing Unreality

I JOINED FACEBOOK primarily for two reasons; to promote this website, and to distribute factual and damaging information about the president. as a retired teacher, I have a lot of Facebook friends, mainly former students who wanted to keep in touch. I tell them all that I aint here to chat, but its good to hear from them. Therefore people send me many many messages, links, forwards, articles, the whole gamut, and I hardly have time to look at any of them, much less all of them. What strikes me is the percentage of them which deal with material utterly unrelated to reality. Also, that the people who send them are seemingly unaware that the material they send has no relationship to reality; they seem to consider what they send to be as valid as anything else in science, current events, or historical scholarship. Topics range from alleged extraterrestrial involvement in human affairs, vast and shady conspiracy theories involving political leaders, and rich and powerful people secretly governing the world, and a favorite nowadays is something called the "Antichrist". The simple fact that there isn't the slightest evidence that any of this exists seems to deter no one, and to actually attract many people. Humanity, in its continuing cultural evolution, will likely eventually abandon these strange concepts of "Christ" and "anti-christ" and good riddance. Deep down most people who swear by the bible probably realize that it was written by people, centuries ago, and is a quaint collection of ancient manuscripts loosely base on oral traditions, and nothing else. It may take more decades and centuries to find life anywhere other than on Earth, and all these crazy conspiracy theories, Q-anon and the rest, are symptoms of societal psychological pathology. But, we love to escape, as any good fiction writer can tell you. If we were willing to confine our serious efforts to reality, reality such as climate change, environmental destruction, mass extinctions of millions of species of plants and animals , the things that are really happening, we would find that we have enough on our plates, as we like to say, enough to keep us productively occupied, without resorting to the garbage we seem so absorbed in. We can only escape for so long, before reality hits us hard. Our ability to comprehend and deal with the real world is greater than we think, and we needn't avoid it so strenuously. We have an impressive accumulation of good literary fiction to keep us occupied. surely we can do without all the messages, links, articles flying all over Facebook, talking about aliens in the banking system and whether Donald Trump and his son in law are the anti-christ. I can assure you that they are.