Objective Reality

We are losing our awareness of objective reality - because subjective reality is so much more attractive: we can make it be whatever we want it to be.

Mankind has always believed that the real world was not our everyday world. Something else was running the show. Originally these were the spirits: the animating forces that resided in everything: animate and inanimate. Our first specialists were those who could communicate with them: the shamans. Much later, these evolved into Gods and Goddesses who ruled over us in a capricious manner - and religions to serve them. The Hebrews consolidated the many gods into one God: a male. But the situation was still the same: outside forces ruled the world.

Then something strange happened: we began to think that we, by the use of reason, could understand how the world worked - without the intervention of religious authority. This was called the Reformation, and it started the long, painful, violent process that formed the modern world. Part of this process was the Scientific Revolution: where people discovered Objective Reality: a reality where Scientific Laws ruled the world - not the supernatural beings we had believed in before. Humanism, another movement in this era, emphasized the importance of human achievements, and therefore of humans themselves. Our belief in human rights comes from this era: the belief that all people have rights that cannot be denied them. 

The discovery of the objective world coincided with the discovery of ourselves: territory which did not exist in the pre-modern world. We also discovered objective morality, and began to insist on honesty as something absolute, and not relative - as it had been before.

All of this had an unintended side-effect: affluence: something new in the world. And this affluence, which was largely due to the exploitation of fossil fuels, made us forget the discovery of the very thing made us so affluent: objective reality: which by definition is a reality that we must conform to, not one we make ourselves: that is, subjective reality.

We can no longer tell the difference - and most amazingly: we have also lost our sense of ourselves as individuals. We see ourselves as part of a group (a tribe), just as we did in pre-modern times.

This plays out in the larger world as our refusal to accept climate change, because it is inconvenient for our subjective belief in everlasting growth.