Delusion

We used to inhabit a world where reality was what we experienced.  However, going back to our earliest times we seem to have had story tellers who spun tales which allowed us to escape it and imagine worlds of Gods and monsters, heroes and villains.

The real world demanded a lot of attention as we had to struggle to eke out a living, protect ourselves and survive.

As civilization progressed, some of those things got easier and various inventions allowed us easier access to the delusional world.  First the written word replaced story telling and we developed theater and the arts.

Improvements in the world gave us more security and a greater supply of food and better housing to make the amount of time expended on these things less pressing.

In fact, human history can be measured by charting the amount of time we need to spend on basic survival versus entertainment or recreation.

Now it also obviously varies a lot based on economic status, but the one thing that kept expanding was where our stories came from.  Obviously in primitive times, everything was very local, with possibly the occasional stranger passing through.

But as we developed media, we were able to hear from farther and farther away, from people we never met or even from people long dead.

If you consider our situation today, we have more access to more information than ever before, which greatly increases how much we can be lied to.

Now people are essentially very gullible.  Not everyone, but we have grown used to accepting things we can't verify ourselves (consider the various religions of the world).  We did however tend to rely on certain people of prestige to tell us what was true and what was false.  Respected authorities could help us determine what was real and what wasn't.

Now there were always people trying to take advantage of us and sometimes they succeeded.  As Lincoln pointed out you can fool all of the people some of the time, some of the people all of the time but you can't fool all of the people all of the time.

However, we have a lot of people believing things that simply aren't' true and the delusion goes all the way to the president.  However, the world has become so delusional that claims of things like uncovered terrorist attacks or widespread voter fraud are pronounced even though they are totally delusional.

We may be in the most delusional period of human history and there doesn't seem to be a path back to reality for many, since the delusions are now considered real while reality is considered false.

Sadly, reality is what is going to happen, no matter what delusions people believe.