Synthesizing Reality

Understanding how embracing reality, rather a culture of simulation, elevates our sense of self to discover how we can make a difference in the world that matters.

Tied in Knots

There is a knot that we all have within us. We keep trying to untie it. The more we try, the tighter the knot gets.

This knot represents the conflict between our true selves and the self that the modern world wants us to be. This knot requires us to compromise, accommodate, and ultimately sacrifice our true selves to fit in. As a result, our lives, instead of being centered on creating an impact that makes a difference that matters, are reduced to status-seeking instead of living a principled, purposeful life. I know some of you believe that the two are the same. But they are not.

No one goes online with the intention of wasting time. We also don’t go online to simply conform to some group’s idea of what status means. We go there to participate and contribute. We believe that our presence can make a difference. Somewhere deep within us, there is a remnant of belief in the value of the individual and the importance of fulfilling our responsibility as contributing members of society.

We go online to discover who we are and how to fulfill our desire to be persons of impact. Yet, we become confused by the obstacles we face. We feel powerless and trapped in an environment that both captures our fascination and rarely fulfills our sense of purpose. There are many reasons for this. I want to look at two in this post.

One is the relationship between reality and the simulated world of social media.

The other is how our beliefs set us up for disappointment, increase our doubts and fears, and negate our agency as human beings.

An Artificial Self versus A True Self

Our world presents contrasting understandings of who we are as a Self. I’m making a comparison between the terms true and artificial.

Here is what I mean by these two terms.

AN ARTIFICIAL SELF is constructed out of associations and representations that symbolize a person without reference to who they are.

A TRUE SELF is discovered through our personal interactions with people in social contexts where

In my previous stack, Synthesizing The Self, I described how our true self develops.

“…the origin of our sense of identity is a product of our relationships …

Our identity is formed through the relationships that we have in these social relationships. This is the life context of our growth as persons. We are transformed from dependent infants at birth into, hopefully, emotionally mature, high-functioning adults. We hope or try to be the person capable of establishing a social environment at home and in the world where people can discover who they are as their true selves.

I am convinced that there is a true self in each of us waiting to be discovered, nurtured, and ultimately celebrated for the impact of our lives.”

I am making a distinction here between the direct relationships that we have with people and the connections that we have through social media. The former provides direct feedback. The latter offers social conformity.

Stepping Back For Some Background

The Culture of Simulation is a perspective that I developed to make sense of the world. For those of us who were born before the 1980s, we can see a contrast between our world now and the way it was like growing up. I recognize that for many people this culture is what you know as normal. However, for others, it stands in contrast to what we knew as children and young adults.

The Culture of Simulation functions like a virtual game or a fantasy story where we create our own characters. We play the game with our lives not realizing that there is something missing. There is little continuity from moment to moment. Every news item is “Breaking News!” about something commanding our attention.

I realize that this perspective is difficult for many people to understand. This is the world of Facebook’s Metaverse, the addictive dopamine rush of TikTok, Twitter’s world of opinions, and the fantasy worlds of Star Wars, Marvel, DC, Lord of the Rings, and Harry Potter. These simulated worlds envelop us in a narrative culture of consumer tastes and opinions.

To belong, we must conform.

To conform, we must follow.

To follow, we must give up our agency to make our decisions and act on them.

To give up is to gain status.

We may feel its effects without knowing why. The constant need to stay in touch, to be up on the latest trends, and never be seen out of sync with social media influencers is the pressure to morph into a character in a virtual story.

The Spectacle of the Real

The place to begin to understand is with a perspective that I call the Spectacle of the Real. To understand this experience, step back and look at what we see on our phones. Moment by moment, we are presented with images, sounds, and words whose appearance and presence are momentary. As soon as one “show” is done, another is there, then another, and another, repeatedly for hours, even days on end.

If you have not suffered from Attention Deficit Disorder, you will experience flashpoints of exhilaration followed by shorter moments of disappointment. The serial nature of this experience is not like bingeing on three seasons of some show. Rather, it is like being introduced to someone new every 15 seconds. It is impossible to process all this information. You can’t, so you don’t. Over time, we are conditioned to absorb, yet not be able to process all this content. We feel a dopamine rush from all this sensory stimulation, with the outcome being a kind of addiction to the whole context of social media.

The culture of simulation seduces us to accept its messaging about who we are. Max Fisher, the author of The Chaos Machine, describes the seductive character of social media in this clip from his interview with Rich Roll’s podcast.

Seduction is more than just the appeal of sophisticated marketing techniques. It is rather the recasting of what it means to be a person and a human being. It is a belief in the self that comes not from our direct relationships with people, but through the culture of simulation online.

As I have experienced this media culture, just like you have, I have tried to understand what is happening to me. I have felt a sensory paralysis that made it difficult to know what to think. As a result, I’d accept what is presented to me as real.

Yet, at the same time, I know that this is not how healthy human beings function. We desire to be thoughtful, purposeful, and intentional in what we do. I want to be open to the world and trust what I see and hear as real. Yet, as AI becomes more commonplace, being able to separate the artificial from the real will become even more difficult to identify.

As human beings, our agency to decide what we want and discern which path to take to gain what we want is in many ways negated by this onslaught of images, sounds, and words. We lose our humanity as a result.

What do we become if we are no longer human?

Freedom versus Control

We live in the world of the Spectacle of the Real. Within that world are two cultures. The culture of simulation is the engine of the Spectacle. It is dependent upon there being just enough of a culture of the Real for us to maintain a nostalgic attachment to reality.

Through the culture of simulation, our sense of self adopts the messages of the commercial and political ideologies of the day as self-defining. This is where we gain our status in society. Three generations ago, consumer products formed our social identification. People knew us by the labels of our clothing, the name badge of our automobile, the neighborhood we lived in, the church we attended, and our political party affiliation. At some point during my lifetime, possibly at the emergence of the digital era, consumer products no longer provided the caché of status. One of the signs of this shift was the spread of outlet malls where luxury brands began to sell knock-offs of their own products.

When social media began to develop in the 1990s, a similar shift away from consumer products to social and political ideologies began to become how people gained social status. Yet, we can see how artificial and fragile this type of status became as canceling people and organizations because of Tweets or videos that were judged to be out of the mainstream became a default behavior in the social media world. In other words,

Status based on exclusion is more a culture of control than one of freedom.

It invites a fear of non-compliance and a more anarchistic resistance to the status requirements of the culture.

The Problem of Status

Status is the perception that certain behaviors, preferences, styles, and groups represent are acknowledged to be of greater value than others. We are talking about certain products and ideologies conveying value to the individual by their adoption.

It is not that the preference for those products and ideologies establishes status, but it also determines those who lack status. This is a source of the tribal conflicts that we find worldwide. It is best understood through René Girard’s minetic theory of conflict. The simple idea is that we acquire our sense of identity through imitation. As we become closer to the ones we are imitating, the very nature of status seeking produces conflict between the imitator and the one imitated. It can be easily seen that the social justice movement is an attempt to replace the status of European white Christian culture with a multicultural culture of equity and inclusion. The irony is that the imitator is still imitator the one they seek to be like.

This is the nature of status. It is never a fixed cultural representation but a constantly shifting, always intermitante, never achievable state of identity.

We can conclude from this that social media platforms are the ideal vehicle for status seeking and imitation based on public interaction. The more the need for social or consumer status dominates our sense of who we are, the more removed we become from our true selves. When we are our true selves, we inevitably stand out as a particular individual.

Ideological seduction is not grounded in direct experience in life but rather the simulated experience of the social media world. Lacking a solid ground requires the development of a religious-like consciousness to incorporate that ideology into a belief system.

When Karl Marx said that “religion is the opiate of the masses,” I believe he was describing a false consciousness that emerges from ideological seduction. This consciousness functions as a system of beliefs and rituals that distinguish true believers from everyone else. I see this as a false consciousness because it is not grounded in the direct experience of reality. What we can truly know about ourselves is not a product of ideological indoctrination but testing of our knowledge, skills, and character. This religious-like false consciousness is the perfect set-up for the social control of society.

A true sense of who we are as persons come out of our direct experience in life. The principal context for this experience is our relationships with other people. The measure of these relationships is not ideological conformity but respect, trust, and mutual accountability across the spectrum of relationships in our lives. The result is self-understanding that provides a basis for the situational awareness that we need to function well in society.

A Tested Self-Perception

The Culture of Reality framework, see diagram above, is how we start to recover a genuine connection to reality. Reality, in this sense, is not some hard object. It is concrete in both the structural use of the term and in the metaphorical use of it as the counterpoint to abstraction.

Reality is the impact that makes a difference that matters. More than the impact of an egg dropped on a floor. Reality is feedback. It is physics, biology, and relationships of peace and mutuality. It is social progress measured in relationships of reconciliation between tribal groups, growing literacy rates, rising prosperity, and global health through natural immunity.

When we test ourselves against reality, we step out of our comfort zone. We embrace change. We recognize that stasis is the end of growth and the potential for premature death. It is the opposite of status. It isn’t a show or the perception of cool. It is rather a deep recognition that I am far more than the simulation allows me to realize.

It doesn’t produce a false religious consciousness. Intead, we gain self awareness with an intuitive sense of how we fit into every situation that we encounter. We are released from the shackles of conformity and fear of shame. We find the freedom to fulfill our genuine potential for impact.

When reality becomes synthesized in our lives, we discover an awareness of the world that reveals how the simulated character of the Spectacle robbs us of our dignity and agency. We gain the freedom to venture forth to discover what is possible for us when we choose to take initiative to create impact.

Synthesizing Reality

Why does this matter?

Why am I saying that it is important to understand the simulated nature of the Spectacle of the Real?

Why do I believe in the agency of human beings to create impact that makes a difference in the world?

These are questions that I have answered for myself. I think each of you needs to answer them for yourselves. Please don’t let someone who prides themself on being a social media influencer seduce you into desiring status over a life of meaning.

Reality is both happiness and hardship. Sadness, sorrow, and disconnection are part of reality that exists for us. Learning to embrace both as a context for testing will ultimately open up pathways for growth.

Take some time. Thinking about what you see. Be skeptical of absolute statements. Decide what you want and why you want it. Then go find people to join you on the journey to find a reality that expands your life’s work.