Becoming the Elephant in the Illusion
The truth has the best press agent in history. It has 5 stars on Amazon and Yelp with glowing testimonials from people like:
Jesus- “you will know the truth, the truth will set you free,”
Buddha- “Three things cannot long be hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth,”
Tom Cruise- “You can’t handle the truth!”
Bernard Hawthorne- “Truth is the mantle with which the flame of life rests.”
Every Mom in history- “Be honest. Lying is only going to get you in more trouble.”
Reading those you’re probably thinking…who is Bernard Hawthorne? I completely made that one up, and let’s be honest…it doesn’t matter. That quote could be from Ronald McDonald. The quote sounded nice and that was good enough to make it believable. That’s my point. As a culture we hold up the truth like it’s the last golden fry in a happy meal box, but it’s a lie. The truth may be the last fry, but its the last cold hard fry that you don’t really want, but eat anyway simply because it’s the last one. The most accurate quote in that whole list is the one attributed to the wrong fictional person, and half of you probably didn’t notice that one either. It’s not even that we can’t handle the truth. We don’t care if Tom Cruise or Jack Nicholson tells the truth because we don’t really like the truth.
The reason for this is simple. Lies are more comforting and entertaining.
Even Jesus knew this. Most of the truths he spoke were intentionally wrapped in the lies of parables because had he just said “Love God above all” & “don’t be selfish greedy jerks” we would’ve said “got it” and stepped over every person on our way to Jericho so we could build our houses on the sand. People struggled to accept Jesus was telling the truth to such an extent he performed miracles that bent reality in order to hammer in the point that he meant it when he said “I am the truth.” Our response was “we can’t handle the truth!!” Three days later he came back and said “how ‘bout now?”
Jesus healed the blind to help us see a bigger reality. When an ordinary person without the miraculous ability to heal the blind attempts to bend our perception of reality that person is intentionally trying to blind us to reality. The blind spots created by bending reality are the indulgences of a lie.
Bending our perceived reality is the lie that makes magic appealing. Take the magician David Copperfield for example. David Copperfield can coat himself in glittery bronzer, put on a black spandex leotard, and blow out his hair and we completely ignore that he looks like a freak because we figure that’s just what it takes to make a tiger disappear. His entire career is based on lying to our faces on stage with really bad hair, and as long as he says “ta-da!” we ignore it, clap, and reward him with models.
Magic makes rabbits appear out of hats, and elephants disappear out of thin air. It’s fantastic press for lying because it’s entertaining but completely pointless. That’s why we accept it. We enjoy the lie & appreciate the effort the magician went through to conceal the truth. How exciting would it be to see a magician say “watch carefully as I place my hat on this trick table, reach inside my hat, down through the false bottom, into the trick table, where waiting under this inconspicuously placed tablecloth is a rabbit. Now right before your very eyes I will grab the rabbit and pull him out of my hat as if from thin air……ta da!!” No one is spending $100 a ticket to see someone with bad hair tell the truth in Vegas.
But they’ll voluntarily risk death for free to see someone with bad hair lie in Tulsa.
All politicians are just really bad magicians. We know they’re lying, but we accept it because we expect it, and just like magic we take pleasure in trying to unravel the lies. Their greatest illusion is making people feel like we matter by making us feel like we’re “winning” if we’re on their team. But think about the very idea of winning. Winning is another lie we tell ourselves for entertainment and comfort. We believe that it somehow matters that our team wins, when in reality, like pulling a rabbit out of a hat, it’s pointless entertainment. What do we actually win other than the ability to say we’re “winning?” Is that even winning, or is that just blindly indulging in an illusion of superiority? The lie of winning feels good & we translate that positive feeling into a sense that we matter. That’s the “magic” of March and November Madness.
When we lose the exact opposite is true and the entire illusion feels destructive. When the blind spots dissolve and we start feeling the negative effects of reality, that’s when we start saying things like “it’s only a game.” The same is true of magic. If your uncle really pulled your nose off and started waving your dismembered schnoz, while laughing and saying “I got your nose”…it would still be shocking, but your uncle would be a psychopath. If I snapped on a black spandex body suit, some glittery bronzer, put on a bad toupee walked out of your house with a bunch of money and said “ta da!!” I’m pretty sure your response wouldn’t be to clap and say “how’d you do that?” You’d be traumatized by my appearance, and my defense of “It was all just a financial illusion!!” wouldn’t cut it. However, put me in a suit and tie, keep the bad toupee and cheap bronzer, make me President and call it “the biggest tax cut in American history” and…. “Ta da!!” here’s your 3rd wife!
How does that happen? People enjoy the lie so much, as long as they feel like they’re “winning” they will view the effort put into the deceit itself as another win. People become so averse to losing they’ll actively take part in maintaining that illusion. That extra commitment to bending reality by lying to ourselves to keep from feeling like we’ve been duped turns the self affirming lie of “winning” into a self defeating subjective reality. We go from being the audience to the person in the box being cut in half. We become the lie in the illusion.
This brings us to the part of the show where we need to address the elephant in the room. Surely you had the sense this whole time that there was an elephant behind you right? All politicians lie, but Trump is something else entirely. In film there’s something called cinema verite’. Cinema Verite is when a film or TV show is intentionally filmed to seem more life like by making things look more amateur than they really are, making the camera and production part of the narrative, and often addressing the audience as if they’re part of the drama. Movies like the Blair Witch Project, TV shows like The Office, & reality television use this technique. They’re a lie wrapped in a lie designed to make you believe something is more true to life by making you more of a participant in the perceived reality they’re constructing around you.
Trump is Cinema Verte in human form. He views and projects himself as high brow and highly successful, and he has sold the public on that lie for decades. His cheap golden elitist veneer is the sparkly black spandex on the ordinary man that somehow made some of us think that’s what it takes to make an elitist tiger disappear. However unlike a polished politician with staged illusions Trump comes across as a cheap dumbed down amateur. He’s Jim Halpert smirking into the camera, a reality television star having an emotional meltdown on camera, and the film crew from the Blair Witch Project chasing down some imaginary evil that is ever present but never revealed. He’s a cliche street magician who hides the strings of his lies by making his audience think he’s not a magician in the first place, creating a perceived reality that they’re more than just an easy mark in the audience. They’re special and participating in a spontaneous & incredible moment. Their astonishment sells the idea that this isn’t the same card trick you’ve seen a million times before…even though it’s a more amateur and cheap version of what you’ve seen before. It’s all staged to dissolve skepticism in the lie, and boost participation in bending reality towards the lie itself.
The best illusion is one people want to believe. Jesus had to bend reality. Stage magicians obscure reality. Trump blinds people to reality by allowing his supporters to be the ones bending their own perception of reality.
Trumps greatest trick is making the elephant in the room disappear by convincing people that the elephant in the room is the illusion itself. There’s no obstruction, no collusion. The transcript was a perfect call. 25 women are all lying about his history of sexual abuse & 3 porn stars are lying about paying off his extra marital affairs. Every person who’s been fired, resigned or spoke out against him are all part of the deep state. With a puff of smoke and a wave of a bible you almost didn’t notice that Trump made an entire group of people disappear out of thin air by gassing and using the military to brutalize them out of sight. There’s no pandemic. It’ll go away in April. We’re not failing at controlling a pandemic. It’s just an increase in testing. No matter what it is, it’s all “fake news” and “a hoax”…Ta da! Get that man another model to divorce! Like a rent-a-sith he waves his tiny hands and his supporters get to work bending the perception of reality for him. You can almost hear the circus music playing as he steps into the spotlight “step right up and be amazed! You won’t believe your eyes…because I don’t want you to!” Pay no attention to the rotting pile of dead elephants in the corner covered in MAGAts busy decomposing constitutional norms and the very idea of the truth. Who needs those anyway…when you’re “winning.”
The upside to knowledge is it enriches every experience, but the downside to knowledge is that it exposes the truth, and the truth limits what every experience could be to what it really is: Reality. The most comforting thing about reality is its a consistently wonderful smorgasbord of inconsistency. It can be beautiful, harsh and absurd in a single serving and we have no control over the menu. In reality David Copperfield is a really weird dude named David Kotkin who owns an island that he bought by pretending to make islands disappear. In reality we bought a really weird dude named David Kotkin an island for entertaining us with lies and really bad hair. In reality if you pull a rabbit out of a hat by it’s ears you can cause the rabbit to lose it’s hearing and damage brain function. In reality once that happens you’ll just end up with a hat full of rabbit poop and a mentally challenged rabbit. In reality you can only bend the perception of reality so far before reality itself starts to splinter and breakdown into a choose your own adventure of selfish lunacy and immoral relativism for dummies.
This is America 2020
This is what makes every mother in history the most honest arbiters of truth on earth.
“Tell the truth. Lying is only going to get you in more trouble” is not a quote celebrating the truth. It’s an acknowledgment that we like to lie, and a warning about indulging in the blind spots lies create. That’s usually the spot we’re blindly in when our moms issued the warning about, not just trouble…more trouble.
We’re in a blind spot and It’s time to face reality. We’re in trouble. We’ve become the lie in a delusional magic show. In reality we’re in the box being cut in half. In reality we’ve turned our nose up so far, we’ve ripped it off and are arrogantly waving it in the faces of the rest of the world like sick psychopaths. In reality the “greatest economy in history” was the gimmick of a cheap street magician obscured by his infomercial enthusiasm. In reality we’ve made 130,000 Americans disappear *forever* because lying to ourselves about the importance of “winning” is allowing a virus to suffocate our collective common sense to death. In reality we’ve lied to ourselves about the existence of an elephant in the room to such an extent we’re making liars out of our own mothers. In reality some of us no longer even recognize it as an elephant due to cinema verte’ media illusionists holding you up by your ears for too long, and all you have to show for it is brain damage and a red hat full of your own bullshit. In reality, he’s not a leader, and he’s not making anything great. He’s Bernard Hawthorne. He’s a lie that sounds good, and he can say “Ma-Ga!” all he wants, it doesn’t change this simple truth.
Lying is the elephant in the room.
“I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts.” -Abraham Lincoln
