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The Museum of Vestigial Desire

Freedom to be deluded

tags: theforest published on:

The first thing that will occur to you when you think about freedom is that freedom of any kind is not really possible. It is only a fantasy. In the densely intermeshed system we live in, we know that we are in a system that has access to the windows on each side of the building. Some say, that the control is not tight and we have to live with a less pronounced faith in the absolute nature of the control mechanisms. You can read conspiracies and you can laugh at the foolishness of the those trying to control the flow of sand out of the leaky container.

But we offer you another choice. You can also choose to be deluded with a fantasy and it will still be fine. The insistence on investigating and pursuing the actual fact is disturbing. There are many ways of accessing what is going on and for some reason, delusion is one of those ways. Go deep into a fantasy of your choice, with an utter discard for verifying or distilling fact from fiction. This will not be very easy. But then how does that matter?

Delusions at their very core are generated from a base layer of fact. But fact is very difficult to deal with in a naked fashion, the colour and flavour of context and the filters of the landscape always distort it. This distortion prevents the fact to ever be able to reveal itself. Facts periodically reveal themselves in the form of the friction of the moment and urgent delusions. Delusions are only poetically encoded fact. This encoding is in a format that does not allow the sharpness of fact to seep through. Delusions are encoded with a sharpness of their own, but this sharpness is not frightening because its resolution is playfully mounted into our viewport by the mechanism of our desire.

Like the rabbit hole that is deep and shallow at the same time, delusions have a variable capacity to deal with our wish to travel and accommodate us fully.

But eventually if our delusion and our desire to know collude, we are led through a sequence of events to a post-fact world where the fact is already history.

Now, history is merely another kind of delusion, which has germinated from some version of the fact. By arriving into the post-fact world, we successfully avoid a confrontation with the agony of dealing with an inaccessible fact. History can be dealt with sincerely and taken at face value but it is dangerous and self-damaging to do so.

So we do need to retail this freedom, this freedom to be deluded. And if we do so, a world rich in narrative possibilities is awaiting for us to get lost in. In this world, we neither have to bear the burden of faith in a fragile and shaky system nor do we have to pride ourself in our intelligence for supposedly being able to see through the pretensions of the construction.

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