The Price Of Reality

I'm going to rant a little. I've just watched a debate in which participants debated if "The Rich Are Taxed Enough." It's linked at the end of this rant. It'll be somewhat "out there," maybe a bit too ethereal for your taste. You might dismiss it as too Utopian or totally irrelevant or far-fetched. Maybe, but it's a rant after all and has no more of an obligation to be nice or comforting than the universe does.

_{Image by Alexas_Fotos - source: Pixabay}

The Matrix is a great film. It's great because no one can say for sure if the story is true or not; scientists are seriously considering the possibility that the universe as we know it is nothing more than a computer simulation or a hologram, with some of them looking for ways how this hypothesis might be proven right or wrong. The thing is: we haven't found one yet, so it could be that you and I are nothing more than a brains in a vat connected to a mainframe.

But that's not the type of virtual reality I'd like to freestyle on today; I'd like to argue for the existence of an artificially constructed reality we all experience every day. You reading this post on your screen of choice, however much I appreciate you doing so, is part of this artificial fabric we're increasingly getting lost in. As humans we've first separated ourselves from The World by transforming it in order to meet our material needs. And these needs started as real ones, the necessities for spirit and body to survive and thrive, but have gradually become fabricated ones, eating away at our general spiritual and physical health. For all the blessings we've received from technological, scientific and engineering advances, it has had the effect of us increasingly becoming separated from Everything Else. If there's one truth I wish everyone would internalize, it's the truth of everything being connected, interdependent and inseparable. You and I were there, in that infinitesimally small dot of energy that exploded into the universe. We are one, we always have been.

The screens that separate us is illustrative of the second layer of separation; after forgetting the material connection to our environment, we're now slowly forgetting our connection to each other. Like the brains in vats from the famous philosophical hypothesis, we're all safely enclosed by a fabricated shell made of our own preferences and opinions, all connected to the mainframe of a profit-seeking algorithmic plutocracy. Ever increasing economic activity and the economisation of life have transformed more and more human interactions into transactions. By connecting the well-being of the population to the well-being of the economy, as materialized in the invention of "GDP" as a measure for the population's "health," we've constructed a reality in which our individual well-being is the outcome of an equation. This is rubbish. The outcome of the equation of reality is "one," for that's what we are, with each other and with the rest of existence.

The price of reality is the price we pay for every product we own. Economy is nothing more than answering the question of how we distribute all we produce together from the materials granted to us from the planet, it's soil, it's life, it's atmosphere and our labor. It encompasses how we extract those materials, how we choose to use them and how we decide who gets what part of the pie. It's how we agree to act among each other while we do the labor that's needed in the production- and distribution process. In this highly interactive process in which we all play a role, in which we all influence each others daily reality, we act as individuals, exclusively as individuals, separated from each other and the planet and the universe. The price we pay for a product is the ultimate act of this fundamental separation; the product I payed for is now mine, and mine alone, and I don't have to think about the thousands or millions of people who were involved in the production of it, the animal lifes that were disturbed while thousands of hands extracted the raw materials needed for it, the teachers and parents who produced the persons and minds responsible for it, and their parents before that; we are one, not just in space, but in space-time.

_{diagram of Brain in a vat. Famous thought experiment in philosophy of mind. - source: Wikimedia Commons}

The price we pay is fake. As much as we like to talk about the markets as natural phenomena, as a representation of "human nature," the closest we can come to how evolution intended us to behave, it's fake. It's fabricated as a construct pulled over our eyes to hide the reality that we're all one, a metric that assigns us a place on life's ladder of success which can only be done individually; your success is yours and yours alone, and so is your failure. In the economy there is no unity not with each other, and most certainly not with the planet or the universe. The economy is what drives the creation of the information-bubbles we increasingly trap ourselves in here in cyberspace. It's what destroys the environment because we've made the ladder infinitely high so we keep growing the economy no matter what. It's a dead-end street. The multiverse is out of our reach. We have only this one. We are this one. We should stop spending ourselves so fast.

Forget the price-tags on the products. As sure as you can't put a price on the lifes or labor of the millions of people who got you the product, the price mentioned on the tag is fake. The real price is one. The true price of every pen, screen and castle is the one we all pay, have always payed and will forever pay to each other by the way we treat each other and the planet we live on. Right now that's pretty fucked up as we've raised the art of separation to new heights in a culture of hyper-commercialization and deification of corporate success. The economy has one thing, just one, that reminds us of how we're connected to each other and no, it's not the free flow of goods and services; it's taxes. And that's the thing we've learned to hate most, sealing the deal of the economy's fake reality. Taxes are not theft, it's the only way we express in the economy the reality that we are all depending on each other and the health of the environment we all share, of which we're all part. You pay for the broken leg of someone you don't know on the other side of the country. Some stranger you might not like at all, maybe a criminal even. And you might hate that, but that's the point exactly. You pay for the schools of children you'll never know. Children who might throw away the chance they've been given to make a difference in their own lifes as well as others, and you may not like that, but that's the point. Reality has no obligation to be nice or comforting.

The universe owes us nothing. Living in it shouldn't have a price-tag, but it does. It's kind of meaningless to say that everyone has a right to exist while maintaining an economic model that needs portions of the population to fail; there can be no winners without there being losers too. But as long as we maintain the price-tags, they should incorporate the reality that we're not just individuals, that we're not separated from each other or the world. We should keep "transacting" with each other and the planet to a minimum and start interacting more. Some things shouldn't have a price at all, like a good education or healthcare, but as long as they do, we should all contribute, and the rich should contribute most. This is not because we common folk are jealous, it's just representing the reality that they have most material wealth, wealth we've created together over many generations. We're even united in the reality of our individual uniqueness. See taxes as the price for that reality.

The true price of reality is one. It has always been, as we have always been, one.

_{The Rich Are Taxed Enough}

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ce Of Reality