To a large extent our reality is shaped by our imagination… not a particularly great insight and an area that is the stomping ground of psychiatrists and psychologists, rather than a lawyer, but this awareness explains a lot of what goes on in the world.
Take the institution of “war” for example. On a retail level, historically, the practice of war is controlled by perception: two men confront each other in combat with the goal each has to kill the other. Now both of these individuals were presumably brought up as children, more than likely by a family that loved and nurtured them, as most families do. For whatever reason, each of them is led to believe that some other group has committed a grievous wrong against their group that must be corrected by waging war with the “other.” Of course in each group member’s mind the other is caricatured and demonized.
I remember reading a book about the Normandy Invasion in. World War II. In it was a picture of a young German soldier in a fighting position, a “foxhole” carved out of the cliffs looking out over the Atlantic. What did his imagination tell him on June 7, 1944 as he looked out on the armada of warships facing him that morning?
“This will be the day that I die?”
That entire scenario was the culmination of human imagination that motivated individuals all over the world to mobilize on one side or the other, to leave their families and go off to kill other individuals who had left their families… all in the name of their perception growing out of their individual and collective imaginations. (Though, certainly, the horrors of genocide… also growing out of a distorted and demented collective imagination… made the perception of one side more justifiable than the other.)
Religion is based totally on the imagination of each group’s followers who collectively “buy into” the stories of their leaders and forbears, in many cases in spite of the cognitive dissonance associated with the actions of these leaders, seemingly in contrast to the “faith” they profess. From fundamental pastors saying that the Lord wants them to have a high powered jet plane to the pedophile scandal in the Roman Catholic Church, what they say is in direct confrontation with what they do, yet in the perception… in the imagination of their believers, the circle is squared, the aberration is dismissed, put out of mind. “Move on folks… nothing to see here. Jesus loves you and there’ll be a second collection next Sunday.”
Cognitive dissonance grows out of the imagination, by ironing out the inconvenient facts that don’t support the narrative in our minds: “I’m not an alcoholic… I just have a problem when I start drinking “
Imagination often tends to be gentle toward the self and hostilely aggressive toward the “other,” the perceived cause of the individual’s perceived malady.
If we perceive the, admittedly poorly thought out decision, of a Secretary of State to use a private computer server instead of the government owned equipment … if we perceive this as a horrific crime engaged in for a devious motive, than we go to rallies, cheered on by a demagogue and chant “Lock her up!” This is all in spite of the fact that this act presumably taken for reasons of bureaucratic efficiency or control is in and if itself fairly innocuous, though in retrospect I’ll-advised.
If you believe that this same former Secretary of State, while a presidential candidate, was running a pedophile molestation ring in the basement of a Washington pizzeria (which apparently had no basement) you show up with a rifle with the intent to do frontier justice… all growing out of a creation in one’s mind.
One of the president’s advisors when boxed in during an interview by the facts of a particular situation, evaded the inescapable conclusion the facts would have resulted in by claiming that there were alternative facts… alternative facts… fictional facts… perceived facts… imagined facts… all the same; all created out of individual or collective imagination… all of them false… all of them feigned… all of them bogus and false.
To a very large extent, our view of reality is shaped by our preconditioned mindset. Whether religion or politics, the facts of a situation are filtered through and colored by our preexisting mindset and in this regard… for us, our perception is our reality.
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