Project Vision 21

There are many excellent ways to close your eyes to reality and, to be direct, it seems that in the age in which we live (and not only because of the pandemic) people still find new ways to disengage and forget about reality. However, closing your eyes to reality doesn’t cause reality to disappear.

One of the most common ways has different variations, but all of them are based on a single premise: if reality doesn’t conform to “what they taught me”, therefore, I should not pay attention to that reality.

The secular variant of “That's not what they taught me” uses phrases like “That's not what my grandmother told me” (said by an adult participant after a class on the emerging future), or “My father says no" (said by a participant in a practical finance class speaking with her father in another country), or simply, "Things have always been done that way."

The secular variant of "That's not what I was taught" uses phrases like "That's not in the Bible" (or, less frequently, in some other monotheistic Holy Book), or "God will never allow that to happen" (Answer: E pur si muove), or, more directly, “That's from the devil” (a defense mechanism to protect yourself from almost everything, from science to aliens.)

There are other ways to close your eyes to reality and ignoring history is one of them. Goethe warned (and here I paraphrase) that whoever doesn’t know for at least two thousand years of history doesn’t live, but only wanders the world.

Another frequent way to close your eyes to reality is to deny the future. And, for this denial to be effective, grandiose and attractive phrases are used, saying they were said by teachers and prophets who never expressed them. It is said, for example, that the future doesn’t exist and that the only thing that exists is the present. For this reason, they insist on not "worrying" about the future.

Yet another way to close your eyes to reality is to believe that the media and social networks represent all of reality and show reality such as it is. Obviously, this is not the case. In fact, as President Abraham Lincoln said (and I saw it on the Internet), "Don't believe everything you see on social media."

But perhaps the worst way to close your eyes to reality is to make it so small that there is only room for one person. That's the technological hyper-narcissism we live in now. But there is a problem: when reality becomes narrow it causes anguish, because -precisely because we are narcissists- we are separated from others, from the universe and from divinity.

In fact, we are so separated from reality that we are even separated from ourselves and we don't see it, either because we don't want to or because we can't. But reality is what it is, laughing at us and ignoring our stubbornness. Meanwhile, we perpetuate our meaningless life looking for somebody or something to blame.