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Living an illusion prevents us from solving our problems

Last weekend there was yet another awards ceremony for actors, actresses, and their movies. Because of that event, a well-known web sited published a series of pictures to show how different those actors and actresses look without make-up and without digital “improvements.”

In some cases, there was a significant difference between the real person and his or her “character,” with an enhanced look thanks to sophisticated and not so sophisticated editing programs. There were cases where seemed to show two different persons.

The online article included many examples of how actors and actresses are “modified” to look more attractive and, therefore, to be more “marketable.” The pictures we see of them in posters and on the cover of DVDs have little in common with the “real” persons.

So, when so many fans of those celebrities yell and scream when they see the celebrities walking down the famous red carpet, those fans are following just an illusion they will be unable to reach, regardless of how much they scream, unless they themselves turn into illusions.

I wonder then how many other pictures, photographs, reports, stories, news articles, statements, and research publications present to us only a distorted version of the reality and prevent us from seeing the reality.

Perhaps what we see in the news, what we read in the papers, the videos we watch online, the opinions of the self-proclaimed experts, the analysis provided by commentators, and the ideas proclaimed by communicators (from politicians to preachers) are also digitally enhanced pictures created because they “sell,” but not because they are true.

I am fully aware that those who know philosophy and history will easily detect the many Kantian and existentialist elements in my analysis and will justly label me as “old-fashioned,” because in these post-modern times the difference between reality and fantasy and between reason and craziness is unimportant.

In fact, as it is seen in the movie Matrix, many people prefer to live in the illusion, even if knowing it is just an illusion, because they want to “live in peace” and “keep a normal life.” The problem is as old as Plato and his Allegory of the Cave.

Whatever the case, I firmly believe the acceptance of illusion as reality is possible only if we first forget who we really are. Two millennia ago, a wise man, Hillel, said, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” He thus distinguished between the “I” (transcendental existence) and the “me” (historical existence).

Or, as Spaniard philosopher Ortega y Gasset said, “I am I and my circumstance,” duplicating the “I” to highlight our place in our everyday life.
This double dimension of the “I” is not the result of an existential schizophrenia, but an essential reality of being human. Unfortunately, our time wants to extinguish it, labeling as “illusion” what it can’t control or sell, and presenting as “reality” what is just fantasy.

Many years ago, I learned that inversion of values is precisely the origin of evil.

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