Unravelling Reality (with Richard Vobes)

‘I find this more and more — that I'm a victim of things and a critic of them at the same time. It’s like a form of inevitable and necessary hypocrisy that you live with and in yourself all the time.’

Seeing Through Everything

‘We're being asked a lot of the time to discount our life experience of reading people. So, you're told, “Oh such and such is a shill! Richard Vobes is clearly a shill!” But then you watch Richard Vobes and you think, “No, he looks to me that he's completely natural; he looks like he's actually speaking sincerely and truthfully.” And yet they will insist. And I just think, well, no — we have to be able to use the apparatus we've developed for reading each other; otherwise we're doomed!’

Is there a danger that our scepticism and growing cynicism about reality, history, cultural truth and media veracity may be delivering to the tyrants precisely what they are striving for? If we doubt or suspect everything, what have we left to hold on to, to stand upon, to hold to, to say of: This much is true?

Can everything really be bogus? Is the music we loved, far from being the creation of our heroes, something engineered by cultural manipulators to dupe and delude us? Are our democracies and republics simply corporations? If the Earth is flat, why is globalism a problem?

If everything is a hoax or a psy-op, what exactly is there of reality that we might trust, or count on, or even remember as the ‘reality’ we grew up in? What then, is ‘reality’? A continuous, interwoven lie, from beginning to now? How big is the Big Lie? What’s left that is really true?

If we turn resistance against tyranny into a Sceptical Olympics are we not at risk of giving our tormentors what they desire? Are we not doing to ourselves what they seek to do to us: discrediting or eliminating our pasts, our formative experiences, even our memories, so that we have no histories, no reliable understandings about what is true or not true?

Scepticism about the mendacious forces that assail our lives is a necessary and useful tool to help us to go beyond the constructs of man's inevitable tendency towards naïveté and self-delusion — perhaps under ceaseless brainwashing and manipulation — under the attrition of relentless wickedness and power-abuse.

It seems prudent to be cautious and sceptical about what we are told from quarters and sources which manifestly sustain themselves by telling lies; but can we get carried away by the desire to be up with the conspiratorial Joneses? Are we in danger of being worn down by the constant dismay about such discoveries to the extent that we believe nothing and no one?

As C.S. Lewis says of the capacity to ‘see through things’:

‘You can't go on “seeing through” things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It's no good trying to “see through” first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To “see through” all things is the same as not to see.’

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‘Take the Beatles. I grew up with the Beatles and I remember those moments when we went to see Let It Be, for example, in the cinema and that was a kind of epic moment in my adolescence and you think, well okay, that’s what they're talking about . . . they’re there sitting in their Studio, they’re writing the songs, they're playing their riffs, they're trying things out. Is this all an act? You know? And I kind of think, well, what are we going to do with our lives now? And then the second thought occurred to me: well, okay, even if this is true, if this were completely true, well that means that the other guys wrote these great songs, yes, so okay —  so can we now find out who these other guys were and understand their story and create a new . . . build a new culture where the old one was? I think we're going to have to do something like that if we establish these things beyond doubt, because otherwise we just turn the past into an empty, you know, ethereal kind of space.’

‘There's another dimension to that which is that there's this kind of like reductionist Olympics going on whereby there's a competition on, and . . . you know this is probably the first situation like this. I mean, for example, if you look at communism in the Soviet bloc, or whatever — like, they didn't have the internet; they didn't have YouTube, social media, so the nature of the resistance took on a different form altogether. You know: it tended to be artists and playwrights and people like that, writing underground dramas and putting them on and producing samizdat editions and so on, and passing them around the city to people in brown paper bags, and so on. This has kind of created a different kind of atmosphere completely where there is this daily almost like moment-to-moment competition to be the one who's got the scoop, who's got the insight, who's got the kind of final say on something or other, and so there's a huge competitive dimension to this, which in a certain sense is kind of inimical to the spirit of revolution, or of resistance, in a sense because it should be about being together, working together. I think that that there's a lot of competitive business which has crept into the freedom movement which is actually, again, probably part of the plan.’

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