The Allegory Of The Bubbles

We’re lost. No one knows what to think anymore. We’re awash in misinformation, propaganda, clickbait headlines and fake news. Beliefs are as numerous as they are outlandish, outmoded, and ludicrous. Subjectivity trumps objectivity. Pundits blame Nietzsche, deconstruction and French intellectuals. Even Noam Chomsky blames French intellectuals. Meanwhile, Trump sits on his toilet tweeting away, Keith Olbermann has weirdly decided that John McCain is his biggest hero, and made apologies to George W. The world is upside down. The left looks to the FBI and CIA for help and guidance, and the right has removed its mask and any pretense to ideology however rickety or faint and begun looting from the government and the country’s resources in broad daylight. “Badges? We don’t need no stinking badges!”

I like illusions. They’ve been rather a hobby for me. I like cultivating them and believing in them. Or trying to believe in them. One illusion is that life has meaning. Another is that meat grows on trees. That one’s a bit silly, but were it not for a generous helping of cognitive dissonance, I would starve. I hate vegetables.

Nevertheless, as much as I enjoy illusions, I get nervous if I feel I have strayed too far from reality, and nervous in the extreme if I see entire populations of people conform to a delusional ideology or concept or behavior. 

For example, war. Has everyone forgotten about the wars our country has been in since 2003? Where were all the lefties when Obama stacked his administration with pro-war people such as Robert Gates, Susan Rice, Richard Holbrooke and Hilary Clinton? When Obama spent 1 trillion in upgrading nuclear weapons? When Obama escalated drone strikes which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of civilians and children? When Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act into law, legislation that authorizes the indefinite military detention, without charge or trial, of any person (including American citizens) labeled a "belligerent"?  

When Obama launched an unprecedented federal crackdown on whistleblowers?

When Obama supported the Wall Street bailout and brought Wall Street insiders into this administration? 

It’s hard to believe anything anymore. And this is dangerous, because it leads to totalitarianism. “In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true,” wrote Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism.  

Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.  

I love that scene in The Matrix when Neo (Keanu Reeves), having just awakened to his actual body in a tub of slime and come unhooked by all the wires attached to his body gets flushed down the drain and resumes consciousness aboard the Nebuchadnezzar, his naked body bristling with electrodes, and asks “why do my eyes hurt?” To which Morpheus (Lawrence Fishburne) responds: “you’ve never used them before.” “Rest, Neo, the answers are coming.” 

I’ve been feasting on movies about deluded societies.  The Big Short, The Matrix, The Truman Show, Fahrenheit 451, 1984, V for Vendetta, Network, Pleasantville, The Island, Logan’s Run, The Adjustment Bureau, The Day of the Locust, Miracle Mile, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Exterminating Angel, and (although it’s a British TV series and I haven’t seen it yet) Black Mirror. 

All these movies have one common thread, the spore from which they came: Plato’s “The Allegory of the Cave,” which appears in Book VII of The Republic. The story has one basic premise: no one knows reality. 

The story concerns a group of people living in a cave. They have been there since birth. Their legs and necks are chained in such a way that they cannot turn but can only see what is directly in front of them, which is essentially a puppet show of shadows cast by fire on the wall facing the prisoners. The prisoners see only their own shadows or the shadows of one another which the fire casts on the wall. The shadows they see is the only truth they know, the only reality. 

If one of them is released and led toward the mouth of the cave, the glare will blind and give that person pain; that person will not, at first, recognize anything as a truer reality. That person will cling to the belief that the shadows which they recognize are still the only reality. That person cannot yet distinguish the things they now see because their eyes have not yet adjusted to the intensity of the light. Eventually, however, that person will grow accustomed to the light of the upper world and first 

…he will see the shadows best, next the reflections of men and other objects in the water, and then the objects themselves; then he will gaze upon the light of the moon and the stars and the spangled heaven; and he will see the sky and the stars by night better than the sun or the light of the sun by day.  

Last of all he will be able to see the sun, and not mere reflections of it in the water, but he will see it in his own proper place, and not in another; and he will contemplate it as it is.  

The Truman Show proceeds in a different manner. In Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” it is not mentioned why an individual is released and led to the mouth of the cave; the entire set-up is hypothetical. So is The Truman Show, but the central character  -  Truman Burbank, played by Jim Carrey -  has a personality, an identity. The intrigue of the movie is in watching Carrey’s character discover anomalies that arouse his suspicion about the reality of his world. 

The tendency to question our reality  -  particularly our social and political reality -  is the natural result of having a high level of cognition. My guess is that microbes and oysters don’t question their reality much. But what do I know? 

And that’s the crux of the problem: what do I know? And how do I know it? 

My world changed the day that my father told me that there is more space than lead in an ingot of lead. That blew my mind. Because if that’s true (and it is: what quantum mechanics reveals is that there is no true “physicality” in the universe, that atoms are made of converging vortices of energy that are constantly popping into and out of existence), not very much of what we believe to be reality is real. It’s more likely to be space. That table? Quarks. That wall? Bosons. 

Pythagoras held reality to be a mathematical code whose core structure was based on the number three. I picture all those numbers dribbling down like rain in The Matrix, especially at that critical moment when Neo reaches enlightenment. 

It’s our sense of our social, cultural and political universe that is the cause of so much insecurity. These aren’t realities to begin with. They’re ideas. We’ve arrived at a point in world history when it’s become absolutely critical that we determine what is real from what is unreal. Those of us who are more prone to anxiety are riddled with doubt: who are my real friends? What will be my fate in a country so consumed by corruption, fraud, and deceit? 

This is why The Truman Show resonates so deeply. In his review of The Truman Show, “The End of Reality,” Douglas Messerli writes:  

Truman’s suspicions seem reasonable because they accord with our own. Even the lying characters, such as Marlon (Noah Emmerich), reiterate to their “friend,” Truman, our shared childhood imaginings, perhaps the earliest stirrings of our suspicious systems: our doubts about our parentage, our imaginings of association with worlds outside our own, and our individual relationships to faith-based hierarchies such as God. If Truman’s disbeliefs have no ground in which to grow, our own full-grown patches of doubt make the character’s occasional wonderments seem absolutely justified. And thus, associating with the stick-figure character with which we’ve been presented, we easily project our own selves into his situation. This, indeed, may be the reason why so many individuals have taken Truman’s delusions on as their own, and have brought them from their encounter with a Hollywood movie into real life.  

Strangely, the movie from which I derive most of my comfort lately, is The Big Short. The mass delusions it portrays are real, and are continuing. 

It begins with a quote by Mark Twain: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

It’s a good quote, apt for the movie, but it’s not from Twain. It appears nowhere in his letters or work. It must be part of the sense of humor of this movie about fraud that it begins with a fraudulent quote.

Ryan Gosling, playing Deutsch Mark mortgage trader Jared Vennett (based on Greg Lippman), delivers the opening monologue:  

In the late '70s, banking wasn't a job you went into to make large sums of money. It was a fucking snooze, filled with losers. Like selling insurance or accounting. And if banking was boring, then the bond department at the bank was straight up comatose. We all know about bonds. You give 'em to your snot-nosed kid when he turns 15; maybe, when he's 30, he makes a hundred bucks. Boring. That is until Lewis Ranieri came on the scene at Salomon Brothers. You might not know who he is, but he changed your life more than Michael Jordan, the iPod, and YouTube put together. You see, Lewis didn't know it yet, but he had already changed banking forever with one simple idea. 

Lewis Ranieri’s “simple idea” was the mortgage-backed security.

Cut to Margot Robbie sipping champagne in a bubble bath, poised as an Olympian goddess in a luxury apartment overlooking Manhattan, who takes us into her confidence and explains Mortgage-backed securities and Subprime loans and then tells us to fuck off as she goes back to her champagne and soap bubbles. 

Mortgage-backed securities and Subprime loans are Wall Street terms for shit. Dog shit wrapped in cat shit.

The magnitude of delusion throughout this movie is stupefying. The levels of fraud and predation strain the limits of the imagination. Steve Carell, playing Mark Baum, an investor based on real-life investor Steve Eisman, delivers a speech toward the end of the movie during a presentation and debate with a character based on an investor named Bruce Miller. “Ok, hi,” he says in a matter-of-fact, somewhat dismissive tone. “Wall Street took a good idea, the mortgage bond, and turned it into an atomic bond of fraud and stupidity that is on its way to decimating the world economy.”

“We live in an era of fraud in America,” he continues. “Not just in banking, but in government, education, religion, food, even baseball… What bothers me isn’t that fraud is not nice. Or that fraud is mean. For fifteen thousand years, fraud and short-sighted thinking have never, ever worked. Not once. Eventually, you get caught, things go south. When the hell did we forget all that? I thought we were better than this, I really did.”

But we’re still there. Still mired in deceit. And look who’s president: the very embodiment of deceit and corruption. 

I derive a strange comfort from watching these movies. I don’t know why. I must’ve seen The Big Short at least five times by now. I will see it again. I believe it’s my feeling of connectedness with these figures as they discover how completely fraudulent the entire culture has become. I feel less alone. 

Another favorite movie is Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris. This isn’t a movie about mass delusion so much as personal delusion, a movie in which illusion becomes the reality and reality becomes the illusion. One of my favorite scenes occurs when Owen Wilson, playing Hollywood screenwriter Gil Pender, encounters Louis Buñuel at a party and gives him the idea for his movie The Exterminating Angel about guests who arrive for a dinner party and can’t leave. Buñuel (played by Adrien de Van) reacts with perplexity. “But why can’t they leave?” he keeps asking Gil. “I don’t understand.”

I know just how he feels.