The Novelist Portent
Johnny E. Mahaffey
June 12, 2016

[photo close-up of a man's eye and ear]
DEATH OF DELUSION; TRUTH RISING
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40% of Americans say that the country's best days are behind it, up 36% in 2012. (Source: PRRI American Values Survey, 2015)

We see a lot of police-state style incidents in the country, along with more laws reducing our Constitutional rights. All the old Orwellian fears have now come to fruition and continue to take shape around us. And in this current society of psuedomature individuals on the rise, it can lead to some trouble: "Philosophers and cognitive scientists agree that the world, including yourself, can only be known to you in terms of how you think about it. Your reality, including who you are, is a story you tell yourself—and you can change it." (Psychology Today May/June 2016 p.58, Halshorey, Ph.D., a professor of clinical psychology at Widener University's Institute of Graduate Clinical Psychology.)
I think; therefore I am.

And that's true, to a sense: we are what we believe ourselves, what we... tell ourselves to be. So, what exactly does that leave a generation being influenced by today's media and entertainment industry? This is a thought experiment I implore you to consider in narrative identity theory. When you encounter a rather difficult person, pause and consider what it is that they are believing themselves to be. Because their delusion of self has a direct influence on their behavior. What brought on their unique (or conformed) style of self-telling-narrative. We are all, in an unavoidable way, the protagonist of our own "movie." We understand ourself, via the world in which we've been reared. So how much of us is really... us?

That difficult person would be an entirely different person under the disillusion of their societal programming. If they can pause to re-examine their "story," they can rewrite their self. This self, in not entirely intangible—it can be influenced, thus directed into a more constructive, positive direction. Our society, too, can be rewritten. Reprogrammed. The American disenchantment can be turned into a fuel, a reflection mirrored for us to evaluate our current actuality, and make changes through the narrative we tell not only ourselves, but others and subsequent generations.

We know; therefore we will be.

M

http://betweenthebars.org/blogs/316/