Crimes a Proposal Against for Action Reality

In a single month, I, along with millions of people around the world, and most painfully of all, of course, people in Ukraine and Russia, have witnessed and experienced a strange psychosocial dynamic. The most well-meaning, thoughtful people, usually inclined to carefully reflect on matters that concern them and not in any sense radical, have now been “moved” from a shared reality into separate realities. I do not use the word “reality” as a metaphor here. I mean reality as such. Former President Trump's expression “alternative facts,” which so many used to laugh at, has turned into a very tangible “alternative reality,” which is not a joke but a dangerous phenomenon. My aim here is to outline the importance and the danger of this phenomenon as it exists today.

I believe the roots of this phenomenon lie far deeper than the realm of politics. I would suggest they may be linked to brain evolution, deep psychology, and religion. I would posit, in fact, that the origins of the use of deception as a social tool stem from imagination combined with magical thinking. Some of the first—and to this day the most tangible—products of this combination are the alternative realities of postmortem life and godlike authorities created within the various religious doctrines of history. For even these can be seen as subconscious creations that serve the purpose of strengthening social cohesion by creating a shared episteme. Now the same psychic tools are directed toward and used for massive secular indoctrination and to divide people. These essentially haven't changed from the time of the Inquisition—physical threat, threat of societal exclusion, institutional authorities' unified opinion, group-directed information, strong leader-image, and many others.

While the obvious catalyst for this psychosocial change was the war in Ukraine, the trend has been observable for years. In 1928, Edward L. Bernays, an American theorist who is considered the “father of public relations,” described