Reality -- a horrible thing to waste (but Trump does)

Yesterday I wrote about Trump's COVID-19 diagnosis over on my Salem Political Snark blog in "Reality is the big winner in Trump's COVID-19 infection." Here's the most philosophical part of the post.

Being as deeply philosophical as I am deeply political, I now want to broaden my take on the meaning of Trump coming down with COVID-19. It's a big win for reality!

Not that reality needs any help. Reality always comes out on top in the end, because, well, reality is the only thing that is truly real. 

A short blog post isn't the place to discuss what I mean by "truly" and "real." So here's my brief take on those words. Everything that exists is real, or it wouldn't exist. Thus dreams are real, as are hallucinations. Fantasies are real, as are lies. Those things exist, but not truly.

To exist truly, something has to posses a certain substance and objective nature. As I said in "The best one-sentence metaphysics ever written," I love Phillip K. Dick's definition of reality.

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

Donald Trump didn't believe in the seriousness of the coronavirus. He thought it would go away when the United States had just 15 cases. He thought it would go away in warmer weather. He thought this country had turned the corner on the pandemic. Those beliefs, and many more, were spectacularly wrong. 

No matter. Whatever Trump or anyone else believes about COVID-19 has no bearing on the coronavirus. It just keeps on doing what viruses are so good at: spreading. We humans have learned a lot about how to slow or stop that spread. Those measures work whether or not anyone believes in them.

Trump and others in his administration have a strong bias against reality. They believe that if a lie is repeated often enough and strongly enough, many people will believe it. Sadly, this is true. But I'm optimistic that most people won't.

Presidential election polling bears this out.

More Americans favor Biden than Trump. Biden has a vastly stronger truthfulness rating on PolitiFact than Trump does. Biden accepts the science of global warming; Trump doesn't. And Biden has been following public health guidelines in his campaigning, including wearing a mask, while Trump hasn't. 

Now Trump has COVID-19. He's been admitted to the Walter Reed Medical Center. He faces a potentially lengthy recovery period, though there is a chance that even at the age of 74 and with underlying conditions such as obesity, Trump will get well fairly quickly. Time will tell. 

What won't change with time is the primacy of reality. It always wins out in the end. Always. 

So it's fitting that in the month before the election where, hopefully, Trump is tossed out of office by voters, the Liar-in-Chief is suffering from the disease that he has been downplaying for many months. To adapt a familiar phrase, the wheels of reality turn slowly but grind exceedingly fine. 

Religions also have a shaky relationship with reality.

They love to talk about things for which there is no demonstrable proof of their existence. God. Heaven. Soul. Spirit. Devil. Afterlife. Angels. Etc. Etc. And they are reluctant to talk about things that clearly exist, such as evolution and the Big Bang.

In my morning reading today I came across some mentions of reality. I'll share those also. Here's passages from Steve Hagen's, "Buddhism Plain and Simple," one of my favorite books. 

The buddha-dharma is grounded in Reality. It is not pie in the sky, or wishful thinking, or a denial of what human life is. There's no attempt to cover up, to gloss over, to reinterpret the facts.

...You are already in reality, whether you see it or not. Reality is what's here, now. Thus you're here now, too. You know all this already, from direct experience. You're not separated from Reality. It's not "out there" somewhere, but right here.

And here's a passage from Sam Harris' fascinating book, "Making Sense: Conversations on Consciousness, Morality, and the Future of Humanity." Harris says:

One difference between religious dogmatism and scientific curiosity is the boundedness of the worldview that results and one's consequent tolerance of ambiguity and complexity. 

For a dogmatist, the final answers are already given. Reality can't be more complex than what's spelled out in his favorite book. 

But for a scientist, or for any truly curious person, the investigation of reality is open-ended. Who knows what we will learn in the future, and who knows how it may supersede our current understanding?

Comments

[271]

Hi Brian,
Sounds like you have conflated “seriousness,” with “appearances” or "happenings".

For example, I may have a bear chasing me in a dream. That is an actuality and no matter how hard I try to deny it, it happened. Was it serious? No.

Should I take that actual dream event seriously?

Statistically, Trump has over a 95% chance of surviving. Humans all over the world get sick. Does that mean we should all cower in our basements in fear, close down our businesses and never come out?

I guess if you are an atheist it does mean that. Most atheists say life is so precious that even if you can prolong it one minute that it better than the non-existence that happens after death. So do whatever it takes to prolong physical life even seconds... that’s how precious life is over the non-existence that awaits us. Thus every form of fear, tyranny and lack of freedom is justified even if it saves only one life for only hours.

Theists have no such worries, that is to say, true Theists, not phonies.

[Apnehochi namastari]

I doubt that Biden wins this election. If he does God help Yankee doodle land.

[It might not be just a theory]

Here’s a vey believable conspiracy theory—Trump’s Coronavirus diagnosis is fake news—just to detract from the monumental train wreck of the debate. It’s the the best the White House could do to slow down the momentum of bad press rolling out from the Presidential debate, a.k.a., The End of Democracy.

[Karim W. Rahmaan]

"Donald Trump didn't believe in the seriousness of the coronavirus. He thought it would go away when the United States had just 15 cases. He thought it would go away in warmer weather. He thought this country had turned the corner on the pandemic. Those beliefs, and many more, were spectacularly wrong."

Posted by Brian Hines in Books, Reality | October 03, 2020 at 02:45 PM

I accepted Mr. President's initial downplay, especially because I had been visiting the mountains daily to further my climbing experience, and didn't have much contact with other people. My brief solitude made me feel safe. But, things of this nature are never to be taken lightly as I am a true believer of mother nature who is A Force To Reckoned With
(as defined by https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/a%20force%20to%20reckon%20with)

[s*]

Mouth caps are horrible!!
My granddaughter goes to school again after being a bit sick.
I hope she has not to ware a mouth cap because she is vulnarable with longs etc..
Itś not healthy at all to ware them.

[Vinny]

if you could speak on videos for 1 hour non stop on any topic, you wouldn't write blogs or books , you would make videos like Ishwar Puri does ; your friend David C Lane didn't tell you this reality. It seems you were/ are sleeping even after reading and writing many books. Perhaps, you could not understand the falsehood of education system fed to you since your childhood to protect British Hegemony present in false education system.

[Sonia]

"Religions also have a shaky relationship with reality.

They love to talk about things for which there is no demonstrable proof of their existence. God. Heaven. Soul. Spirit. Devil. Afterlife. Angels. Etc. Etc. And they are reluctant to talk about things that clearly exist, such as evolution and the Big Bang.

It's not like you had any inclination towards atheism on your own. If Laurel had been a Christian Scientist then you most definitely would be a Christian Scientist as well. You're a Libran. Librans completely lose all sense of self when they're in a relationship. At least be open to that reality...

[Brian Hines]

Sonia, what you say isn't true. I had strong leanings toward atheism for a long time, well before I met Laurel. I've always been scientifically minded, not believing in traditional religion. Even when I embraced Sant Mat, it was with a scientific attitude. I'll give the experiment of mediation a try.

When Laurel and I met in 1989, I was still embracing the RSSB teachings. And Laurel was heavily into New Age teachings, including channeling. I had my audiotapes of Charan Singh. She would get regular recordings of someone whose name I'm forgotten, who would go into a supposed trance state, then connect with supposed supernatural beings who would speak through him.

So I believed some weird stuff, and so did Laurel. She'd ask me how I knew what I believed was true, and I'd ask her the same question. Bit by bit, over the years we evolved in the same direction -- toward atheism. Now we agree on almost everything.

Almost certainly, God doesn't exist. There is no life after death. Religions are B.S.

But we arrived at these conclusions in somewhat different ways, because our supernatural beliefs we started with were different. Hope this explains that Laurel didn't make me an atheist, nor did I make her into one. We simply shared ideas with each other over many years and came to the same conclusions.

[Horor Scope]

This is worth reading - a well principled article

https://www.westword.com/news/marty-coniglio-on-the-tweet-that-cost-a-media-career-11816048

[Spence Tepper]

Anyone serious about truth moves to Atheism. And through it. But Faith may have helped them get there. Because belief in an absolute truth, a principle that is true for all time, or at least persistent as a force of nature,an ultimate force, among the fewest possible forces, is also the foundational belief of science. The reward of an active faith is experience, realization and understanding. It is its own science.

God most certainly does exist, but who is it, what is it? Does he think and make decisions? God is the ultimate ADD adult. Because, in love with God, we get answers and understandings to questions we never asked. And the questions we did ask are often forgotten. The science of spirituality is accepting all of what arises to our view as truth, whether physical, psychological, symbolic or social.

[Spence Tepper]

When I wrie God exists, that is no God that can be described except in ecstatic terms. But physical reality is His footprint. Consisder the elegance and complexity of nature. Where did all that come from? Then we discover, through investigation, a beautiful evolutionary process that mindlessly creates all the most complex designs. It tests! It conducts the most complex experiments! Results immediately go into production! And become the universal standard! The word design is anthropomorphic, because all came into being without thought. What we call thought is a biological process. But wisdom and understanding, even the entire creation, emerges without thinking at all. And that is genius. The divine spark, the empty space around which forms the vessel. The vessel in love with the invisible space it is shaped around, the space in love with the vessel it creates, just by existing as a non - existant space. The love affair of God with each of us! Our absolute worship and adoration of Him, the unknown and unknowable space.