Outside The Bubble

Daniel Greenfield writes in his blog, Sultan Knish, Everything is Fake, 8/28/12

Excerpts:

It’s a lie, but knowing a lie for what it is requires either being able to do the math or have the common sense to know it for what it is. And common sense is derived from rough and tumble contact with reality. And reality has gotten harder to find these days. It requires unplugging all the belief channels, stepping out into the fresh air and trying to see what still remains when all the things that the belief trends told you to believe in have gone away.

There is a very specific category of people who are uncomfortable with the way things are and for the most people these are the people who have ongoing forcible contact with realities that don’t go away when the talking head begins jabbering, the memes begin spewing and the trending topics trend. These are the people who work for a living outside the bubble, who know that external safety nets are unreliable and that they are always on the edge of something… even if they don’t always know what.

It isn’t wealth that is the determinant. Many of the wealthy occupy a wholly unreal world. A world where things happen because they want them to. It’s what makes the technocracy of the last three administrations so seductive to powerful men and women who begin to think that they truly can move the world. It’s the edge that matters, the sharp sense of pain that reminds you that there is a sharp reality here that isn’t going away.

Even an unreal economy reported on by an unreal media cheering on an unreal leader can only run for so long until reality punches through the illusion, the curtain falls, the magicians scramble off the stage with rabbits and doves tucked into their pants, and everyone wakes up to realize that the dream is over and we realize that we are entering a world where the stories no longer matter and history is about to begin.

HKO

an excellent post worth reading in its entirety.

In the old agricultural economy there was a deep knowledge of sewing and reaping, and the penalty for failing to understand this was starvation.  Even in the more modern industrial society we understood market realities in an intuitive sense.  But in our world of digital and media creations that closely mirror reality and a leviathan state that insulates us from the harshness of reality we risk losing our understanding of the real world.  Fewer of us work outside the bubble.

Delaying this summit with reality only makes the encounter far worse.