Beyond the Kingdom of Illusions

I have written recently at The Human Adventure about Nicolai Berdyaev’s argument that technology is neither organic nor inorganic but organized. As such, it’s a new reality we must learn to master if we are to live a fully human life.

One challenge we must overcome as we learn to master technology is the kingdom of illusions that gets built up around us. I recently came across an essay from 19th century American minister, philosopher, and writer Ralph Waldo Emerson. Simply titled “Illusions,” the piece reminds us that all of us can fall prey to illusions that can loosen our hold on “the central reality” and diminish our ability to “taste the real quality of existence.”

Life is an ecstasy, says Emerson. As children, we have our fancies. As we grow into adulthood, our senses continue to imaginatively organize our experiences to make the most of our pleasure and pain. He uses the language of the carnival and the masquerade to show how easily we can get distracted:

“I find men victims of illusion in all parts of life. Children, youths, adults, and old men, all are led by one bauble or another.”

A bauble is a “showy trinket or ornament,” from the Old French baubel for child’s toy. The word came to mean a trifle or thing of little or no value. And it’s not just kids who are led by the baubles of life:

“The toys to be sure are various, and are graduated in refinement to the quality of the dupe. The intellectual man requires a fine bait; the sots are easily amused. But everybody is drugged with his own frenzy, and the pageant marches at all hours, with music and banner and badge.”

Emerson goes on to describe the deceptions of the senses and passions that can entangle us, as well as the “structural, beneficent illusions of sentiment and of the intellect.” In 1860, when Emerson wrote his essay, sentiment and intellect could certainly be influenced through books and magazines, toys and gadgets, exotic artifacts from faraway lands, and the bandying about of radical ideas, for example.

But think how much more positioned we are today to experience direct assault on our sentiment and intellect. Appeals to our attention and affections are lobbed at us from every direction: endless entertainment choices, social media, the 24/7 news cycle, the Internet, AI chatbots, emails, texts, alerts, and more. We are bombarded with conflicting narratives, fake news, click bait, half truths, and profane messaging. We work overtime to make sense of it all, and it’s exhausting and disheartening.

“From day to day the capital facts of human life are hidden from our eyes…In this kingdom of illusions we grope eagerly for stays and foundations.”

The remedy, says Emerson, begins at home:

“There is none but a strict and faithful dealing at home and a severe barring out of all duplicity or illusion there. Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.”

The way to get beyond the kingdom of illusion is honesty, says Emerson, and it starts with ourselves:

“At the top or at the bottom of all illusions, I set the cheat which still leads us to work and live for appearances; in spite of our conviction, in all sane hours, that it is what we really are that avails…”

There is no chance and no anarchy in the universe, argues Emerson. The unities of Truth and Right that govern the cosmos are not broken by our disguises. They are ever present, and we can turn to them whenever we want them. As he closes his essay, Emerson paints the picture of an individual who can either give way to the whims of the masses or choose to act differently:

“He fancies himself in a vast crowd which sways this way and that and whose movement and doings he must obey: he fancies himself poor, orphaned, insignificant. The mad crowd drives hither thither, now furiously commanding this thing to be done, now that. What is he that he should resist their will, and think or act for himself?”

We are all, as Emerson puts it, “liable to mirage.” Let’s give some thought this week to the illusions we harbor: in our personal lives, our relationships with others, our work lives, thought lives, spiritual lives. And let’s also think about how technology may be fostering, fueling, or furthering our illusions. Let’s not kid ourselves, as the saying goes: let us be honest with ourselves first and others next. I’ll leave you with an old Persian saying Emerson quotes near the end of his essay:

Fooled thou must be, though wisest of the wise:

Then be the fool of virtue, not of vice.

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