In America today, even Rod Serling would have a hard time getting through to Americans.
Not all, but certainly enough that it would seem, most.
Rod Serling began broadcasting the Twilight Zone in 1969. Inside the episodes were warnings. Warnings that television censors would not have allowed, had they been stated as facts and presented publicly as such.
America’s racism, xenophobia, religious fundamentalist thinking, even then had to include magical thinking, pseudo science and the denigration of science, of inquisition, and all proof, if you will. Carl Sagan drew attention to just this issue in his book, “The Demon Haunted World.”
Today, Rod would have created an episode that would have used science fiction as the vehicle of communication, while only those with an understanding of science would have divined the actual message behind the program, and its intent.
The introduction might have sounded something like this.
You’re traveling through another dimension — a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That’s a signpost up ahead: your next stop: the Twilight Zone!
You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension: a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. You’re moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas. You’ve just crossed over into… the Twilight Zone.
Be aware that the fourth dimension is not something you can see, –for time, which obviously exists cannot be seen. And it is within time that these constructions change.
As you proceed through time, it is not linear. For if you move laterally through time, while someone else moves vertically through time, time itself changes. One, relative to the other is travelling faster, away from you.
And Rod Serling used the Twilight Zone as a vehicle to send messages, in such a way that TV censors would be unable to stifle the intent of the message.
Rod Serling was not enamoured with what he saw occurring in America. He had lived through McCarthyism, the denial of truth, the attack on ideas, without evidence in relation to disloyalty or subversion.
He bridged this by talking about dimensions in such a way that magical thinking could be employed that involved imagination, not science, magical thinking, not facts.
There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call “The Twilight Zone”.
In essence that is exactly where we now ‘lie’, — pun intended. We are in a world that requires magical thinking. We can ‘see’ the objective truth of an action, statement or event, yet there are those, now many in number, whose eyes, senses and even their mental acuity has been dulled to the point where the filters they view the world through and with, do not allow for truthful interpretation. That has been negated, denied, not just obscured but made unseen.
Just as Rod Serling used imagination as a tool to envision, today, politicians and religions use magical thinking to negate the objective truth and to deny science and truth.
Faith is simply Belief, in the absence of evidence. As Carl Sagan suggests, it is only rational and reasonable to withhold belief until there IS compelling evidence.
The scientific information that the Bible is based on came from what was known in 600 BC. As Sagan suggests, “We have learned a few things since then.”
Carl Sagan, in “Why Humanity Must Overcome Religion”, stated;
https://youtu.be/-EdmF4OyoKI?si=bNmg7LB1c7FcNiX7
“Science is a self-correcting process. To be accepted, new ideas must survive the most rigorous standards of evidence and scrutiny. The suppression of new ideas may be common in religion or politics, but it is not the path to knowledge and there is no place for it in the endeavour of science.”
And yet.
Today’s Twilight Zone
Just imagine the following:
Imagine a nation so angry that it would enable a man deficient in every human value to become its leader.
Imagine a nation where fear of others is so profound that the only way to interact with them is to deny them entirely. Arrest them, detain them and deport them, so dangerous is their truth that their actual existence must be denied.
Imagine, if you will, a nation so afraid of truth that it must erase facts and create a world filled with mysticism, lies and conjecture.
Imagine a world where the news, the actual events unfolding in front of your eyes is denied. A place where the objective truth is replaced with ignorance and ‘alternative facts’.
Imagine a world where science, education, the scientific methodology itself is denied, assaulted and ignored.
Imagine a country whose people will take part in magical thinking and in beings that cannot be seen, touched, heard or explored scientifically in any manner.
Now, imagine incorporating this fiction into the very structure of a country’s administrative functions.
Imagine a place where knowledge is eschewed. A place where medicine, all science, even the law can be reinterpreted, even reinvented through the eyes of those without any ability to even conceive of its objective truth.
Now, open your eyes.
Look around. Where are you?
You are in the United States of America.
Here you dare not question facts. Here you dare not ‘tell the truth’. Here you dare not attempt to explore, learn, validate, test or replicate. Here one must not disprove the lies.
To do so risks attack. To do so risks the destruction of your vocation, your ability to speak truth to power.
Here you will become voiceless. No one will support you, no one will validate you. In fact, the agency of the administration will attack you, disavow you, blackball you, defund you, and tell overt lies about you and your intent.
Case Western Reserve University held a talk on September 27th, 2024 which stated the following;
“Trolls. Disinformation. Canceling. Conspiracy theories. If America’s grasp on reality seems to be under attack, that’s because it is. Epistemic warfare—the use of powerful psychological manipulations to divide, distract, and disorient our society—has come into its own in the 21st century as never before.“
https://case.edu/news/staying-real-war-truth-and-how-win-it
Scientific American, stated on September 29th, 2022 in an article entitled “Truth Under Attack”,
“Lies, extremism and the manipulation of reality seem to be common themes in today’s current events. Because all untruths are antithetical to science, we hope this issue will serve in some small measure as an antidote to the poison of manipulated facts and other forms of mendacity. Never has it been more important to understand the science of how we humans determine the truth… Nowhere are our failings at objective reasoning more exploitable than on social media, used globally by billions. Facebook and other platforms enable the spread of misinformation that sows social unrest — in particular, meme culture has been shown to propagate lies and increase division. Platform algorithms that take advantage of our psychological vulnerabilities trap us in echo chambers. In the end, users become the unwitting vectors of these threats.”
And so it is that Donald J. Trump and his acolytes have become the purveyors of lies, willfully, undermining the public’s ability to differentiate fact from fiction. Truth from lie. Magical thinking from scientific inquiry.
The United States of America and its media, has now weaponized ‘echo chambers’ of intolerance, where critical thinking and rational discussion is eschewed. Only group-think and like mindedness is allowed. All other dissenting voices of reason and intelligence are attacked purposefully.
The future of America, is now tenuous.
As Andrew Young stated, “There can be no democracy without truth.”
I emphatically agree. And as George Orwell stated so eloquently;
“In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
Such is America today, to its eternal destruction.
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