Reality Bites

All of us know of people who can’t seem to accept reality. People who deny the facts. People who cling on to their delusions despite all the evidence. Usually when we think of such people, we mean the kind of people who still believe in creationism.

But denial is not always that simple: it’s not always because people are dumb or crazy or religious. Sure, that’s mostly the reason but sometimes, just sometimes, it’s because the alternative is very scary. Even a vacuum at times. Or we feel the alternative puts us on a slippery slope to everything that we detest. These lines from Grey’s Anatomy give one such example from the world of surgeons:

“Disappearances happen in science. Disease can suddenly fade away. Tumors go missing. We open someone up to discover the cancer is gone. It’s unexplained, it’s rare, but it happens. We call it misdiagnosis, say we never saw it in the first place, any explanation but the truth.”

Of course, the smarter you are and the less you capable you are of lieing to yourself, the more well thought your arguments to hold on to your existing belief system. For example, a misdiagnosis is a perfectly legitimate possibility in the scenario described above.

The flip side to all this is that we may be scaring off those who can shake the world. Nicolas Cage had these great lines in the movie, Next, where he asks what if magic was real?

“You've probably seen a lot of those shows. Mentalists. Magicians. Illusionists. You'd be shocked to know that sometimes, not often, but sometimes, it's the real deal. Masquerading as an act. Hiding behind a few $50 tricks. Hiding in plain sight. Because if the magician doesn't do that, the alternative is impossible for others to live with.”

Is the alternative reality of a world where magic is real so scary that we’d rather just be muggles?

But if you thought we’ve scared away all the magicians, fear not. Apple for one seeks out the technical magicians. Or at least they did back in 1997 as per their “Think Different” ad from back then:

“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”