“All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players”…
… A citation that needs no introduction, and even while William Shakespeare was making metaphorical reference to the transient nature of life, she couldn’t help but find in those words, a striking appositeness to the artificiality and deceit poisoning the 21st century, an era in which the complexion of truth is unequivocally darker than ever before, and may well be considered the most grievous casualty of the times…
…Like love, the truth has neither a precise explanation nor singular manifestation, thereby qualifying as one of the central concerns of philosophy, rather than science, the former tireless in its efforts to pursue means by which the truth may be established, parameters within which it must be permitted to glide and forms it might take without betraying a fundamental agreement with reality, that which the English dictionary defines as ‘the state of things as they actually exist, as opposed to an idealistic or notional idea of them’; a far too simplistic rendering of a deceptively complex concept that has effectively paved the way for the perception of reality to be easily perverted, the unprecedented prowess of advanced science and technology, aided and abetted by the ‘infodemic’ spawned by social media platforms, unparalleled in its ability to artfully misrepresent the facts and seamlessly disfigure the truth.
The two most recent and flagrant examples of such type of defacement of reality pertain to the covid 19 pandemic and Russia Ukraine war, the narrative built around the former having duped the majority of the world’s population into injecting themselves with a host of largely ineffective vaccines, since proven to not only be non-preventive, but also unable to uphold the claim of curtailing the severity of infection, for the statistics, when closely examined, clearly reveal that the incidence of serious illness was the same pre-vaccination as it is post-vaccination, any attempt to expose the sheer absence of logic in the convoluted tale that has been told, immediately branded a conspiracy theory, its proponents forthwith discredited and declared of unsound mind…
…In the matter of the latter, the two theories that have been doing the rounds are, to put in concisely a) Putin is a war criminal (yet to be formally affirmed), his invasion of the Ukraine unanticipated, unprovoked and unjust. b) The West is ultimately to blame, for Putin was a known trigger that it pulled, whether inadvertently or intentionally, his invasion of the Ukraine representing an attack against the Western, globalist elite… but as the war progresses, bringing with it what appears to be economic suicide – if not genocide – for many of the parties, either directly or by domino effect concerned, is it so unthinkable, she wondered, that the scenes unfolding around the world might not in fact be a masterfully orchestrated performance by all of the actors on the stage, in addition to some behind the scenes, designed to reset a world order, restructure currency dependencies and facilitate the whitewashing of internal debt crises in consort with a rolling out of central bank digital currencies, the sinister consequences of which remain in shades of grey…
…But alas, under the relentless artillery fire of misinformation, so repetitive and ubiquitous that within the minds of ordinary men, reality will invariably mutate into the imaginary, there seems to be little or no room left for the truth to prevail…
…in the end , it is only the study of Philosophy, tragically no longer part of the DNA of both formal and informal education, which might serve as an equipoise to the dogma and persuasive powers of Artificial Intelligence, for it not only teaches one how to think for oneself, but also and most importantly nourishes the essential human quality of intuition i.e. the ability to acquire knowledge without recourse to conscious reasoning, in the absence of which, as 16th century French philosopher, mathematician and scientist, Rene Descartes long ago conjectured, man will, without fail, be subjugated by the machine……and thus she was forced to conclude that even if all the world is indeed a stage, not all the men and women need to be players, for as author Stephanie Klein once wrote, “Tell the truth, or someone will tell it for you”.