190 - Representation vs. Reality

FROM THE NOTES OF KRIS SAKNUSSEMM...

If people haven’t read Jung’s work on Flying Saucers (as modern myth), I recommend it. I hadn’t looked at it in some time, but I think it reads even better in this age of social media. He completely skirts the issue of “real” or “imagined,” and focuses on the sheer popularity of the mythology. This is the view I took of cargo cult beliefs when I was a failed young anthropologist in Melanesia. Real/Unreal misses the point if something is deeply vivid at the social level. Jung’s short book makes a nice pairing with Randolph Stow’s remarkable novel Visitants, which is set in the Trobriand Islands during a UFO-cargo cult crisis. Stow was a young patrol officer, and the book provoked a nervous breakdown of lifetime impact. You can see why. In something like Melville, the strangeness starts early, and then Stow takes you right off any map.

To me, this strangely ties in with a larger phenomenon. Representation vs. Reality. Representation as Reality. It’s interesting to me to note how far we have degenerated from Schopenhauer’s ideas put forth in The World as Representation and Will. I think all forms of German idealism have a lot to answer for in Western thinking, but Schopenhauer had a lot more on his mind than we do today.

Case in point. Google’s Gemini AI image generator has recently caused a stir for ludicrous depictions of black Popes, black female Popes, black Vikings (although they look kind of cool), and images of the Founding Fathers as blacks and Native Americans (which rather contradicts the revisionist history program of today). The Right scorns the images as overzealous wokeness or outright historical misrepresentation. The Left dodges and weaves, and claims this is how stereotypes get broken down. The larger and deeper problem, however, is the notion that image alone is what counts.

This isn’t what Schopenhauer meant as “representation.” He meant a magical human capability of imagining all of existence. It was humancentric to be sure, but it was deep conceptually and structurally. Now what we mean is “optics.” Pure visual surface. We mean the artificial world of media and entertainment. Yet we know people aren’t really fooled by this. Just frustrated.

American black people know that one black President and a few millionaires and even billionaire celebrities don’t equate to genuine structural change. How can this discordance not cause confusion and anger?