Op-Ed: Reality really isn't a choice

Have you noticed an increasing number of drivers who do not use turn signals, look before they merge or drive defensively?

Have the basic manners of those around you deteriorated, so we all must be subjected to noise and distraction from their electronics?

Do you have to take extra care as you go about your daily business, because people around you seem neither to notice nor care about the effects of their choices on others?

No, these trends are not merely because outsiders have flooded our home town. Culture, not California, is the cause.

In times past, Americans who would not conform to standards of good manners were rebuked, shunned, and even punished if their excesses went too far. Today, who are you to judge?!

Like a selfie-obsessed person today, the legendary Greek Narcissus was cursed to find nothing in this world as fascinating as his own face. His self-absorption was his doom, a warning to others to find something to cherish beyond yourself.

Narcissist Personality Disorder is a diagnosed psychological malady in which a person is so self-obsessed that the reality of anything other than the self fades into insignificance. A decade ago, the American Psychology Association considered removing it from the list of recognized disorders because a disorder must be uncommon. Narcissism had become so common that the APA considered it might have become the norm.

The greatest pandemic facing the western world today is not the Wuhan Flu, it is narcissism. Advances in technology and the lack of major wars between industrialized nations since World War II have created a false reality; a baseless sense of entitlement. The foundations of this mirage are the assumption that peace is the norm, that wealth is to be expected, and that the self is like unto God.

For more than 50 years, even our government has called the satisfaction of our basic needs an entitlement, as if human beings were owed a living standard by the rest of us just by being born.

Philosophies of post-modernism and deconstructivism have increasingly dominated culture since World War II. These assert that objective reality does not exist.

Economics, politics, citizenship, language, social norms, gender, and every other aspect of our lives are to be seen as personal choices. Identity, not reality, is now to be the foundation of our individual and social lives.

This extreme individualism, divorced from all concepts of objective reality, is now at the heart of every controversy. The fervor of those who insist they are beyond anyone else’s power to define has reached Salem Witch Trial levels. Now, anyone who denies the innate and unlimited autonomy of each person to make their own reality must be “canceled” for the common good.

Political narcissists aim to be freed from all social constraints rooted in traditions that recognize objective reality. This explains both the poor manners around us and the irreconcilability of today’s controversies.

Are we mere mortals who are a part of a universe beyond our reckoning and control? Or, are we each a little god who can demand from everyone else the total freedom to redefine all truth to conform to our personal preference?

One answer leads to sanity, progress and civilization. The other must end in a thorough break from other people, from reality itself, resulting in nothing less than madness.

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In Maine and then Idaho, Ralph K. Ginorio has taught the history of Western Civilization to High School students for nearly a quarter century. He is an “out-of-the-closet” Conservative educator with experience in Special Education, Public Schools, and Charter Schools, Grades 6-12. He has lived in Coeur d’Alene since 2014. Email: rginorio@cdapress.com