Ghost World

There's a scene in the movie Interstellar (Pound for pound perhaps the worst film I've ever seen), where Anne Hathaway, apparently after experiencing some sort of spiritual epiphany, waxes on in a schmaltzy diatribe that reaches its crescendo with this line: "Love is the ONE thing that we're capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space." There's a lot of this kind of specious guru-babble throughout the film, along with a dumptruck load of pseudo-scientific hogwash that wouldn't pass muster in an 8th grade science class (is it a coincidence that Morgan Freeman is in 2 of my 4 least favorite movies of the century so far? Also Michael Caine is in 3 of them. :)).

Ugh, I could go on about this black hole of a movie (wink, wink...get it?), but I should move on to my point, I guess. Or perhaps we could say I need to zero in on my singularity (somebody stop me!). Anyway, what crybaby Annie has demonstrated in this scene is the tendency we have to take transient emotional signals and wrap them up in color-coded abstract language bindles. Love in this case, white as the sun and ultimately dominant over all the lesser impulses.

Oops! Because of course, they're not impulses anymore, are they? Love and hatred and values and all those other language infested 'objects' now occupy the world of the materially real. In fact, they dominate, no longer representational but actually more real than reality, sustaining the living world instead of emanating from it.

Thus we believe we 'discover' love, even though in reality 'love' is the abstract byproduct of a particular kind of brain activity. Several, actually, rising from a boiling stew of brain goop. Values work the same way. We like things a certain way, and we want other people to like the same things we do. But no, that's not enough. We want to make our set of likes the only acceptable set of likes, because, after all, our likes are obviously the best likes. No, in fact they're logically the only set of likes that anybody can reasonably like.

In this manner we have built a ghost world. It's a world that works from the outside in. From the POV of the ghost world, the physical world is merely an expression of something deeper, more profound, more important. The hand that shapes the clay, as it were.

Mostly the ghost world gives us something solid to hold onto. Love MUST overcome and ultimately stand alone in victory, or else what's the point? Values are writ in stone, above and beyond what each person merely prefers/desires. Otherwise, where's the authority? Soon, ducks will be in all the swimming pools! Obviously this sort of thinking is embedded in cultural indoctrination, and is probably just as obviously necessary for societies to develop.

Had a bit more, but I'm out of gas. THC is a harsh mistress. :) Laterz, Gatorz!