Caitlin Johnston on 'A Truth-Based Relationship with Reality'

 

Caitlin Johnstone Read on blog or Reader Only A Truth-Based Relationship With Reality Can Satisfy By Caitlin Johnstone on November 24, 2024 Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley): What we all want, deep down, is a truth-based relationship with reality. We might not be aware that this is what we are seeking from life, but it is. And everything in our society is stacked against our ever getting it. Everything in our society tells us to orient ourselves toward falsehood. Toward the lies of the empire. Toward the gratification of the ego. Toward fraudulent strategies for happiness which can never, ever satisfy. And all we really want deep down is truth. The overwhelming majority of humanity is lost in delusion. Our minds are full of propaganda-induced hallucinations about a completely fictional world in which capitalism is working just fine and the US and its allies stand on the side of freedom and justice. Our behavior is driven by advertising and cultural indoctrination about what we should buy and how hard we should work to buy it and what kinds of goals we should be striving to achieve. Our psyches are wrapped around a believed sense of self which is completely and utterly illusory. We flail this way and that seeking happiness and satisfaction from sources which can never provide them to us, because they aren’t true. We buy all the products we’re told to buy and find they yield only the most shallow and fleeting sort of enjoyment. We chase all the goals we’re told to chase and then find ourselves in a mid-life crisis when we’re still miserable after spending decades successfully achieving them. We try to find some inner stability by obtaining knowledge about the world and find ourselves fighting off cognitive dissonance because of the contradictions between the propaganda-induced mainstream consensus about reality and the raw data of what’s actually going on. We are unhappy because we live in a civilization made of lies, but because we live in a civilization made of lies, everything we reach for in an effort to escape our unhappiness is itself made of lies. Buy this product. Become fit enough and beautiful enough. Become wealthy and impressive. Fill your head with knowledge from all the most respected and esteemed sources. Happiness is just around the corner if you can only obtain the next shiny thing. It’s all lies. It cannot satisfy.  The only thing that can satisfy is a truth-based relationship with reality. One in which your worldview is in alignment with truth, and your thoughts are in alignment with your worldview, and your words are in alignment with your thoughts, and your deeds are in alignment with your words.  Happiness and satisfaction are not the result of getting everything you want and becoming the envy of the town, happiness and satisfaction are the result of purging your mind of falsehood. Falsehood about the world and the way it works. Falsehood about your life and your relationships. Falsehood about yourself and your true nature. There are many different ways we can delude ourselves, and it’s possible to be fairly free of delusion in one respect but deeply deluded in others. Someone who’s spent a long time researching global power dynamics and abusive systems might have a lucid understanding of the ways in which the rich and powerful conspire against the interests of ordinary people, but be totally enslaved to their ego and harbor countless unquestioned false beliefs about reality. Someone who’s spent decades in meditation and contemplation may have seen through the delusions of self and separation, but still harbor a deeply unconscious perspective on the world that’s not much different from what you’ll see pundits spewing on Fox News or CNN. The extent to which we experience satisfaction is the extent to which we stand against untruth. Untruth in ourselves, untruth in our immediate community, and untruth in the world. This necessarily entails a courageous willingness to look directly at very ugly things in all of those areas. Anyone who sincerely resolves to get real about reality will at some point find themselves staring at some dark, ugly things inside themselves that they wish weren’t there. But the first step to healing ourselves of untruth is to get real about the untruth that’s hiding in the shadows of our subconscious.  Anyone who sincerely resolves to get real about reality will likewise find themselves staring at dark, ugly facts which contradict the mainstream worldview we’ve all been indoctrinated into mistaking for truth. The genocide in Gaza has been one long, uninterrupted lesson in how profoundly ugly these truths can be. We will never have a healthy world until we are capable of becoming a truth-driven species. A species driven not by propaganda and the fraudulent psychological delusions of fear, greed, hatred and self-interest, but by truth and sincerity. I am firmly convinced that we are capable of becoming such a species. The cool thing about this is that the journey in this direction begins right beneath our own two feet. Right here in this moment you can get curious about what’s true, and where untruth may be hiding in your beliefs and assumptions about yourself, others, and the world. Human delusion runs profoundly deep, so every one of us has some untruth lurking around in the background which can be drawn into consciousness and healed.  Remove all untruth from yourself, and do everything you can to remove untruth from the world around you. This is what a truth-driven life looks like. And it’s how we begin the work of building a truth-driven world. _________________ My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley. Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2 Featured image via Adobe Stock.