Reality Is Imagined
The curious interplay between our imagination and external reality gives credence to the argument that the struggles over the mental environment are the future of activism. By protecting our mental environment we change external reality more quickly than any number of direct actions. But to make such an argument in today’s materialist, secular and scientific world requires the courage to imagine a different way of thinking.
Three hundred and seventy years ago, René Descartes sat down in a comfortable chair, with a candlestick on his table and his feet warmed by a fire. Closing his eyes, he gave free reign to his imagination. “What can I know for sure,” he wondered, “if I doubt everything?”
Modern philosophy began in this moment, with Descartes leading us through a series of thought experiments in which the rejection of all dubious knowledge leads him to discover the only knowable fact, famously expressed as “cogito, ergo sum”: I think, therefore I am. The freedom to imagine and to doubt all conventional wisdom and traditional truths was, thus, the first step in building our modern world-view.