One Night in Bangkok

Thank God I'm only watching the game, controlling it...

Some people think my dives into popular culture references are silly - but there are threads in this realm from which reality is woven. Sure, this isn’t reality - but it approximates it to some degree.

Some take it a step beyond, believing we live in an artificial world, essentially a computer simulation and that everything we know and experience, up to and including reality itself, a simulation created by some unseen and unknowable entity

This idea, known as the simulation hypothesis, was first advanced in 2003 by University of Oxford professor Nick Bostrom.

Is it possible?

I suppose the belief in God as the master and controller of all is like the simulation theory, but I think it is far more likely that people have come to live and believe in such a way as to be virtually indistinguishable from a simulation.

When I began churning this over in my mind, for some reason I could hear Murry Head singing these lines from “One Night in Bangkok” over and over:

“Siam's gonna be the witness
To the ultimate test of cerebral fitness
This grips me more than would a muddy old river
Or reclining Buddha

But thank God I'm only watching the game
Controlling it…”

I was thinking this morning how different the Russo-Ukrainian conflict would be seen in America if we still had a non-activist, honest, independent press – but then I realized that our press may have been independent to an extent, but they have always been dishonest activists. Powerful people like William Randolph Hearst and Woodrow Wilson have used the partisan nature of the press to their benefit, Hearst basically creating an event that began the Spanish-American War and Wilson propagandizing America’s entrance into WWI.

I know it is a bit pop-culture, but when I think of these newsrooms, my mind sees J. Johan Jameson bursting into a bullpen full of reporters huddling over typewriters, waving handful of newsprint in one hand while screaming, “New headline! ‘Hero or Vigilante? Spider-Man saves baby but destroys subway train, costing city millions!”

I’m not a gamer. I guess I was too old to get hooked on videogames, so what I know comes from having two sons who did play a goodly amount, but from what I know about their experiences, there sure seems to be a lot of similarity between those games and how the public, and not exclusively those familiar with video games, are approaching a real, shooting war.

To many, the world appears as a MMORPG, a Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, populated by FPSs (First Person Shooters) and NPCs (non-player characters). Nobody really dies and the carnage isn’t real. It is a way to experience battle, end-of-the-world level disasters and alien invasions in and environment where player safety is guaranteed.

The war is too distant for people to experience it in real time, so the only knowledge we have of it is through mainstream news, internet media and social media. The visuals we see seem straight out of the video game environments; those being created by programmers.

In a way, we know these images cannot be trusted as reality – because the behavior of the sources has taught us not to trust them. They have altered reality for their own purposes and benefits before, what is to say they aren’t doing it now.

The real threat of nuclear war once would have sent people looking for their local Civil Defense shelter, schools drilling kids in “duck and cover” and people stocking up their root cellar, but today that threat doesn’t even register with most. The reports of potential food shortages once would have sent people into conservation mode - largely because my parents and grandparents taught us about the deprivation they experienced during the Great Depression. People would be planting gardens and revisiting home canning and other methods of food preservation.

But not today.

The fiction of both the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the DC Extended Universe have introduced hundreds of millions of people to the concept of “mirror” universes. For example, the Mirror Dimension of Marvel’s Doctor Strange is a parallel dimension that allows the user to practice their magical abilities and fight their enemies without the public's knowledge.

Generally, the public is approaching this entire cataclysm, one brought about by two years of disastrous responses to a virus that destroyed the global economy, the takeover of food production by giant, multinational corporations, the centralization of control over global financial markets and the willing cooperation between business and government through “public/private partnerships”, as if it wasn’t real.

But it is real - and while nobody really controls the entire core code for the game, there are powerful people and entities that do design the environments in which the game is played.

It has been a perfect storm of bad for individual freedom.

Nobody recognizes it because they have been conditioned to live as if life was a role-playing video game.

This is where the destruction of objective reality has taken us.