Reality

posted by The Vidiot @ 1:40 PM Permalink

One of the saddest things about this dumb brain thing is I sorta' have to give up my motorcycles. In the words of my neurosurgeon "Any idiot can fall off a bike. If you fall off a bike, however, you'll be really screwed up." But the flip side of that is I get to read on the subway. Right now, I'm reading a book called "The social construction of reality. A treatise in the sociology of knowledge." by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann. (Mr. Vidiot turned me onto it.) Anyway, it got me thinking.

This article in the WaPo is touting the same old tired line: the Democrats are struggling.

Excerpt: News about GOP political corruption, inept hurricane response and chaos in Iraq has lifted Democrats' hopes of winning control of Congress this fall. But seizing the opportunity has not been easy, as they found when they tried to unveil an agenda of their own.

Yet, whatever I read, I see that Bush's numbers are low (Cheney's are even lower), Dem numbers are on the rise, and Dean is raising buttloads of cash. Does that sound like a party in trouble to you? No.

Now, the book is all about construction of reality. I'm not all the way through it yet, but it's very interesting with regards this story. We all have heard the left-leaning blogosphere going on and on about how the media gets things wrong. How they create a narrative and stick to it, no matter if they've been proven wrong -- Gore as liar; Republicans better on security. They create the reality. We have to stop letting them create the reality. And don't let the media call you crazy either. ..."any radical deviance from the institutional order appears as a departure from reality."(Berger: pp66)

Near as I can tell, according to Berger, society creates reality, and the reality, in turn, creates society. (I'm just now beginning to grok the concept of a dialectical effect (which Berger and I think Marx are big on)). So, if these "woe are the democrats" articles become more frequent, you can bet that whomever is behind them is frantically trying to shore up the "dems will fail" reality with the hope that people believe it. A self-fulfilling prophecy sort of thing.

Don't let them do it.