Menu

Proyecto Visión 21

There are consequences for not knowing who we are

I was reading the comics a few days ago when one of the comics caught my attention. The father and the mother were sitting together at a sofa, clearly at home, and a boy was playing nearby. The father then said something like, “Son, your mother and I think your now old enough to know you are a hologram.”

 

It didn’t make me laugh, but it made me think. For this, this comic strip was not funny, but it was alarming. For example, are the children of our times so technologically removed from their parents that parents and children have nothing in common except living in the same house?

 

Or are parents taking advantage of current technology to create children instead of rear children?

 

I don’t think the creator of this comic strip was thinking about those issues when he drew what he drew. However, he is a keen observer of our reality. His cartoons are, therefore, a reflection of what is happening in our society.

 

In addition to being an exquisite analysis of the differences between parents and children, this comic strip opens another path of thinking, inviting us to think that we may not know who we really are until we are mature enough to have somebody who care for us to reveal us the truth.

 

The idea that we may be just holographic projections has been artistically explored, with different results, in many sci-fi series and movies, including “Star Trek” and, from a different point of view, the “Matrix” trilogy.

 

That idea is, in turn, just a variation of the so-called “simulation argument,” that says that perhaps our whole life is only a huge simulation inside a computer of untold power. (For details, visit www.simulation-argument.com.)

 

And this idea that we are just computer images is, in my opinion, just a technologically updated version of the old belief, popular even just a few centuries ago (read the works by Calderon de la Barca) that we are just images of a dream that somebody is dreaming.

 

Whatever the case, when questioning who we really are and who are children really are is no longer reserved to philosophers or science fiction writers but something that can be seen in a comic strip, then that’s a clear indication that questioning has reached a general, deep, constant, and subconscious level.

 

Not knowing who we are has an impact in everything we do. If we don’t know who “we” are, then we will not know who “the others” are. That means that since immigrants are by definition “the others,” we will be unable to solve the immigration problem.

 

There is something even more alarming. If, as this cartoon shows, the only way for us to know who we really are is to be mature enough to have somebody reveal the truth to us, then we are at risk of being manipulated to believe we are something or somebody we are not.

 

In such spiritual, existential, and social “fall” we live our everyday life.

 

Go Back

Comment

Blog Search

Blog Archive

Comments

There are currently no blog comments.