Wednesday, April 6, 2022

Is Solipsism the Next Paradigm Shift?

The spreading of doubt about the nature of reality has paralleled the coronavirus epidemic and started with the notion perpetrated by Trump and his QAnon proxy that the pandemic was a conspiracy devised to remove him from power. There has been a lot of talk about what set the stage. During the 90s, when Russia was weak NATO took advantage; the minute Trump got into power Democrats set to work at litigating the existence of his presidency. It would be interesting if the creation of solipsism by the Bishop Berkeley was motivated by a similar perception of threat. In his landmark, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn proposed the notion of paradigm shifts—out of which movements like the new historicism propounded by Shakespearean scholar Stephen Greenblatt developed. Underlying Kuhn’s notion is the labile nature of reality. There's no absolute truth in history or in fact science itself. Remember Heisenberg’s “Uncertainty Principle?” The idea that there is no Kantian "categorical imperative" is somewhat vindicated by the quantum universe where a subatomic particle can exist in two places at the same time.  Such radical skepticism obviously has its downsides. "The Big Lie" is one example as is the current assertion by Russia that the images of slaughter in Bucha are the result of Western media doctoring images. Holocaust deniers like David Irving thrive in this kind of atmosphere.

Read "Dream Hoarders" by Francis Levy, HuffPost 

and watch the animation of Erotomania

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