No, reality is a social construct and it’s harmful to people who fall outside of reality as the white cisheteropatriarchy defines it. At various times that category has included trans people, religious minorities, otherkin, gay people, neurodivergents… Fuck reality.

There is too much diversity between different people for one universe to accept us all. That’s why we need a multiverse.

But if we go even further back in history, to the very origins of the term, it’s not good. There’s an ancient Greek myth about this teenage boy, Narcissus. He was 16 years old and very beautiful, so everyone wanted to marry him. But he just wanted to be alone in the woods and be a hunter. Bring back food for his community. But every time he returned to civilisation, he was inundated with marriage proposals. And he was just a boy. So he loses his temper and tells one of the people sexually harassing him, Ameinias, to go kill himself. Ameinias actually does if, because he’s genuinely obsessed with Narcissus, and as he does it, he prays to the goddess Nemesis for revenge. So Nemesis curses Narcissus to be capable of beholding his own beauty. Next time the kid comes across a pond, he sees his reflection in it, becomes obsessed with staring at himself, and dies of thirst because he can’t tend to his basic needs.

So this is an aro/ace child in an aphobic society who was sexually harassed, lost his temper, and sentenced to death by a god.

A lot of people perceive Narcissus as some kind of abuser, and I think these readings of the myth come from just how aphobic Greek society was at the time. They thought if you’re pretty, then you owe people sex, and if you don’t want to have sex, then you’re stuck up and full of yourself. It’s disgusting. And I’m not comfortable with the way our society has spent 3000 years mocking a queer child. Even a fictional one.

So no, I’m not going to become okay with hearing the word used as an insult. I’ve genuinely done a lot of research on this issue and I’m convinced it’s bad. As an asexual, I relate to Narcissus. As someone who suffered child abuse and now has a harmful relationship with My self-image, I relate to Narcissus. Our society hates people like him and people like Me because its values are all twisted up, same as the ancient Greeks.

Money is a social construct. Money can be real, but only to people who are either so ignorant they don’t understand the issue, or to people who admit that reality is also a social construct.

Observable phenomena caused by things that aren’t real. Money isn’t real, but we see it make the world work. It’s powered by collective belief. Magic.

They take a mundane piece of paper, print a picture on it, and it’s imbued with metaphysical power that the poor would kill and die to obtain.

And they don’t even have to print it to make more! They can just lend and borrow it to create more money out of thin air! That’s how the 2008 financial crisis happened. Too much magic mucking with the money.

They buy newspapers and TV stations so they can rewrite the reality that the people believe in. Create a mirage of nukes in Iran through rhetoric. Illusion magic.

They trap your mind in a prison, and they have more than one prison for different kinds of people. Some of the prisons look like you’re working against them, but it just advances their agenda further.

Not to mention the Pope. He’s got so much magical power over people. But the new kid on the block to challenge Christianity is the worship of money. Trump knows it, he’s made himself a religion.

The rich are using magic. We need it too, in order to have an equal footing.

The word “autism” originally came from psychiatrists’ perceptions that autistic people are preoccupied with ourselves. So if I say “My boss is so autistic, it’s disgusting”, is that okay? Etymologically, it’s valid. I’m not talking about a disorder. But I don’t think it’s an okay thing to say.

When psychiatrists made narcissism a label to apply to vulnerable people, I think they made it off limits for casual comments. I’m careful about labelling people as antisocial or paranoid too. Those are serious words used for serious conversations about mental health. That means they can be dangerous in untrained hands. Think of those words like power tools. You don’t pick up an angle grinder and start waving it around without the proper training and carefulness. That’s going to get someone hurt. These words have just as much destructive potential, so we need to treat them the same way.

If you’re lucky enough to live in Australia, get to know the Aboriginal people in your local community. Attend some Indigenous cultural events as a learner. White culture has forgotten how to value relationships over technology, but Indigenous culture still remembers. Just remember not to be a nuisance. Listen, be respectful, and do what you can to give as much help as you receive.

When you’re in a dream, the things happening seem real, but they aren’t. That’s the way it was explained to Me by an indigenous man from the Tiwi Islands.

Science agrees with indigenous metaphysics. Cognitive psychologists have used evolutionary simulations to investigate the origins of perception. Donald Hoffman created a virtual environment and created some virtual creatures to live within in. One creature perceives the environment the way it actually exists. Another creature perceives only fitness payoffs. And fitness beats truth every time. Perceiving reality is a waste of resources that evolution selects against. Our ancestors were the primitive organisms who perceived fitness payoffs, not truth.

I have NPD, and I don’t like it when My disorder is shortened and used as the word to identify Me. I’m not a “N*rcissist”, I’m a person with NPD. Call Me a person, not a disorder.

Yep. Aboriginal folks don’t tend to teach their kids the white idea of reality. I’ve heard from some Indigenous people that their culture (keep in mind, there are many Aboriginal cultures) doesn’t believe in reality at all.

So the white people took Aboriginal kids away from their families and put them in white institutions and with white parents. Took away their language, their culture, their land, and gave them white patriarchal realism instead. And there was a hell of a lot of abuse. Beatings and rape. They called it “civilising” the children.

It was an attempt to exterminate Aboriginal cultures. I call that genocide.

This article would have been better without the ableist slur against people with NPD.

That’s why I think we need to use more religious techniques. And no, I don’t mean ML brainwashing. I mean we need spiritual ceremonies. We need to use magic as part of our praxis. We need to liberate our minds from the religious brainwashing of capitalism.

It will pass when the left overcomes our internal differences and works together to fight the fascists instead of each other.

I think we should use science to manipulate our senses for good, regardless of alignment with reality. But the realists say we should only use science to get closer to reality. I think they’re stifling scientific progress.

We don’t live in a society that persecutes people for not breathing, but we do live in a society that persecutes people for not believing in reality. Genocides have been committed in the name of reality.

Realism isn’t about lack of belief. Solipsism is about lack of belief. Realism is about an unshakeable faith in the existence of an external world beyond the senses. Soulism is about making the best of the world within one’s senses. Out of the three main approaches to reality, the realists have the most belief, and are most easily cut down by Occam’s razor. That a world beyond our senses exists is an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence. It is nothing to base one’s life around. It is better to work to improve the malleable world within our senses, than to strive for Plato’s world of forms.

Now I’m on Arch, where learning is fun

The biggest organised religion is realism.