We Hold These Truths: Deconstructing What We Believe to Be Reality

by Chris Volkay

Life, love, money, religion, politics, right and wrong? Just about everything we think is true is simply wrong. We have absorbed the prevailing mythologies of a rather grotesque society and made them your own. These mythologies are what holds us back, robs our purse and makes us just as sick and crazy as your neighbor, that poor slob next door. "We Hold These Truths" endeavors to break these strangleholds in our thinking and show us the true nature of life. One based on science and logic, not on superstition and mythology. But here's the real question, mon ami, do you have the guts to face reality? Hmm?

164 pages, Paperback

First published May 3, 2011

About the author

I'd like to offer what my site and I am about, or at least trying to do right off the bat My literary heroes are that horrible, scabrous wretch of a man, Bukowski. Then Celine, Voltaire, Mencken, Dostoevsky round out my starting team.

And, if I were to choose perhaps the most important book to read I would opt for Voltaire's Candide. If you haven't read it, do yourself a favor. (But I swear that's my story in there. How he did it, I have no idea.)

Somebody once wrote about Bukowski, his mission was in piercing the veil of pretension that all of us live by. And of course there's the famous quote by Sean Penn, "the thing about Bukowski, everything he says, he's right."

So not an over abundance of rainbows and twirling sparklers around over here. Bring your own flashlight. I opt for a slightly darker view of life. Critics would say "negative" I would say honest. Like all things, it's debatable. It's like they used to say to Miller & Williams, Eugene O'Neill, "why so negative? depressing? Their collective answer? I'm just writing reality.

As I see it this obfuscation, this supplanting virtually all reality with the various lies and myths officially sanctioned by our society and all the rest of it is the most stunning, gobsmacking event going on in the world today. It's like we are all being slapped across our collective faces by a big wet tuna, and we don't even seem to notice it. People accept, almost without exception the wheelbarrow full of lies that is palmed off on our society. And it's not just one thing, it's all the B.S. across the board. I would opine (love that word-must mean I'm smart? huh?) that of the 7.6 billion people currently clogging up my planet, (I am kidding-I think) that every single one of them has invented their own little trusty world that swirls around in their heads and only they see. As to the real planet that's here? Earth? I don't know if anyone has ever even seen it. It remains largely unknown to human eyes.

So, at least from my point of view, and thusly this will be the focus of much of my writing, the REAL ‘Faustian Bargain’ humanity made with itself was that it would always live in hope and self-delusion. And in this regard every human being bellies up to the bar and drinks their fill.

Reality was so wicked, ugly, like a broken bottle in a back-alley Chicago bar fight, that we didn’t want any part of it. It all initially seemed innocuous enough, one supposes. Fill our lives with the agreed upon hopes and lies, what we prefer to be
true, and so what? Anodynes to assuage the acridity of adulthood. And so, like master craftsmen, we set about building our own individual dream worlds. Everything we believe and act upon in our lives is part of this great Faustian bargain.

But these illusions are not value neutral. In fact, they’re downright poisonous. The psychological equivalents of the flesh-eating disease. By shielding us from the unpleasantness of reality they serve and conspire to keep us weak, wee little tater tots. Our creativity, our abilities to think and stand on our own two feet are torn asunder. This only conspires to keep people infantile. Yes, in the short-term it dulls the inevitable agonies of the human condition, but in the long-term it’s what keeps us so damn infantile. We are childish, are we not?

Scientists natter about the harnessing of fire, the invention of the wheel, Gutenberg’s printing press and the emergence of Miley Cyrus as major turning points in the history of humanity. But remember theology too. Why? Because it starts us off on a highway, a path, a way of thinking about the world and ourselves that will become the preferred method. And thus this unscientific, supernatural way of seeing the world, then infects, like a computer virus, everything we see and think about. Through this altered and faulty prism of wishful thinking, we then formulate our viewpoints regarding life, love, politics, psychology, etc. And as our thought processes