"You People Seem to Think We Have to Start With Reality" - Living in a World Where Everything is Made Up

“You people seem to think that we have to start with reality. But we’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
Karl Rove quoted by Ron Suskind in “Faith, Certainty, and the Presidency of George W. Bush, October 17, 2004.

Once upon a time, you were raised in some small place, told how the world was, and everywhere you looked you saw evidence of what you were told, all confirmation that the world was just one way.

Then everyone's world grew larger, we were exposed to other peoples and places, they invented travel, fiction, philosophies, and then science fiction, and then moving pictures and now everyone is exposed to a huge variety in lifestyles and ideas and values and can hardly escape the realization that everything is made up. We're all acutely aware at any given moment that things are one way now but they could be different. Likely will be different.

This could excite you, exhaust you, confuse you, make you open up or hunker down.

There are two choices once people get this insight.

1. Just make up and declare anything you want because, you know, everything is made up. Say that when people are offended by you, that's on them. Throw a piece of sheet metal into the air and call it an airplane. Just lie to people even when you know they know you're lying. Live by your own rules and change those depending on your mood.

Or,

2. Feel sobered by this insight that everything really is "just made up" and that making up the wrong things can leave a trail of dead bodies, broken hearts, bankruptcies, chlamydia and cynical, angry youths in your wake. Take at least as much care in "just making things up" as an architect and general contractor would in "just making up a house" that someone they loved was to live in for decades.

Freedom is a beautiful thing until it suggests freedom from consequences or conscience.