Editor’s Note: Your periodic reminder that you should be checking out The Last Redoubt regularly.
“The map is not the territory.”
It’s both simple, and difficult to unpack. It’s also related to the old saw about “the difference between theory and practice.”
The short version is that the “map”, the model we hold in our heads, the very language that we use, has a relationship to objective and underlying reality, but it isn’t actually the reality. It’s an abstraction. A roadmap you look at on paper or on a screen isn’t the road itself, and may not even be accurate if anyone made mistakes in the surveying or transcription, or if construction has been done since the map was made. Similarly, the various models of the atom that most of us were taught in chemistry are just that – useful ways to think of the structure for certain contexts.
The usefulness of a map, of course, is in how well it can be used to describe reality in the relevant context. It’s bad enough that no map perfectly corresponds to reality, but imagine now a map where some practical joker arbitrarily draws in new roads, or swaps out labels for locations, or on the map key.
Post modernism took the truism that our perception of reality is imperfect, and that we tend to treat reality as if what we perceive as real and how we label it is what’s real, and ran with it. At best – the reality of the territory does not matter, because there is no territory or objective truth, just a narrative we relate to sieze and maintain power.
Consider that. Rather than mistaking the map for the territory, they explictly act as if the map is the territory, and more importantly, controls the territory. Similar to a roadrunner cartoon where the act of painting a tunnel on a cliffside creates an actual tunnel. Or roadrunner fails to fall because he never studied physics. Except that in the cartoons it’s a joke, because we know it’s not real.
Yeah, I know, any reasonably self-aware post modernist will insist that they believe “airplanes” “fly” simply because they’ve chosen to believe the societal narrative, and if they chose to believe / rewrite the narrative perceptions otherwise, it would be just as “real.” That said, I’ve yet to find one willing to jump off a building because height is “just a narrative”. Odd how, when push comes to “shove”, they act like reality is real.
Nevertheless, they continue to redraw the map in order to redefine “reality”. Incidentally, more than a fair bit of the occult and magick tries to do just that – to change reality by changing our perceptions and definitions of it, even to the point of creating things out of whole cloth.
This treatment also explains a few things regarding how news and late-night “comedians” have reported on the election-related lawsuits. The narrative is that Trump’s case was demonstrably bad because the lawsuits were all dismissed. His claims otherwise are hopeless and delusional. And there is no evidence of significant election fraud. They are acting as if the rulings made by the judges are evidence to affirm their narrative. They have their map, and there is no territory outside of that.
The judges have declared that the cases are meritless, and so they must be so. There is no chance the judges made a wrong or politically biased decision. Nevermind the same liberals would – if at all remembering their history lessons – go on about how ridiculous the Dredd Scott decision was. Most egregious to me was the PA suit dismissed over poll watcher accessibility, ruling that the Republican poll watchers ahd sufficient access to do their job and verify the integrity of the election.
You know that old joke “the computer says you don’t exist”? Just because the judge dismissed the suit, we’re supposed to believe it’s baseless. We should believe this despite not only numerous sworn witness affadavits, but numerous videos showing poll watchers being blocked from entering, numerous vids and pictures of the windows at the polling rooms being sealed off to prevent observation, and as I noted in a past post, poll watchers being ejected to cheers.
We will have little luck, even with hard physical proof, convincing them their maps are wrong. The map – at least the one the left and globalists are using – says it was fine. Ergo it is, and what kind of unenlightened bigots are we to claim otherwise?