=some notes on the book i'm currently reading=

"...this was a country absorbed in myth, doped and dozing and dreaming, because if there was one common fact or factor underlying everything else, it was that nothing was as it was described—as if a spirit of rhetoric (because of the war?) had infected everything, made it impossible for any fact to be seen straight."  —Doris Lessing

Early in the The Four-Gated City, Doris Lessing describes the sense of displacement and disassociation, the Twilight-Zone unreality that her alter-ego/heroine Martha Quest experiences as she navigates a world that no longer corresponds to the official narrative. 

We find ourselves today in an identical predicament. We are repeatedly told that we live in a free society even while our rights and freedoms are being methodically taken away. We are told that we live in the best possible country but the majority of us have no real experience of life in other countries. We are told that our country only goes to war to defend itself and to uphold liberty, that anyone can grow up to be president, that our political and economic system is the fairest when we know damn well that none of these claims are true, or, at best, that they are arguable. 

Is it true that we are any freer than, say, Canadians, who also vote, as do Italians, and the citizens of Spain, England, Germany, Australia, Venezuela, and a laundry list of other countries, even Russia? Are we cognizant of the fact that in many other countries there are even more political parties to choose from than here in America, so that in other countries there is arguably more choice than in the U.S. with its hardly distinguishable, grid-locked, two-party system? Do we stop to think that in actuality anyone can grow up to be leader of any country—consider, for instance, that Stalin was the illegitimate child of peasants and he became ruler of the Soviet Union. Of course, it took a revolution for him to do it, but does anyone really doubt it wouldn't take a complete overthrow of the current status quo for a truly poor person, a person outside of the club of wealth and privilege, to become "president" of the United States today?

In the post-monarchical world any person can, theoretically, grow up to be "president" in any country, if they have the cunning, the ruthlessness, and, of course, the wealth, either through their own enterprise, or the backing of someone wealthy. Of course, it's always been like this and always will be, but somehow we continue to believe the puerile myths of the exclusive exceptionality of our own particular society. Why? To paraphrase Goethe, "No man is more enslaved as the man who falsely thinks himself free."

Am I un-American for thinking the way I do? Well, I sure hope so. I'm not an "American," I'm a human being. The accident of my birth within the purely arbitrary and ultimately transitory borders of a place designated as "America" was something that happened outside of my control or choice. If I'd been born in France, I'd have been just as nonsensically expected to be proud that I was "French".

Most people don't even question the truth of the slogans and propaganda by which they are governed, they simply absorb them as truisms, as catechism, even while being dimly aware of their falsity. This was a theme that Lessing took up again in her short but excellent book of essays "The Prisons We Choose to Live Inside." What does this duality, this schizophrenic doubling do to the average person? Is it any wonder that so many "normal" people are  psychologically dysfunctional, so prone to depression, substance abuse, overeating, overspending, outbursts of displaced anger, sexual addictions, and so on?

And how does the person who dares to actually think things through live in such a world without going mad themselves, a world where everyone around them is asleep, mad, repeating lies, acting by remote control or out of control altogether? How can they turn on the television or read the paper or look at what passes for the official version of events on the internet without the disquieting sense that they are all alone in the world? Because god forbid you try to nudge your fellow dreamers awake, the wrath you are certain to incur will teach you the most horrible truth of all: most people prefer to remain asleep.

These are the questions that Martha Quest faces in Lessing's monumental novel. They can be summed up in one Ur-Question: how, with so much pressure to conform, can one live a fully authentic life?