The world is digitized. There is hardly a person left who doesn't have at least a TV in their home. Movies, TV shows, cartoons all provide an alternate reality that isn't permanent. However, sometimes, it feels real, at least while we're watching it. And sometimes, we'd rather it be real than what we have in our everyday lives.
In the episode of Black Mirror titled "The Waldo Moment," a man named Jamie voices a cartoon bear who accidentally becomes a political candidate for an upcoming election. Jamie struggles with the idea that people only like the bear; that he doesn't matter in the slightest. His feels persona as this fictional, rude, cartoon bear has overtaken his own personality. People like Waldo because he speaks the truth. Jamie can say what he wants because he isn't actually Waldo, but the consequences come back to bite him in the butt anyway. It may seem crazy, but the people actually vote for the blue bear over real people. As Jamie says, "Waldo is a bear. A blue bear," but for some reason, people don't seem to care. Suddenly, Waldo is a beacon of truth, and it doesn't matter whether he's real or not.
Robert Nozick's "The Experience Machine," the same idea is portrayed though with entirely different circumstances. The idea that people might rather prefer to plug themselves into a machine that gives them a false but realistic reality is similar to people voting for a blue bear in an election. To some, a cartoon that tells the truth seems the better option than the people who lie in order to gain favor. Just as with the experience machine, people can pick and choose what they want to experience. They don't have to worry about awkward, sad, scary, or annoying situations. The virtual reality is suddenly better.
However, when it comes down to it, are these really better situations? In Plato's allegory of the cave, the people are presented as not knowing the truth while in the cave. It's only once they're outside in reality that they can come to know the truth. It's uncomfortable, and they aren't used to the light at first, but eventually they get used to it. They learn more than they ever could have in the cave, but when they go back, they're shunned. Perhaps Waldo is telling the truth, but he's still a cartoon. There's a person behind him who is the one who actually thought of everything Waldo says. Perhaps if the people who voted for Waldo instead chose Jamie as their candidate, things might have been better. A cartoons simply cannot do something meant for human beings, as entertaining as he may be. Jamie was the brain behind everything, but at the end of the episode, he ended up homeless.
And so, it seems that most people prefer the fictional over the real. Jamie gave Waldo a voice and thoughts and a personality, and yet, people preferred the cartoon over the human. This shows that it's dangerous to be too involved in the fictional world. It might overtake reality one day.
I really enjoyed reading your post! I think it raises the scary possibility of people preferring fiction to reality. When Jamie comes out from behind the screen, people ridicule him when, in reality, he's the person who makes Waldo exist. While video games, TV, and movies provide a nice escape from the stresses of everyday life, what if people begin to prefer the "escape" to everyday life? In "The Waldo Moment," the people preferred a digitalized cartoon to two human candidates. Cartoons lack emotions, intelligence, and the ability to think rationally. They are in no way human and would not even exist if it weren't for humans. Yet, the people still preferred Waldo. While they liked that he spoke the truth, he criticized many of the tendencies of all humans, such as the desire to strengthen their careers. If Jamie himself had spoke the same words, I agree that he could of swayed the public. However, I do not think the effect would have been as great. People preferred Waldo because he criticized all the human faults the candidates displayed. If the candidate had been Jamie himself, who's to say he wouldn't have had the same motives. Waldo was an escape from the reality of human motives and greed. However, Waldo displays the mix of reality and fiction, as people voted for a fictional character to take a real, human position. Your post truly displays the danger of immersing oneself too greatly into fiction, as the lines between them can become blurred, as "The Waldo Moment" displays.
ReplyDeleteI think another reason the people voted for the bear and not Jamie is because he is human, therefore, in their minds, he is bad. They're making out anybody human in this election to be the bad guy and the truth telling bear as their idol. Waldo is an escape from their horrible reality just like the experience machine, which you so eloquently stated. As a Memphian, which I'm not sure if you are from here or not, something like this happens every year in the mayoral election people will vote for a man named Robert Hodges, otherwise known as Prince Mongo. This man is actually a real human-being, but the reality in which he lives is not. He claims to be an ambassador from the planet Zambodia and is 333 years old, and this man runs for mayor every year and actually gets votes! Just goes to show that people will lean towards the weirdest thing if it means the other choice is a lying politician.
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