Why I like fake things.

People love fake stuff. Fake things always seem way better than real things. Fake news easily beats out real news. It's more interesting. It's not ambiguous and confusing.  No thought.  No analysis. No thinking of any kind. Just belief.  Easy peasy.

And way more entertaining.

This is the secret of Breitbart and Fox News.  It's more exciting than the real news.  And you don't have to read through five pages of some deep thoughtful investigative reporting thing with big multisyllabic words in the Atlantic Monthly, the New Yorker or Rolling Stone. Five or six short sentences with pictures is all you need. Or 140 characters on Twitter.

For fake news, back when I was first  a consumer, we were stuck with the National Enquirer--stories of space aliens having sex with Jackie Kennedy in the White House swimming pool, available on every grocery store waiting line.

Good photos but otherwise not that great.

Things are definitely looking up these days in the fakery department.

First came fake breasts. Without question, many women people prefer fake tits to the real thing, despite their exorbitant cost. Who want real tits anymore?  The hard-as-steel fake ones are so much larger, shapely, and more durable.

But breasts are only the tip of the fake iceberg, so to speak.

Today I struggled up a steep hill to the Center of New Zealand, ruminating all the way about the popularity of fake anatomical devices and other fakery. After huffing and puffing all the way up to the top and photographing the site, I discovered that it was the fake center of New Zealand. The real center is many miles away. Nobody goes to the real center.  The fake center is the BIG tourist draw.

Another popular thing invented in New Zealand is fake suicide. People by the thousands pay $200 a pop to jump off cliffs and bridges plummeting earthward headed hundreds of feet down like Humpty Dumpty towards the river and rocks below. Suddenly they bounce up just before splatting. It's called bungee jumping. Everyone does it in New Zealand.  Lots more fun than the real suicide thing. It is the main reason why there are absolutely no readical Islamic suicide bombers in New Zealand. Teenagers otherwise susceptible to the thrills of ISIS can comit fake suicide over and over again without explosives.

In politics also, fakery is the up and coming thing.  Barack Obama was a real President.  Boring. Predictable. Thoughtful. Complex.  No drama Obama. Now Americans can lay claim to a much more exciting leader, a drama queen if there ever was one.  We offer the world a fake President with fake hair, fake wealth, fake stories, a fake sex life, fake executive orders, failing casinos, fake terrorist attcks in Sweden, and fake inauguration numbers. Pretty much everything fake.  He is like fake tits for an entire nation.  Much weirder than the real thing.

Personally, I have never been all that thrilled with reality. Looking in the mirror, for example, is distasteful to me. In my fake imaginary world, I look one Hell of a lot better than I do in the mirror.

So far as the future of the planet is concerned, the fake future looks a lot better than the real thing.

The fake future is called "Utopia." It's a place where everything works out well. Peace, love, and rock and roll. “Love is all you need”, said Sir Paul. It's the world I thought we were heading into-- back in the day--when I travelled to Woodstock to see a hundred bands play, and then quit work to take the hippie trail to Nepal.

The real future is called "Dystopia."  This is the world Donald Trump described in his campaign for President. And it is the world he continues to promote. In this world, crime is out of control, especially in Chicago and other cities. Rapists and terrorists are flooding across our porous borders. Enemies are everywhere, especially at the NY Times and Washington Post.  Out national security is endangered by CIA analysts, scientists, and environmental advocates trying to purvey their crazed ideas.  Our best hope is to allow the mentally ill to buy more weapons and get rid of the failed Obamacare health program.

Holy cow!!!

I definitely prefer the fake future.

DUPED!

After two years of silent marination if various forms of public lying, cheating, and observation of all forms of  lying, cheating, and stealing, I am circling back to where this blog began, addressing one of the quintessential mysteries of the human mind: the puzzling question: why do so many people so enjoy being duped?

With the election of a consummate con man as our so-called President, this question has become more pressing than ever before.

It’s hardly a news flash to learn that Donald Trump is the ultimate  huckster, skilled in pulling off the gigantic heist. Just this week, a senior editor of the corrupt lying media (Washington Post), Michael Gerson, complained that Trump, as is his habit, “lied about things large (election fraud) and small (inaugural crowd size), refused to allow facts to modify his claims, and attempted to create his own reality through the repetition of deception.” (Post, Feb.7, 2017, A5)

Reminiscent of Bernie Madoff, Trump is the crème  de la crème of the big-time tricksters. Millions of voters knew this about him, and chose to vote for him nonetheless. They lovingly bought the scam he was peddling, even while many quietly admitted that they knew it was fakery.

At first glance, one would think that no one wants to be tricked, duped, fooled, or played. But, strange as it may seem, cognitive science, and our own experience in the entertainment world, tells us otherwise. The clearest example is magic.  When David Copperfield makes an elephant disappear before our eyes, we know it’s not real.  Still, we love it. We are tricked, but we enjoy it enough to pay big money for tickets to his shows. The conclusion is unavoidable: We love being duped.

Along similar lines, its clear that fake things, like Disneyland's European villages, are often more popular than real things. Professional wrestling, for example, is far more popular than real wrestling. No one makes a living as a real wrestler, but thousands of men and women worldwide make bags of money faking the fights.

Do people believe pro wrestling is real?  Of course not, except for those below 5 years old. But the fake showmanship only enhances the popular enjoyment.

Sound familiar?

Our so-called President instinctively understands this human quirk.. When he promised unemployed coal miners that he would bring their jobs back, they voted for him in droves, planted Trump signs in their yards, and howled about locking Hillary up. Did they really believe him? Of course not. But they loved that he was saying what they wanted to hear, and they loved that. The fact that it was delusional was not a problem.

 Did Trump really believe that he could make the elephant of coal miner unemployment disappear? Of course not. But he loved pulling off the con. It was a good show and the audience went for it, “hook, line, and sinker”, as they say in east Kentucky. On one occasion, he boasted that he could shoot a man on 5th Avenue and still get his vote.

But there’s a catch. When a magician steals your watch or gets off with your wallet,  he gives it back to you after the fun part of the deception is done.  When a beautiful girl is sawed in half before your very eyes, she is soon restored, her body intact and unharmed. The audience is suitably appreciative

Sometimes there is a flip side to the fun of being duped.

When a trickster dupes you and KEEPS your wallet and watch or steals your money, it’s a feces-in-the-fan situation. Take Bernie Madoff, for example. People invested with him because he was “the magic man of Wall Street,” the only person who could make steady money in good times and bad. Like Trump, Bernie said, “I am the ONLY one who can make this happen.”

Since Bernie never posted losses, investors were happy happy happy.  Many were apparently sophisticated enough to realize that what the wizard was doing was totally impossible in the real world. They went along for the fun anyway. And the money.  Yet, when the Ponzi scheme hit the wall, everyone was suddenly pissed.

This raises the obvious question. What happens when Trump’s tricks are exposed as frauds?  Will his adoring fans turn on him?

Sadly, Donald Trump is  unlikely to end up in the same cell as Bernie Madoff.  Too slippery for that. Trump will place the blame  on his evil enemies, the scoundrels who prevented  him from making all the impossible promises he made come true: the media, the “so called judges, the Democrats, windmills, Meryl Streep, menopausal women, Alex Baldwin, the Prime Minister of Australia, the Chinese, disabled people, and the European Union. This list isThis list of Trump’s enemies grows longer with every Tweet. Every day.

To blog or not to blog. That is the question.

 I got almost 12,000 hits when I was blogging two year ago about the growing epidemic of lying in politics. But I got tired of the grind, and the cognitive science was repetitious. So I dumped my computer and suspended the blog to the relief of many.

Now, however, it seems like there is a lot of fresh new material for deceptologists (rhymes with proctologists)such as myself to work with. What I thought was an epidemic of fakery and falsehoods in 2014, became a pandemic in 2016 and continues to explode like dynamite in an outhouse. Our so called president and his close associates have demonstrated skills in the science of deceptology far beyond what any politicians have ever before attempted in this country. 

Some Americans are buying the scam hook, line, and sinker. Others are freaking out, protesting, breaking windows, and spending 25 hours a day on Facebook dumping on Trump. It's crazy.

It's hard to resist the temptation stick the blogging needle back in my arm. 

Tomorrow, I am going to New Zealand to explore the bolt holes that the billionaires from Silicon valley are building down there to stay safe in the coming nuclear holacaust. If time permits, I may unleash another incendiary blog or two....so hold onto your hats.