"The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless."
~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau
"Everything you can imagine is real."
~ Pablo Picasso
I somehow recently stumbled upon the theme song for the PBS kids' show, Reading Rainbow, a program that I remember being shown countless times in elementary school. It's a show which, as a child, is hard not to love… the premise was simple: different celebrities would narrate and visually "bring to life" a selected children's book. Upon hearing the introductory music after years of nearly forgetting about it, I was filled involuntarily with fondness and nostalgia– yet, one line from the song echoed in my mind and made me uneasy:
"I can be anything."
I began to ask myself, what does it mean when an entire generation of people begins to believe this maxim? What happens when common attitudes about the imaginary begin to reflect Pablo Picasso's in the quote above, and the distinction drawn by someone like Rousseau between imagination and reality begins to break down on a societal level? What happens when people believe that an act of imagination is actually essential to the formation of one's identity?
Reading Rainbow might seem to be a trivial example of this idea being promoted to the masses, but both the sources of its funding (top wealthy elite private organizations like Kellogg and Carnegie, and public institutions that execute the elite's political agenda like the US Dept of Education) and its numerous accolades (too numerous to list here), demonstrate without question that the overvaluation of imagination and the subconsciously embedded belief that one can "be anything" and "anything is possible" are being eagerly promoted by the powers that be. The normie teachers responsible for actually getting their hands dirty and putting these notions into the minds of the youth believe, naively, that it is empowering… but anyone not ignorant of who the elites of our world truly are, and what they want to make the masses into, cannot help but conclude that anything being pushed from the top is far more likely to facilitate our enslavement than our empowerment.
Another example of this paradigm of identity-creation being pushed by the highest levels of power in our society is the clip of Kamala Harris lecturing a group of paid child actors about how they should "never let anyone tell you who you are… you tell them who you know you are and who you intend to be." The fact that this was a staged event with literal actors was ridiculed by many for being "inauthentic" misses the point– the important element of this is not whether the eldritch entities which populate the high rungs of state are themselves authentic… what is important is that the consummate liars, thieves, and killers at the helm of a megalomaniacal cult of power officially instruct children that identity basically made up is through an act of imaginative will; that nobody external to themselves could possibly identify you based on the objective facts of your life; that you could be anything.
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