The Deception of Real-Life 'Inception'

For all of its "Matrix"-like convolutions
and "Alice in Wonderland" allusions, the new film "Inception" adds
something significant to the ancient ruminations about reality's
authenticity-something profoundly relevant to this epoch of confusion.
In the movie's tale of corporate espionage, we are asked to ponder this
moment's most disturbing epistemological questions: Namely, how are
ideas deposited in people's minds, and how incurable are those ideas
when they are wrong?

Many old sci-fi stories, like politics and
advertising of the past, subscribed to the "Clockwork Orange" theory
that says blatantly propagandistic repetition is the best way to pound
concepts into the human brain. But as "Inception's" main character,
Cobb, posits, the "most resilient parasite" of all is an idea that
individuals are subtly led to think they discovered on their own.

This argument's real-world application was
previously outlined by Cal State Fullerton's Nancy Snow, who wrote in
2004 that today's most pervasive and effective propaganda is the kind
that is "least noticeable" and consequently "convinces people they are
not being manipulated." The flip side is also true: When an idea is
obviously propaganda, it loses credibility. Indeed, in the same way the
subconscious of "Inception's" characters eviscerate known invaders, we
are reflexively hostile to ideas when we know they come from
agenda-wielding intruders.

These laws of cognition, of course, are
brilliantly exploited by a 24/7 information culture that has succeeded
in making "your mind the scene of the crime," as "Inception's" trailer
warns. Because we are now so completely immersed in various multimedia
dreamscapes, many of the prefabricated-and often inaccurate-ideas in
those phantasmagorias can seem wholly self-realized and, hence, totally
logical.

The conservative media dreamland, for
instance, ensconces its audience in an impregnable bubble-you eat
breakfast with the Wall Street Journal's editorial page, you drive to
the office with right-wing radio, you flit between Breitbart and Drudge
at work, you come home to Fox News. The ideas bouncing around in this
world-say, ideas about the Obama administration allegedly favoring
blacks-don't seem like propaganda to those inside the bubble. With
heavily edited videos of screaming pastors and prejudice-sounding
Department of Agriculture officials, these ideas are cloaked in the
veneer of unchallenged fact, leaving the audience to assume its bigoted
conclusions are completely self-directed and incontrovertible.

Same thing for those living in the closed-loop of the "traditional"
media. Replace conservative news outlets with The New York Times,
National Public Radio, WashingtonPost.com and network newscasts, and
it's just another dreamscape promulgating certain synthetic ideas (for
instance, militarism and market fundamentalism), excluding other ideas
(say, antiwar opinions and critiques of the free market) and bringing
audiences to seemingly self-conceived and rational judgments-judgments
that are tragically misguided.

Taken together, our society has achieved
the goal of "Inception's" idea-implanting protagonists-only without all
the technological subterfuge. And just as they arose with Cobb's wife,
problems are emerging in our democracy as the dreams sow demonstrable
fallacies.

As writer Joe Keohane noted in a recent
Boston Globe report about new scientific findings, contravening facts no
longer "have the power to change our minds" when we are wrong.

"When misinformed people, particularly
political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories,
they rarely changed their minds," he wrote. "In fact, they often became
even more strongly set in their beliefs."

What is the circuit breaker in this
delusive cycle? It's hard to know if one exists, just as it is difficult
to know whether Cobb's totem ever stops spinning. For so many,
meticulously constructed fantasies seem like indisputable reality. And
because those fantasies' artificial inception is now so deftly obscured,
we can no longer wake up, even if facts tell us we're in a dream-and
even when the dream becomes a nightmare.