Has
fiction become reality - and is there any 'real' life left out there?
Folha, Brazil
Our Planet Contracts 'The Truman Syndrome'
"It turns out that the
nightmare has become reality. … A growing share of the human race has grown
tired of this circus; tired of a world of hollow celebrities who, in truth,
feel like part of a permanent 'reality show.'"
The epidemic of the 21st
Century has a name: Truman Syndrome. The name belongs to the 1998 film The
Truman Show with Jim Carrey in the principal role. You don’t remember it? I
do: Carrey’s character was a kind insurance salesman who gradually discovers
the existential fraud that surrounds him. From the cradle, his life is just a
gigantic reality show filmed by hidden cameras 24 hours a day. And all the
people around him - his wife, family, neighbors, friends and enemies - are mere
actors hired to represent their roles.
The film ends in a heroic moment,
with Carrey about to free himself from the nightmare, in other words,
abandoning the studio where he lived enclosed (and filmed) for decades.
It turns out that the
nightmare has become reality. I now read in the press that the number of people
who genuinely believe that their lives don't belong to them is growing at a
frightening rate. Their lives appear to belong to a television producer who has
built a gigantic all-encompassing illusion. As in the Jim Carrey film, these
people feel watched by imaginary surveillance cameras and look at their lives
as if there were a pre-written script.
They don’t trust family. They
don’t trust friends. They don’t trust anyone. And there are even cases of
attempted suicide by confused creatures who can't handle “continuing” the
“show.” One of the most harrowing stories belongs to an anonymous North
American who, tired of “acting,” entered into a federal government building and
begged, on his knees, for them to turn off the cameras and end the show. He
simply wanted to leave.
What the doctors? Doctors
have an important role, starting with psychiatrists. But as they themselves
admit, cases like this aren’t so easy to resolve - especially since they
themselves are seen by the patients as part of the storyline. The doctors
aren’t doctors. They are actors dressed in white gowns who try to convince the
patient that he's ill.
I don’t mean to raise an
unnecessary controversy. But confronted with this epidemic, I myself doubt the
illnesses of the patients. And I ask, in all seriousness, if they aren't the
only lucid people in the midst of this reigning madness.
Perhaps a little history
would help: for centuries, the position that people have occupied in society
was determined by the crib we were born in. If you were born in the wrong crib
under circumstances of material and cultural poverty, you were half on your way
to an equally poor and dreary life. Of course, there are many exceptions in the
world. But the exceptions only serve to prove the thesis: our position in society
was a matter of luck, not merit.
With the end of World War I
and the end of the Old World that the conflict buried with it, everything
changed. The crib continued being important. But it was less decisive. Merit
began to determine our place in society. In theory, and above all in practice,
it would be possible for the son or daughter of a poor man to enter the halls
of the wealthy. For this to happen, it was enough for the poor to earn the
money needed to buy them. Our societies are the proven evidence that
meritocracy has had its revenge and that “self-made men” have largely defeated
the prejudices of class.
Read Toby Young's article 'Lulled By the
Celebritariat'
And today? Today, as Toby
Young wrote in a recent essay for the magazine Prospect , the
meritocratic era has been buried. After passing through crib and merit, we have
now arrived at the age of celebrity. We can certainly be born in the right crib;
we can even climb the social ladder on our own proving our intrinsic value; but
if we aren't “famous,” in other words, if we don’t feed the collective
voyeurism we live in, we are absolutely nothing. We live in societies that are
mediatized and massified. And in a mediatized and massified society, it is
anonymity and not poverty or incompetence that weighs most heavily on the
species.
It's no wonder, therefore,
that a growing share of the human race has grown tired of this circus; tired of
a world of hollow celebrities who in truth feel like part of a permanent
"reality show." They beg to leave the spectacle because of the
impossibility of avoiding defeat.
Crazy? I'm no doctor. I'm
just a columnist disguised as a doctor. But I suspect there's more sanity in
the madness of these people than in all of the "reality shows" that
surround our lives.
João Pereira Coutinho, 32, is a
columnist at Folha. He has compiled his articles about Brazil into the
book Avenida Paulista (Ed. Quasi), published in Portugal, where he
lives. He writes every two weeks, on Mondays, for Folha Online.
