Sometimes I lie in bed at night and ask myself how we got here. Homo sapiens sapiens. That is what we call ourselves, the scientific name we give to our own species, without shame or modesty.

We are at the top of the food chain. We think ourselves by far the smartest species, and factor this into our own name, not once but twice, as if to try and convince ourselves.

Human evolution has taken a very strange twist in our times. At the start of the last century, the world was talking about fighting “the war to end all wars”. It did not take long to see through this greatest of illusions. Yet one hundred years later the illusions we are surrounded by are a hundred times more numerous.

Think of it. Just about all our life-systems are underpinned by new veils of illusions, fantasies that have created a new age of fake.

We now have the existence of fake food, with almost no nutrition. Some people show off fake wealth, feigning riches they do not own, for they own only debt. Many sport fake smiles, others fake happiness or fake success. “Fake it until you make it” is a new world adage born across the Pond.

We are herded into fake crises by fake flags, generally referred to as false, to elicit a response that serves some geopolitical goal. We start to trade our real pets for fake ones in the digital world, and have kids pretend to feed and take care of them.

We are surrounded by fake news, fake stories and fake narratives. We are exposed to fake reporters who beam out across the internet.

We are entertained by fake wrestlers. We follow sports, batting for a favourite team, oblivious to the various pre-determined outcomes and thus fake victories.

We tune in to fake music, which has never in our history been so far removed from all the theory of harmony.

We get drawn into a fake reality created by Hollywood which is owned by the very same persons who own so much of the news and TV media.

We have created for ourselves a world of fake wealth, health and happiness- Rodolfo Ragonesi

We are awash in fake money, be it in paper or digital form, produced in abundance out of thin air, again to give us a sense of fake wealth, or to allow the few to exploit the many, or to exploit the stock market and gobble up hard- earned assets.

We create fake values to companies on the stock exchange that far exceed their real ones, and invest in fake swaps. We are fooled by fake philanthropists.

We enter in fake relationships online, with someone we have never met, not knowing their true names, origins, feelings, age or gender.

We stand in awe or jealousy at beauty on some billboard that is faked in photoshop, which wipes out all blemishes or creates a digital model, making real people feel somewhat subdued and less confident.

We get drawn in by commercials with fake testimonials. We chime in, chatting very knowledgably, oh so knowledgably, about fake threats and fake enemies. We deal with fake diseases and suffer fake diagnosis or prognosis.

We buy into companies that pay for fake accounting. We build economies on debt, while referring to them as strong, through all sorts of financial engineering. We indulge in new forms of colonialism, providing fake packages that keep other nations and regions in bondage, through financial institutions that bail them with fake money.

Never in human history have we created a world where, rather than seek to peel away the various layers of illusion that limit our reality, we have dived straight into adding evermore layers of illusion. It is almost as if our failure to seek a higher awareness by looking inwards and ascribing value to relations, personal or public, to love, kindness, nature and giving, has led to the collective seeking success and happiness through the pursuit of external features.

But then, the failure to obtain the desired results are in turn leading us to keep pushing the boundaries of illusion/reality. Rather than bursting the bubble of the material world, we seek ever more ingenious ways of retreating into a world of extended illusion, to make that bubble grow bigger.

We have created for ourselves a world of fake wealth, health and happiness. When a person crosses the boundary detaching himself from the real one, thinking it real, the medics diagnose him as delusional. Yet, the human race has gone way beyond those same parametres used to judge the individual’s sense of reality and sanity. We have come to live in a delusional world built upon fake. The world has gone insane!

Those who are more prone to look inwards start to understand the illusory nature of our lives, and seek to gravitate to the forces of nature, love and harmony.

Such persons might tend to be less likely to fall for illusions that powerful magicians spin and weave all around us.

Those among us who tend to get sucked into the whirlpool of a fake reality are more likely to be fooled by the latest layer of fake.

A dream could be a nice escape. But that is all it is, a dream. We must remain ever vigilant to guard against the spells that the powerful among us, who operate in the shadows, cast upon our world and our reality.

If we fail to do so, we risk slipping deeper into the dream, only to eventually wake up to a global nightmare.

Rodolfo Ragonesi is a lawyer and researcher in international affairs.

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