Let’s take another look at Willy Wonka’s invitation to children to join him in a world of “pure imagination,” and then ask ourselves a few basic questions.
Some Questions:
As wonderful and enjoyable as the world of imagination can be, would you feel safe living in a world of pure imagination, with no grounding in reality?
And even if you do, would you feel safe completely entering a world of someone else’s creation and fantasies, of which you will receive no logical explanations?
Would you be truly free if you simply did “anything you want to,” or slave to your impulses and preconceptions?
What does it take to live in a utopian paradise? Is it really as easy as just looking around and viewing it? And is it true that if you want to change the world, there’s “nothing to it?”
The Big Question:
Does the imagination free us from our constrained view of reality, or does a dose of reality free us from our whimsical fantasies?
Welcome to a new XL series exploring the imagination and its role in the human mind and society at large. While at first we will be taking a critical view of the imagination, this is only to liberate us from the rigid fantasies of our own creation, and those that we’ve been subjected to by other parties to sell their power, products or ideologies.
Ultimately, we will come to see how the Torah sees a vital role for creativity and the imagination in manifesting otherwise abstract truths and motivating action in ways that cold and calculated thought alone cannot.
But first…we must pop the bubble of its deception.
American children are generally encouraged by the adults in their lives — their parents and teachers — to indulge their imaginations and fantasies without regard for any grounding in reality. It seems harmless for a kid to do so, but is it?
On the one hand, we will tell a kid that he can be “anything he wants to be” when he grows up, but on the other hand, when he hits 17, and doesn’t have the grades and experiences to open doors to the future we let him imagine as a child, we’ll chastise him for “not being realistic.”
Does this mean we should clip kids’ wings with sober realism? Is there any rational room for dreaming? Or should all of our thinking be constrained by evidence and logic? These are questions we won’t answer this time, but keep them in mind as we explore this topic.
Here’s another example of fantasies seamlessly woven into the realities of our children:
Most American adults will not hesitate to allow their kids to believe in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and other imaginary entities, which they themselves know to be baseless and false. At some point, as their children gets old enough to be skeptical, they will sneak down to surveil the fireplace on x-mas night or sleep with one eye open waiting to see who “Santa” and the “Tooth Fairy” truly are. What happens when they watch with eyes-wide-open that it is their parents who are drinking the milk, placing the presents under the tree, and putting the money under their pillows? Naturally, these children will ask themselves: what else have we been lied to about??
One student of mine stopped keeping kosher with his brother as a teenager. At some point, his brother unilaterally decided to come clean to their parents. When he did, the father revealed that they (the parents) hadn’t been keeping kosher for decades except to keep up the appearances of religiosity to the community. This brought all of Judaism crashing down for my student, and he vowed then to never live a lie for other people.
Fiction itself isn’t damaging to our sense of reality, except when we are unaware that it is fiction.
It’s for this reason that the Talmud records an additional rabbinic prohibition against lying to or in front of children. Aside from the general issue of lying, when children are figuring out how to discern fact from fiction, by allowing them to take as true something that is imaginary, not only are we are distorting their reality, we are distorting their ability to discern reality.
Imaginations that are over-indulged can lead to harmless day-dreaming in children, habitual fastasizing in teenagers, and adults who have become completely out of touch with reality.
The power of human imagination and the underlying capacity for creativity are no doubt immensely powerful, but like all things powerful, they can be used productively or destructively.
The human mind cannot experientially tell the difference between reality and imagination.
Meaning, if you go into a deep visualization of an upcoming presentation at work, you might actually start sweating and experience other physiological effects you would if you were actually speaking in public. This can be used in your favor to prepare because, otherwise, you’ll stay in denial that it’s fast-approaching, distracting yourself from the big day, and show up nervous and unprepared. In this case, your imagination is actually helping you be in touch with the imminent reality of the presentation you will be delivering.
However, when left to its own devices, your imagination will do whatever it can to distract us from reality, leaving us vulnerable to the fantasies projected onto us by others.
When watching a TV show, we rapidly suspend disbelief, letting go of our awareness that it is a show, in order to enjoy it. When watching an action movie, we let it slide that 99% the bad guys’ shots miss the good guys as they run away. When watching a science fiction series, we don’t overanalyze the scientific plausibility of every teleportation and time-travel device used.
Advertising agencies take advantage of our suspension of disbelief during the commercial break to sell us their product or service. Since, anyways, we’ve stopped questioning whether what we’re watching is real of fantasy, when they then show us happy, healthy, young people drinking their beer or soda on the beach, our brains naturally associate the two, and a part of us believes that drinking this beverage will help us have that same blissful beach experience.
But the delusions of fantasy can actually be much more insidious than this.
What about the hoards of college students who have occupied campuses across the country, blocked Jewish students from free movement, destroyed millions of dollars of property, and celebrated the well-documented, barbaric acts of known terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah as part of the global revolution they’ve been dreaming of to bring about world peace?
It’s been called by many Live Action Role Playing (LARP). They are so “in character” that they believe that it is they who are an oppressed, occupied minority while they themselves are oppressing other students and occupying university property. The delusion has gone so deep that, infamously, one “spokeswoman” of the occupation went so far as to demand “humanitarian aid” for their student encampment. Unsurprisingly, her PhD dissertation is “on the fantasies of limitless energy in the transatlantic Romantic imagination from 1760-1860…”
The world of pure imagination is dangerous.
We should not feel safe entering “the world of [someone else’s] creation.”
Thinking that it takes “nothing” to change ourselves, or the world, for that matter, is a naive delusion.
And living there, we are certainly not free.
If we truly wish to be, we must start by questioning the fantasies we inhabit, and genuinely search for the reality they are concealing.