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On this side of the galactic wall, dialogue has been infantilized and denial globalized

NASA recently announced that, hidden behind the Milky Way, there is a “galactic wall” of astonishing proportions and that, despite its immense size, we were only now able to discover because our own galaxy covered it up. I wonder then what is hidden that we still cannot see behind the galactic wall.

And I also wonder how it can be that troublesome featherless bipeds living on an insignificant planet orbiting a small star in a remote corner of the galaxy still believe that the limits of our knowledge are the limits of reality. After all, until less than a century ago we believed that the Milky Way was the entire universe.

An infant can usually only see no more than 18 inches away. He/she can be forgiven for believing that the world ends where his/her sight stops. This is why babies laugh when an object they thought was missing then reappears, like when the mother plays peek-a-boo, hiding and then showing a toy to the baby. 

Young children can also be forgiven for believing during several of the first years of their lives that their parents were born adults, that parents were never children. In fact, it takes several years for children to form the idea of "past" and even many more years to understand that there is a historical and prehistoric past. 

Meanwhile, with a limited understanding of time, children assume that before them there was nothing and only slowly understand that they actually came to a world that preceded them, both in a "geological" and "cultural" sense.

Children can be forgiven for confusing the limits of "their" world with the limits of “the” world, but for adults there are no excuses, whether or not they know what they are doing. Only the deepest arrogant ignorance, which knows it is ignorant, but it doesn’t care (whose examples are now repeated daily and at all levels) believes that "his/her" world is "the" world.

However, that is exactly what we see in these times and, perhaps, what has always happened to us humans: we take the part as if it were the whole, the provisional as if it were the final, and the temporary as if it were permanent. And we also confuse “everydayness” with “normalcy” and the map with the territory.

So, on this side of the vast galactic wall that NASA recently discovered, dialogue has become infantilized and “motivated denial” has become global.

Many dialogues now begin with "We shouldn't talk about those topics," but "those topics" are precisely those focusing on relationships between humans, between groups of humans, and between humans and the universe or divinity. That is, they are topics that we should talk about.

“Americans increasingly exist in highly polarized, informationally insulated ideological communities occupying their own information universes”, said Adrian Bardon, a professor of philosophy at Wake Forest University, writing for Scientific American. 

“Denialism" has expanded so much that logic, if it still exists, must be hiding on the other side of the galactic wall.

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