Virtual reality
According to international news agencies, Thierry Meyssan’s book «The Frightening Fraud» is flying off the shelves in French bookstores. In the book, the French writer argues that the terrorist assault on the Pentagon on September 11 was nothing but an illusion. Meyssan claims that what people around the world saw and read was actually staged by the US government in order to mislead the public, that witnesses’ comments were contradictory, and that there are no convincing photographs of the plane hitting the Pentagon. There is no question that Meyssan’s theory is a paranoid one. However, it may be interesting to consider the reasons that have made this book a bestseller in his country. French sociologist Pierre Lagrange reckons that the Meyssan theory is so popular among the French because, even today, the events of September 11 are very hard to believe. If this is the case, then the problem lies not only with the author but with that considerable proportion of the public that has reacted in a similar fashion, refusing to accept a dismal reality. The Meyssan theory’s many readers are buying the book not out of interest in his absurd account of the events, but rather as an antidote to the shock and the anxiety caused by the terrorist strike. They want to escape into the illusion that what they saw on that day last September was product of virtual reality. They are acting as we all do when we wake up from a nightmare and immediately try to dispel it and return to reality. Meyssan’s readers behave in the opposite fashion. Experiencing an anxious alertness, they are trying to find refuge in a calm and illusionary fantasy. The term virtual reality was coined in our times in order to describe the capability of modern technology to revive the past via audiovisual means and project the future in an equally convincing fashion. It would be very unfortunate should this term be used to refer to the unprecedented tendency by modern man to resort to self-delusion, refusing to come to terms with, perhaps even resisting, a dismal present.
