Delusions are endless

What are delusions? In Buddhism, a delusion is a form of misunderstanding that is not necessarily strictly voluntary nor involuntary. Certainly it is true that delusions can be willfully indulged. Sometimes the expression "wishful thinking" approximates this kind of delusion. Other times, the misunderstanind might be inadvertent. Seen another way, though, we can never be certain, because we can arrive at a misunderstanding in so many ways. For example, laziness, haste, failure to take the time to carefully observe, or other mistakes can cause us to shortcircuit the process of discernment that could have resulted in a better understanding of a situation. Other times, we may willfully indulge in averting our gaze from unpleasant truths, and become so practiced at that bad habit that we forget we are even doing it, and start to believe sincerely in the wishful thinking we are actively cultivating.

Such an outcome should not come as a surprise. Habits eventually harden into character, ie, a set of traits that we cannot simply will away, even when we start to actively regret them, in other words, they are not completely voluntary anymore.

I have a close relative who often expresses puzzlement or annoyance at my deliberate avoidance of any packaged and processed foods. I have a lot of reasons for this avoidance. I know that any food that is packaged has to produce a profit for multiple middlemen. That leaves a strong incentive for those intermediate parties between me and the original harvester, farmer, or other producer to cut corners in the quality of the ingredients used, the care taken with them in the packaging and production, and so on, to ensure an adequate profit after all their expenses are taken into account.

The more middlemen, the more acute the problem. I have often shared with this relative snippets from the endless barrage of articles that come out every day about contamination of industrial food products, everything from melamine in dog and baby food, to willful use of moldy ingredients in canned tomatoes, to heavy metal contamination of corn syrup and illicit importation of Chinese products like "counterfeit" honey (honey that has been dilluted illegally with cheaper adulterants like contaminated corn syrup, and ultrafiltrated to remove any traces of pollen, preventing palynologists from tracing its sources -- products cannot be legally labelled as honey in the first place if all pollen has been removed from it, because any real honey always contains pollen, but pollen also allows forensic investigators to trace its source to within a few miles, since pollen from every locality has very distinct characteristics, so organized crime interests who know this will cover their tracks, even though the ultrafiltration raises the production cost of the illicit product).

The industrial economy presents us with an apparent cornucopia of products, most of which are useless if not actively harmful to our long term personal and planetary health. We cannot kick the habit though, because among other things, an entire "better-living-through-chemistry" generation has grown up accepting these things as givens, without question, and no amount of factual information will "stick" with most of them that there is a deadly urgent problem afoot. Staring these truths in the face would put them too far outside of their comfort zone. The delusion here is definitely neither strictly voluntary nor involuntary.

When I retell my relative the same information six months or a year or two years later, they sincerely express astonishment and swear it is the first they ever heard all this. And it's not on account of age-associated memory loss, because they don't exhibit any other kind of forgetfulness.

Delusion is the foundation of the entire industrial economy. It is evident to even a child who hears any tv news segment today that our civilization is careening towards oblivion. Only a rigorous habit of distraction and obliviousness can obscure that truth. Alas, precisely such a habit is omnipresent and at work every day to keep us on track for the approaching apocalypse.