The Dangers of Systematic Ignorance

Human engagement in escapism, or purposeful detachment from the real world has been used for centuries on both large and small scales. Daily activities such as reading books, watching television, partaking in a daydream, and listening to music allow a momentary break from current circumstances. Means of distractions flood our lives. When we walk into Walmart we are offered beats headphones to completely drown out the sounds in our environment and we are offered portable televisions that we can use to distract children during car rides. When we examine all the ways that we remove ourselves from the current moment, the culture of entertainment is appears to be one of the main byproducts of our eagerness to escape. But it turns entertainment is just one crop yielded by escapism. On a larger scale, entire societies attempt to remove themselves from the harshness of reality.

A snap shot of the Baltimore City and Baltimore County region provides a good illustration of the larger effect escapism has on entire regions. I live in small town named Hereford that is located 30 minutes outside of Baltimore City. The drive to Baltimore City makes it feel so distant from my doorstep. During the trip, I pass through miles of cornfields and farms before even reaching the main Highway that takes me into the city. When I venture there, I usually arrive right on the cobble stones of fells point or in the parking lot of Camden yards. As result after a day in the city, I would usually come home to my nicely mowed green grass and never thought twice about the urban scenes of murder, poverty, and drugs. I didn’t even know we were known as the number one Heroin Capital because my community was so strategically distanced from this horrible reality in the city. The interesting part is, my community was also strategically distanced from this horrible reality next door. Heroin did not stop at the city-county line. Millions worth of heroin was also rooted through the surrounding counties, including my hometown. When I was a freshman journalist in high school, I happened to find some obituaries for 6 students that died in the late 1990s from heroin overdoses. When I did some more research I found that several students who graduated recently had also died from heroin, but no one talked about it. When I look back on this strange disconnect between the people of my town and the horrible heroin epidemic, I realize that there is a reason why people erect white picket fences around their perfectly green mowed grass and cookie cutter home. They want to escape reality.

The novel Ready Player One takes this idea of escapism and emphasizes it to a degree that the readers cannot ignore. The setting of 2045 projects a future in which escapism is no longer an option to people, it is a necessity. The world presented is full of poverty, overcrowding, and violence. In fact, the society is so broken that school is no longer physical, instead it is conducted through the virtual reality of OASIS. This world of rampant detachment allows for an interesting setting to the novel, but it also strikes fear in the reader that their future could look like this too. This novel reminded me very much of Orwell’s 1984. Both of these novels project dystopia’s in order to point out the current problems that could gradually lead to end state of horror if humans are not careful. Ready Player One takes escapism to the extreme with an artificial world that is impossible to tell from reality, but it effectively points out the potential dangers of our systematic ignorance.