Don Quixote as Everyman

“Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing.”

I recently finished the first volume of Don Quixote, the Spanish classic, a series of splendid stories of a poor Spanish nobleman of the lowest rank, an hidalgo (hijo de algo – son of someone). The premise of the stories is that Don Quixote has read so many fictional tales of chivalry, which were popular at the time, that he has become addled and believes that they are true. He imagines himself a knight and sets off into the countryside on his own romantic quest to right wrongs as he sees them. In his confused imagination, his old nag is a royal steed, windmills are monsters, a humble roadside inn is a castle, and prostitutes are ladies of the court. The stories are interesting, humorous, and touching.

In reading Cervantes’s great work, it struck me that Don Quixote himself is an instructive Everyman for modern society. In today’s world of distracting infotainment, rather that becoming befuddled by chivalric romances, many people get so caught up in the stories playing out on film, television, and the internet that they begin to believe that what they see and read is real and that they are (or would like to be) personages in what is happing on the screen. They interpret life as though it is a crime drama, a clash of GOOD against EVIL, or an impersonal situation comedy . Advertisements feed this tendency; automobile commercials are a fine example—the powerful car racing through a deserted landscape, free from the confines of dull, everyday existence. Televised sports events offer similar delusions; in college or NFL football, the heroes go into arena to fight against the terrible foe, while their fans arrayed in logos, make up, and other totemic symbols chant madly “We’re number one!” I am always surprised at how streets empty during the Super Bowl, which has become the premier secular holiday in the country.

The internet provides an even a more powerful fantasy world. Readers can find sites that reflect and reinforce their worldview, creating an illusion of reality as hypnotic (and foolish) as the chivalric novels did for the old Spanish hidalgo. In political sites in particular, both left and right, viewers so immerse themselves in the posts and conversations that they lose perspective and come to believe that the sites offer not just truth but the absolute, only truth. One can see that tendency played out in discussions on many types of sites, not just ones that are overtly political. Those oriented to disaster preparedness, for example, are laced with survivalist themes and “doomer” scenarios about WSHF, when the shit hits the fan, and often drift into more unsettling subjects such as fundamentalist attitudes on religion, race, and guns. Similarly, some sites related to firearms include political discussions in which the participants seem to live in their own fantasy world in which the government and liberals/socialists/communists are trying to take away their guns, fund silly social programs with tax money, and allow the country to be invaded by foreign hordes.

It is no wonder that “fake news” has become such a common meme. Being so immersed in fantasies on the screens to which we have become addicted, we have lost the ability to discern what is real and what is not, what is true and what is fiction. The result is that we suffer an epidemic of solipsism in which we have created our own version of reality, just like Don Quixote.