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THE REAL WORLD - page two July 27 2000 After I published my last thought for the fortnight...erm, I mean week, I received numerous e-mails of complaint which have sparked this week's thought. The last article was about cars, specifically a campaign in the UK that protests the high tax on fuel. I argued that, since driving is an inherently destructive and short-sighted transport solution for our country, motorists should be happy to repay society via their petrol tax. "What planet are you living on?", wrote one correspondent. "If you lived in the real world", spat another, "and held down a real job, you'd think differently." From having viewed my site, these people had deduced that I do not live in the real world, something I can only be glad of, seeing what a terrible place "the real world" seems to be. When I was at school, a chemistry teacher became quite infamous for his outbursts on "the big wide world", a frightening parallel universe in which deadlines are king and the machinery of corporate capitalism must forever be stoked with mind-numbing repetitive tasks. School, in his eyes, was little more than a channelling process in which any element of enterprise, inspiration or individuality must be swiftly suppressed. His real world must have been something akin to that of Dickens' character Thomas Gradgrind- "a kind of cannon loaded to the muzzle with facts, and prepared to blow them clean out of the regions of childhood at one discharge." But what is "the real world"? Once the question is posed, it seems almost ridiculous. Yet the notion of reality is something that philosophers have debated for centuries- and it's something most of us wrestle with daily. If you've ever wondered whether there's an afterlife, you might have thought to yourself something akin to to a Peggy Lee song lyric: "Is That All There Is?" Plato thought not. He taught - and this is a vastly paraphrased and abridged rendering of Platonic dualism - that mind and body are separate, and life on Earth as we recognise it is the dark world, a mere glimpse of the true nature of life. In that case, it might be fair to say that none of us lives in the real world at all. comment on this article e-mail this to a friend start a discussion 
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