Today, the spectator/consumer (more traditionally referred to as “the average citizen”) not only suffers from the dissociative forces at work in society, but also actively contributes to them. It is ultimately our own most infantile and regressive urges that make up the vast, seething collective id to which professional image mongers pander.

In the realm of business, we don’t so much buy tangible, practical products anymore as we buy the auras and images, ultimately rooted in our own pre-verbal urges and fears and desires, that marketers conjure up around those products.

Likewise, what we demand from our news and other media isn’t so much an accurate or insightful depiction of the world we live in, as the conjuring up of an enchanted realm that appears to exist far above the dreary hubbub of the literal reality we ourselves experience. We adopt this concocted Media Realm as our latter-day Olympus and Valhalla, and enthusiastically embrace a powerful secular mythology built around the celebrities who “inhabit” it.

Having accepted this Media Realm as the locus of higher significance, it then seems only natural to us validate our own direct, personal experience against something that appears on a screen, rather than vice-versa.

The cumulative effect can be to leave us feeling as far removed in our own personal experiences from what is meaningful, in the grand scheme of things, as the medieval peasant rooting in the dirt for a potato once did from his visions of angels in the clouds.

Or perhaps even farther removed. The medieval peasant, after all, believed he had a far better chance of entering the Kingdom of Heaven than most of us do of achieving the contemporary state of grace known as celebrity.

How can we extricate ourselves from this unhealthy dissociative state?

We can begin by acknowledging how easy it is to slide from rationally recognizing the limitations of our own personal experience, and consequently deferring to the observations of people and organizations who have seen more, to irrationally and naively viewing the media as the source of virtually all meaningful observation about our world.

In the process, we need to take a closer look at the changing nature of the process by which socially shared perceptions and cognitions originate and spread. We can then begin to grasp what makes up the prevailing “cognitive order.”