That somebody else might be:
- an educator with an agenda,
- a television personality masquerading as a newscaster,
- a YouTube personality chasing views and advertising dollars,
- a radio shock jock playing to the emotions and prejudices of an audience,
- a political party seeking votes,
- a news media corporation presenting only stories -- or "versions" of stories -- it thinks its viewers will desire, its government will approve of and that its advertisers will tolerate,
- a private corporation making efforts to increase profits or market share, "capture" the government that tries to regulate it or cover up its misdeeds,
- a government and its school system -- both of which have an admittedly understandable interest in keeping people invested in the civilization it oversees,
- a court whose members come from positions of power in a society and consciously or unconsciously make decisions that perpetuate that power structure, or
- a church or religion.
To be fair, sometimes what we are told by third parties is true. Other times it is partly true. Still other times it is slanted, shaded, oversimplified, denatured or whitewashed. But in some cases it's just plain wrong -- a flat out lie.
But it is not just third parties that are to blame for us not understanding, or living in, the "real" world. In other words, there is often no "conspiracy" to be discovered. Sometimes the "reality" of our world has simply been lost through the passage of time. Forgotten. Obscured by later events. Other times people just misremember what happened or how we got to where we are. Both of those things are perfectly understandable. Memories are fallible. People are busy. Their lives are full. People are distracted and they have a lot of things to do each day -- work, play, tend to children, manage a house, pay bills, etc.
Whatever the reasons for persons' unreality, I created this site. I believe enlightenment is good -- even if it is painful, unsettling and/or uncomfortable.
But how does someone discover reality? It is my firm conviction that the only way to be grounded in the "real" world is to accumulate facts. And knowledge. And to think carefully and critically about what we hear, read and see. Armed with facts, knowledge and a critical eye, I firmly believe that people can -- and will -- make better decisions. Better decisions in their own lives. Better decisions for their communities. Better decisions for their country.
Over thirty years as a practicing lawyer, I saw my clients make better decisions in their lives if they were given fair, balanced and solid information with which to work on their problem. That was true regardless of the practice area in which I was working -- commercial litigation, estate and tax planning or business and corporate consulting.
Now that I am semi-retired from the practice of law, it is my hope with this website to give you facts and knowledge. And to help you think critically about your life, the country in which you live and the institutions with which you interact. In other words, to clear away the cobwebs, the misinformation and the disinformation, to educate or simply remind you about a particular history, and in the process to "reveal" the "real" world to you through long-form essays, short takes, important quotations and accumulated client wisdom.
To be perfectly clear I didn't choose revealing because I have a super-secret pipeline to hidden information. Sorry to disappoint but I have no exclusive sources, no insider access, and no special knowledge available only to me. You will find nothing here that a curious person could not find with enough time and effort. So, if you came looking for revelations from an oracle, I am afraid you will be disappointed.
The name "Revealing Reality" itself also didn't magically appear out of thin air or come to me in some revelation from the great beyond. Instead, it grew naturally from and out of five stories -- and one book -- that might be familiar to you. In their own way, these stories each partially describe or attempt to elucidate the difference between appearance and reality. None of these stories said everything I wanted this journal to be. But each says something useful. Taken together, they explain why Revealing Reality felt like the right name. Here's a brief discussion about these five stories (and one famous book) that you might find helpful and an explanation as to how each relates to this site:
Plato’s Cave: when the shadows are the whole world
In Book VII of Plato’s Republic, Socrates asks us to imagine prisoners who have been confined in a cave since childhood. They face a wall. Behind them, a fire shines on objects carried past a partition and throws shadows onto the wall in front of them. Because the prisoners have never turned around, the shadows are not merely entertainment or misinformation. They are the only world the prisoners know.
One prisoner is freed. At first, turning toward the light is painful. Eventually, he sees the fire, the objects, and then the world outside the cave. When he returns and tries to explain what he has seen, the people still watching the shadows may distrust him—or even become angry with him for challenging the only reality they have ever known.
That picture has a lot to do with this journal. Most of us encounter public affairs through representations: a headline, a campaign advertisement, a court ruling reduced to one sentence, a statistic separated from its assumptions, or a story repeated so often that it becomes common knowledge. Those things are not necessarily lies. A shadow can be cast by something real. The trouble comes when we mistake the shadow for the whole object.
Plato’s story also comes with a warning for the person doing the writing. It is easy to imagine that I am the one who escaped the cave while everyone else remains chained inside. That attitude quickly turns education into condescension and disagreement into proof that the other fellow must be ignorant.
That is not what I have in mind. I am in the cave too. So are you. We all depend on incomplete information, and we are all capable of being wrong. The point is not for me to announce that I possess the final truth. The point is for us to turn around, look at what is producing the shadows, and see whether the picture changes.
The Wizard of Oz: pulling back the curtain
Near the end of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Dorothy and her companions finally confront the supposedly mighty Wizard. The terrifying disembodied voice turns out to be an ordinary man operating machinery behind a curtain. Much of his power rests on spectacle, projection, and the willingness of others to accept the show at face value.
That image fits the study of institutions pretty well. Legal language, government procedure, financial complexity, professional credentials, political ceremony, and polished media presentations can make power look remote, mysterious, or inevitable. Pulling back the curtain lets us see the people, incentives, rules, money, and machinery that produce the result.
But we should not take Oz too literally. Public life seldom has one secret fellow hiding behind a curtain pulling levers. Corporate power, media influence, party politics, bureaucratic habits, and economic dependency usually operate through systems, not one grand conspiracy. The important machinery may be sitting in plain sight -- in statutes, budgets, contracts, ownership records, court decisions, tax rules, and ordinary institutional incentives. The curtain is a useful reminder to look closely, not a promise that every complicated outcome has one secret author.
Down the rabbit hole: more beneath the surface
In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alice follows the White Rabbit and tumbles into a world where the depth, scale, language, and rules keep surprising her. Today, going “down the rabbit hole” usually means following a question much farther than expected and discovering layer after layer beneath what first looked simple.
That describes a good deal of the work I plan to do here. A Supreme Court case leads backward to a statute, a constitutional provision or dispute, an economic theory, a forgotten dissent, or a political movement. A familiar account of the Boston Tea Party leads to the Tea Act, the East India Company’s financial troubles, colonial merchants, patronage networks, the Company’s rule in India, and the relationship between economic privilege and political power.
Here again, there is a caution. “Rabbit hole” can also describe research that loses its standards of proof and turns every complexity into a suspicion. Going deeper does not automatically make an explanation true. Good research still has to stay tied to evidence, context, counterarguments, and the possibility that the ordinary explanation is mostly right. The goal is not to make everything mysterious. It is to make an important subject more complete.
Through the looking glass: familiar words, different rules
In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, Alice enters the world on the other side of a mirror. It looks familiar, but things work differently. Directions reverse, language slips around, and movement follows rules that do not behave the way she expects.
That is a useful picture for legal and political life. An institution may use familiar words—freedom, representation, competition, choice, or equality -- while the rules underneath those words produce results that seem almost backward. A market may offer a hundred consumer choices while the institutions in which the market is found leaves citizens with very little say over the institutions shaping their communities. A political system may be formally equal while money and access are anything but equal. A law may promise one thing in broad language while its exceptions, procedures, and later court decisions produce something quite different.
The looking glass reminds us to examine the frame and the rules beneath the words. Its limitation is that it suggests a separate world. This journal is about this world -- the ordinary one we already live in -- and the structures within it that are easy to overlook.
The red pill and the blue pill
The Matrix turned the choice between a comfortable illusion and an unsettling truth into one unforgettable decision: take the blue pill and remain in the familiar constructed world, or take the red pill and accept the risk of seeing what lies beyond it.
It is a powerful image because it reminds us that knowledge can be uncomfortable and can carry consequences. But it is also too neat and too binary for what I want to do here. Public questions rarely divide into one total illusion and one perfect truth. The metaphor has also become politically loaded, and it can flatter people into believing that joining a particular camp is proof that they are enlightened.
Reality is usually more complicated than that. It is layered, nuanced, and open to revision as new facts come to light. No pill can take the place of evidence, judgment, and a willingness to admit when we are wrong.
Walter Lippmann: the world outside and the pictures in our heads
Finally, Walter Lippmann’s 1922 book Public Opinion gives us a less dramatic but useful explanation. According to Lippmann, modern society is simply too large, complicated, and fast-moving for any one citizen to know it all firsthand. We act in the real world, but we do so through what Lippmann called a “pseudo-environment” -- a picture assembled from news reports, categories, stereotypes, symbols, personal experience, and all the institutions that filter information for us.
That does not mean citizens are stupid, or that every public belief was manufactured by some schemer. Relying on secondhand information is unavoidable. None of us can personally inspect every agency, courtroom, corporation, battlefield, scientific study, legislature, or historical archive. We have lives to lead. We divide our attention and rely on other people.
But that unavoidable reliance creates power -- and great potential for its misuse. News organizations, governments, schools, churches, political parties, corporations, technology companies, experts, advertisers, and social groups all help decide which facts we see, which words are used to organize them, and which choices seem realistic. Sometimes the result is accurate and helpful. Sometimes it is shallow, slanted, incomplete, politicized, sanitized, or wrong. Sometimes it is an outright lie.
The aim of Revealing Reality is to improve the picture -- to bring a little more of the outside world into view while admitting that no essay or series of essays can reproduce all of it. Something we learned in school, heard in church, saw on television, absorbed from a political party, or watched online may deserve another look. The point is not to disbelieve everything. It is to take another look with better information.
Conclusion -- Why "Revealing Reality"
Plato gives us the shadows. Oz gives us the curtain. Wonderland gives us the unexpected depth beneath a simple question. The looking glass gives us familiar words operating under strange or reversed rules. The Matrix gives us the choice to leave a comfortable construction. And Lippmann explains why every modern citizen must rely on incomplete pictures of a world too large to experience firsthand.
Revealing Reality borrows something from all of them without adopting any one of them completely.
“Revealing” is meant modestly. It describes the work of uncovering one part of a subject -- not a claim that I can reveal everything or that I possess some secret truth. “Reality” is what I am trying to get closer to: the law as it actually operates, the institution as it is actually structured, the history the evidence actually supports, the power relationship underneath the slogan, the evolution of an idea, agency or institution and the complications left out of the familiar accounts.
As I said, I believe most people are perfectly capable of making good decisions when they have the relevant facts and understand the choices in front of them. Reasonable people can look at the same facts and still disagree. That is fine. What matters is that the evidence is not hidden, the other side is not turned into a caricature, and mistakes are not defended merely because admitting them would be embarrassing.
The goal is to reveal the reality in which we actually live and how we got here. Then, with clear eyes, we can ask whether this is the best we can do, or whether a few tweaks, some larger course corrections, or even an occasional wholesale change might make the country -- and its institutions and our lives -- better.
Reality, revealed. I hope you enjoy both the site and the name.
Sources and further reading
- Plato, Republic, Book VII.
- L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
- Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass.
- Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (1922).