Paracosm

Paracosmos: Misadventures in Unreality is a psycholinguistic and social analysis of the phenomenon of the “paracosm”, a detailed imaginary world, which manifests itself in public discourse and experience as an inversion of the real for the irreal, and the irreal for the real. In particular, this book uses two particular events in 2015 as examples of various characteristics of this phenomenon: the mysterious case of Ellen Brody parking her car on train tracks in front of an on-coming commuter rail train in New York; and Andreas Lubitz deliberately crashing his Germanwings passenger plane into a mountainside in Switzerland. This book is an attempt to answer what these events might represent in the emerging ethical aesthetic of public consciousness driven by the manufacture of a “paracosm” in mass media and consumer culture. The matter is examined from the perspectives of psychology, psychiatry, neurology, linguistics, politics, sociology, phenomenology, and ethics in an attempt to understand the problem holistically. Peer-reviewed papers, as well as classical works, are analysed in an attempt to provide the reader with a comprehensive resource to understand what is described by the text as the “paracosm” of an imaginary world at odds with the fundamental mechanics of the analog, physical world.