The Day Society Decided the Sky Was No Longer Blue
A Story about Absurdity
It was announced across all channels – via official press releases, television networks, national radio addresses, and of course over social media – that Society had decided the sky was no longer blue. Various tastemakers and influencers – some of them no doubt strategically informed ahead of time, others genuinely excited to jump on the bandwagon – immediately began reinforcing the narrative and extolling the virtues of the new consensus. Across social platforms, mobs of agreement formed, and various dissenters were castigated to get in line.
It was surprising how quickly the majority of citizens seemed to accept this redefinition. Some of them probably simply didn’t care. Others must have thought to themselves that, after all, if the rest of society was on board with the decision, there was no reason to oppose it, even if it was a little silly. A few thought that it didn’t matter, because things like the sky – or a tree falling in the forest – only mattered insofar as humans or other living creatures said they did.
And there were many who accepted the new idea on the grounds that society had every right to redefine reality – which was either a collective hallucination, a malleable material that could be bent into any shape provided there was enough sincerity and effort in the bending, or a meaningless absurdity which only received its meaning through human words and thoughts and which therefore could be anything society wanted it to be.
But there were a few who didn’t accept this absurd story, who said the obvious – which was that the sky was still blue a good portion of the time, whether society wanted to admit that or not – and of those few, Elizabeth Dagnall was one of the foremost.
“What are you talking about?” Elizabeth wrote on TwitTok, in response to a TwitTok influencer who had jumped to trumpet society’s decision about the sky, “I’m looking outside right now and I can see that the sky is still blue.”
She doubled down on her wrongness when she was pressed upon it, insisting that, yes she did believe her lying eyes, and no society couldn’t simply decide that the sky was no longer blue – that such a statement, and such a decision was meaningless.
Colleagues and friends began to reach out to her to warn her not to stick her neck out, or to point out considerately the error in her ways. She responded to each of them that they must have lost their minds.
For several days, Elizabeth was hounded by online mobs and even protestors outside her house. Her employer began to pressure her to quiet down, but she simply continued in her folly. After a week, she released a statement that read:
“Society can’t decide anything, let alone the color of the sky, because society can’t even really be said to exist. And, if it does exist, it has no will, and therefore can decide nothing. And if it had a will, it wouldn’t be a conscious will, and therefore nothing can be decided by it. Society is a fiction, a nice story we tell ourselves, but there are only individuals and groups of individuals and larger groups of individuals. When we state categorically that society has decided something, we mean that certain individuals and groups within larger collections of individuals and groups have made that decision – and the decisionmakers want everybody else to get in agreement.
And even if society could make decisions, it certainly couldn’t make decisions about the nature of reality. The sky is either blue, or it isn’t, and it’s blueness does not depend upon our recognizing it as such. We can change the word we use to describe it, and we can change the meaning of the word blue, but nothing about the color of the sky will change. To insist that the color of the sky can change, in spite of all contradictory evidence, is ridiculous.
In the last week, many people have treated my refusal to accept the idea that the sky is no longer blue as somehow important – as though it mattered whether or not I thought the sky was blue. But it doesn’t matter what I think, or what any of us think – the sky will be the color that it is. My critics seem to labor under the illusion that if they could just get me – and all the other “obstructionists” who refuse to say that the sky isn’t blue – on board, then they could actually alter the color of the sky. But it wouldn’t matter if we really did all agree on this – nothing would change about the sky.
And therefore, I will not say that the sky isn’t blue, because I refuse to lie. The truth is that it still is blue on cloudless days – and while I am irrelevant to the truth, I will persist in acknowledging it. As I type this statement, the sky outside my window is blue.”
She lost her job after that, but Elizabeth had a sizable portfolio and could live comfortably for a long time – at least until the mass hallucination ended and everyone returned to their senses and she could get a new job.