Caution: Reality

In my eyes Lem’s novel brings our perception of reality into question more than anything. Through Tichy’s eyes the reader sees how the future of our society may be built upon manipulation and fallacy, but only to preserve mankind. Lem portrays how we will go to incredible lengths to preserve ourselves, because it is an inherent and animalistic instinct. While the population in the novel takes pills in order to induce this psychedelic and utopic perception they have, I think the message can be taken one step further. Even without pills we manipulate our own understanding of the world around us and falsify what we see in order to serve our best interests. It’s sometimes difficult to question whether what we believe is actually the truth. We can shake the foundations of our beliefs by introducing just one foreign idea, but in the novel allowing people to live in their own world ensures mankind's prosperity. Ignorance really is bliss and opening your eyes can reveal some very ugly circumstances. I think parallels can be drawn between this and the ending of I, Robot. In I, Robot the reader is left to believe that mankind will continue to prosper, but at the expense of our awareness. Mankind becomes subject to its own creation in order ensure that we thrive in the long run. Viewed from the other side, we see in Frankenstein, that our awareness and understanding is what brings us closer to our downfall. It becomes easy to see that we destroy ourselves when we become “shipwrecked in reality” and instead we’re safest inside our own illusions, regardless of how we construct them.