Apt, IMHO, FWIW. Setting a few personal things in order I want to order your book, finally. I've already been suggesting it, so I'd better read it.
What is a term for attempting to extract some of what is and substituting it for what is, and thus, detatching from it's source? Selective contamination, maybe. Yet that doesn't quite work, because any such bad work is an act of destruction with universal consequences.
Second reality works, though. The fuzzy guy in Lewis' first space novel had trouble imagining such a ontological contortion and I think he came up with kind of an inadequate word, though another succinct and effective one: "bent."
Of course we have the phrase "vain imagining," already, too. The One who is Reality has yet more succinct terms -- more personal and relative terms, of course: "lie," for this process and "death," for the state of clinging to the lie. Ya gotta love a guy like that.
It's not really "darkness," but it's something of what hunches over in that inevitable ambient result.
May I suggest what I hope is a method by which to find a plausible answer to the above question, unspun?
I propose we begin with a "text," hopefully to get everybody on the same page at least initially:
In our capacity as political scientists, historians, or philosophers we all have had occasion at one time or another to engage in debate with ideologists -- whether communists or intellectuals of a persuasion closer to home. And we have all discovered on such occasions that no agreement, or even an honest disagreement, could be reached, because the exchange of the argument was disturbed by a profound difference of attitude with regard to all fundamental questions of human existence -- with regard to the nature of man, to his place in the world, to his place in society and history, to his relation to God. Rational argument could not prevail because the partner to the discussion did not accept as binding for himself the matrix of reality in which all specific questions concerning our existence as human beings are ultimately rooted; he has overlaid the reality of existence with another mode of existence that Robert Musil has called the Second Reality. The argument could not achieve results, it had to falter and peter out, as it became increasingly clear that not argument was pitched against argument, but that behind the appearance of a rational debate there lurked the difference between two modes of existence, of existence in truth and existence in untruth. The universe of rational discourse collapses, we may say, when the common ground of existence in reality has disappeared....[from "On Debate and Existence," in the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol. 12...., Ellis Sandoz, ed., 1990; but I added the bolds.]The Second Realities which cause the breakdown of rational discourse are a comparatively recent phenomenon. They have grown during the modern centuries, roughly since 1500, until they have reached, in our own time, the proportions of a social and political force which in more gloomy moments may look strong enough to extinguish our civilization -- unless, of course, you are an ideologist yourself and identify civilization with the victory of Second Reality.
And that is what we call a hypothesis. Now we have to test it.
Not to anticiate too much I hope, but it does seem to me that the people who flack Second Realities are not the most gracious or forthcoming folks on the face of the planet. And it can be shown that they "cheat" as often as possible, so long as it is "necessary" to uphold a doctine that does not at all appear helpful to human flourishing, let alone conform with direct human observation of the natural world....
But I'll leave it there for now, so other folks can weigh in on this question first....