Perception vs Reality
This might sound a little disorganized, I spent last night on a futon in a humid basement full of spiders, listening to someone snore at speaking volume.
My dear friends and strangers: reality does not exist. (Okay, I’m not actually about to argue that, I just thought it sounded cool). Perception is more important than reality. If you want to change reality: change people’s perceptions. Facts won’t do anything. Let me explain.
Defining “perception”
Imagine that you are in a dark room. You can see a dark blob in the corner, but there’s not enough light for you to determine what it is. If we divide experience into two layers, we can call this the sensory layer. It’s what your eyes see, what your ears hear, what your nose smells, what your mouth tastes, and what your skin feels, in the moment before your mind can start trying to process/categorize/interpret it. But as you look at this blob, you might think it is a chair, or a monster. Or you might start trying to remember what was in the room before you turned the lights off. All of this is perception. And perception does not really care about reality. The blob could, in reality, be a murderous clown, and you might still perceive it as a chair and go peacefully to bed. This is the power of perception.
Let’s consider another situation. Imagine you’ve just moved into an apartment, and you have an upstairs neighbor, Bob. For several months, he is completely considerate: no stomping around or blasting music late at night or anything else like that. Then, one day, it seems like he’s suddenly converted his apartment into a nightclub. There’s loud music and stomping every night until 4am. Your opinion of Bob, which was previously good or neutral, sours completely, and you quickly grow to despise him. After a week of this, you go up to his apartment and knock on the door in order to confront him. But as it turns out, Bob doesn’t live there anymore, and the noise was being made by an entirely different person. And here you’ve been for the past week, despising Bob, when he is actually completely innocent. Why? Because of perception. You perceived that it was him making the noise, so you hated him, and reality had no involvement in the situation.
The dangers of perception
Now, there are significantly more high-stakes ways that perception can lead us astray.
- A cop perceives that a Black teenager is holding a gun, and shoots him. Later, it is revealed that he was holding a hairbrush
- A woman with a bit of facial hair is violently expelled from a bathroom because someone perceived her as a man
- Your coworker who stays in the office until 6pm every day, but actually spends 50% of his time browsing the internet, is promoted instead of you because your boss perceives him as hardworking.
- Your country elects leaders who waste money and benefit no one, because they perceived immigration to be the greatest problem.
Is reality enough?
In some cases, exposure to reality is enough to destroy a false perception. But in a lot of cases, it is not enough or not available. Your racist neighbor has met a black person before. Their perception did not change. You can wave statistics showing crime rates are down until you’re blue in the face, and your sister will still be afraid to go out at night. Why? Because most people’s perceptions have been engineered by a staggering volume of propaganda. Reality is not enough when the 24/7 news cycle keeps repeating that vaccines can kill you; that immigrants will kill you; that your neighbor will kill you; that if you walk down the street at night, someone will leap from the bushes and kill you. Reality is not enough when all the social media feed shows is people from outside your demographic saying that they hate you, and people from inside it saying that you can only trust each other. Reality is not enough when reality is not accessible because you spend all your time at the office, at home, and in your car.
Fight fire with fire
Reality is not enough. Facts are not enough. They convince some people, but not enough people. When faced with a lie repeated 100 times, and a truth said once, with all the facts and evidence, most people just throw up their hands. And that’s not even addressing the fact that the lie is appealingly, comforting, empowering. The lie says “you’re fine the way you are, other people are the problem.” The truth says “you need to change in ways that are uncomfortable.” So the truth alone is not enough. The truth needs propaganda of its own. The truth needs us to promote it, to tell stories about it, to make it appealing. The truth needs us to flatter its best side and put makeup on its blemishes.
This may seem dishonest to you. You may instinctively recoil. “The truth doesn’t need all that, that’s how you know it’s true!”. Well, there may be some honor in being the only person at the weightlifting competition who isn’t taking steroids, but you can’t expect to win that way.