Channel Mike

The phrase, "perception is reality," is one of the most ignorant statements I've recently heard. I vehemently disagree with it and wish people would stop spreading it around. While I can appreciate the situations in politics and marketing (are they still separate fields, or have they merged?) where creating a false perception can shape and alter reality, I urge you to understand that perception is still just perception. And there is still an underlying reality that may or may not be reflected by the perception of any or all of the people in it. I don't need a lecture from anyone about how this particular phrase is used to demonstrate how peoples' perceptions cause them to buy or vote in certain ways. Perceptions drive behavior, sure, but that's a part of my point, and part of the reason I'm irritated at its use.

I could spend hours writing about the meaning of the word "is." I could spend a lot of time debating the context surrounding this statement when it was coined (by whom I have been unable to discover). The phrase may or may not have been coined as a metaphor, a misguided statement of truth, or a philosophical construct to generate thought and debate. I don't know. But, in my lifetime, people are using it to naively say that their incorrect beliefs are worth a damn, as though their wishful thinking may change the underlying reality. This is the usage that is irritating me to the point of writing about it. If its use were confined to marketing classes and political strategy meetings, I'd be more tolerant. I would not be completely tolerant as I'll explain a few paragraphs later, but more tolerant than I am now.

To make my point, I'll highlight several examples of my own. The earth that we live on is essentially a sphere. It's not a perfect sphere, but is spherical in nature with a slight bulge around the equator, and accompanied by mountains and valleys in places. This is about as close to a fact as we can come up with. And today, nearly everyone held to this sphere by its gravity, whether nearer the north pole or the south, accepts this truth. If I found someone (and I'm sure this person exists) that trusts his or her instincts of "up" and "down" more than some paranoid fantasy of a scientific cabal trying to fool us, it would not flatten the earth at all. Even if we could go back in time to pre-Copernican, pre-Galilean, pre-Columbian times when it was common knowledge that the earth was flat, it was still spherical. Sure, there was not the collective misperception of nearly seven billion people to skew reality, but the millions around back then could not change reality by misunderstanding it.

We can come up with all the examples you'd care to read. Evolution is absolutely happening today and probably has been happening for several billion years. Sure, it's possible (highly unlikely, but possible) that there's a God that put us here a mere handful of eons ago, triggering evolution in the process. And it's possible (highly unlikely, but possible) that all of the carbon dioxide pumped into earth's atmosphere is somehow not causing a greenhouse effect. But for either of these "possibilities" to prove true would require a huge amount of our collective understanding of physics and biology to collapse. It simply wouldn't make sense after understanding Joseph Fourier's work in 1829 to assume that carbon dioxide traps heat in a lab, but no longer does when we remove the glass jar. Neither would it make sense, after reading what Darwin actually wrote in 1859 (not what IDers misinterpret him as saying) and after seeing the work the Grant family has done, to assume that evolution is happening today, but couldn't have happened thousands of years ago. For all intents and purposes, we can accept these theories and make decisions based on the evidence behind them. All that being said, we probably evolved, but even in the case something else happened, it has already happened. Whatever happened is over and done. If every person on earth believed that a flying spaghetti monster deposited us on earth and expected us to dress like pirates, that particular perception would not change actual reality one iota. There would still be the underlying fact of our origins, whatever it may be. Even if we don't know for certain what reality is, it still is reality. Even if we can't quite figure out what is real and what is not, the reality is there. In other words, Shrodinger's cat is either alive or dead regardless of our ability to detect it or our belief in its life or death.

One of the examples of this "perception is reality" idea that I've read about is from a marketing class where the professor uses one real egg, cracking it and pouring it into a glass to set up the class's perception, then throws a bunch of fake plastic eggs into the audience. Obviously, the students' perceptions that the eggs are real affect their behavior as they try to dodge the flying eggs. But in a million tries, not one plastic egg would ever grow a yolk as it sailed toward the misperceiving class. The reality, regardless of perception, and regardless of the behavior that perception influences, is that the eggs are plastic.

Advertisers can create a perception around a product that it is cool, that it is priced to be a good value, that it will change your life, get you a girlfriend, or whatever it is they're trying to do for their product. You could even take it to the extreme and postulate a scenario where some guy is taken in by this ad claiming that a particular jacket will get him the girl. He's convinced and buys the jacket; his perception of himself changes; he thinks he looks great in the jacket, and believes everyone else sees him the same way; and he goes out and gets a girl with his newfound confidence. Perhaps the girl even actually did like the jacket and perhaps he really did look great in it. In this case, a manufactured perception did, in fact, change reality. But this is only the case if the jacket actually does look good to the girl. Only if the perception is an accurate portrayal of the reality does this apply. If, in fact, the jacket was ugly, a misperception that it is attractive would have the poor guy ending up alone and humiliated. This particular scenario brings us into the gray and hairy area, however, where we are really arguing about the "Fact" that her "perception" is different from his. Peoples' behavior, both hers and his, are influenced by their respective perceptions. If they both saw an ad with that hot jacket, and were both convinced, they act differently moving forward through time. Perception is changing future reality. And this is where marketers and politicians have their impact. If you have any doubt about the ability of politicians to pull this off, look up Frank Luntz on the right, or George Lakoff on the left.

For this reason, we all need to make finding reality a priority. Every company that makes a jacket is going to tell us that it is a great jacket that will get us the girl. But in most cases, the person makes the clothes rather than the other way around. Politicians all have to act like they know everything for us to trust them, but none of them do. It's easy to believe in gravity and a spherical earth that orbits the sun; everybody agrees with you. But if your pastor or political hero tells you that global warming is a hoax, research the issue. Find the facts. If your school board wants to teach you that evolution doesn't happen, do your research. Find the facts. Uncover reality. Perception can be changed and controlled with short commercials and psychological games. And if enough perception is changed, people can be coerced into buying the wrong products, voting for the wrong candidates, making the wrong decisions, and en masse, making our own situations worse for ourselves. We live in a society where everything is connected. We're preached to, marketed to, and confused at a level never before possible. Perception certainly is not reality, but it has the power to shape future realities. Check yours and speak out after you've uncovered reality, not before.