How Perception Shapes Reality

You may have heard David Icke say it, but I want to break it down for you. Humans appear naturally inclined to find patterns in their experience and extrapolate them to establish their views. In simpler words, whatever they see repeatedly, they establish as a rule.

Here’s an example. When I started watching YouTube and actively surfing the internet in 2018, I noted that internet users think that college students are promiscuous. This view appeared consistent among users of pretty much all social media and YouTube. An individual who spends all his time on the internet may think that humans are promiscuous even if he has not met any promiscuous person. Having an opinion, biased or not biased, is not as detrimental as what it may lead to. Someone who believes that promiscuity is the norm may engage in it even if he once wasn’t inclined towards it. This might lead to a normalization of promiscuity.

I have never known any promiscuous college student. My first roommate in college was in a long-term relationship with a woman who is now his wife. My second roommate was dating his now fiance or wife (haven’t checked lately). My third roommate was also in a serious long term relationship. My fourth roommate was married. Thus, none of my roommates did anything objectionable at all. None of my guy friends were promiscuous. They couldn’t even find one woman much less multiple. A good number of my female friends are now married or engaged to their then boyfriends. The rest were also not promiscuous. If they were, they had kept it hidden. The only account of promiscuity I ever heard in college was from an Information Assistant in my dormitory. She told me about her friend who cheated on her boyfriend and got pregnant. You can see why, before 2018, I was inclined to think that college students were not as promiscuous as portrayed.

I wondered if my experience was not representative of the truth. Perhaps, I attract a specific kind of people, who are not promiscuous, which shapes my reality. But it can also be true that the internet world is projecting a false reality. Whichever is true isn’t the problem. It is that most people never question their own experiences. They tend to go along with their observations and inductively derive their views.

Once you show something repeatedly, people think it is the norm. They assume it will happen again. They think this is how the world works. It makes me think of school kids who are getting trained to work 9-5 for the rest of their lives. Since they do it for 12 years, they think it is normal. They no longer see what’s wrong with working 9-5 every day 5 days a week for someone else. They don't see that their entire lives have been hijacked. They are mere tools to the ruling class. In fact, they consider their wage slavery a privilege.

Let’s not judge them. Even physicists fall for such inductive pattern recognition. Consider how Hubble found that that universe was expanding. He found that all galaxies were receding. He concluded that it is the very way of the universe to expand. But the Universe doesn’t always have to expand. Perhaps, it was not expanding 1000 years ago. Perhaps, it is will contract a few million years down the line. It is only inductive to say that what is happening now or what has happened lately has always happened and will always happen. That is a very bold statement to make for a species whose lifespan is infinitely smaller than that of the Universe, just saying.

Thus, if you show something over and over again, most humans are likely to accept it as a law of nature. Repeated perception is likely to become reality. Since most humans are also confident that they have seen life, especially older humans, this pride-induced blindness can be exploited to program their views and understanding of life (their reality). The repetitive precept doesn’t even have to be real. It can be totally fictional. My mother thinks men are like the characters she seen in soaps. What she fails to realize that male characters in soaps can be made to say/do anything. Superman was made to wear his underwear over his pants. Just who does that in real life? If this was true, we would call it overwear, not underwear.