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Patmos Rhodes

Perception Is(n’t) Reality, Or Is It?

  • William Romanowski
  • Aug 8, 2024
  • 7 min read

Updated: Aug 14, 2024

(7-minute read)

Keywords: post-truth; alternative facts; newspeak; fake news; social media; Orwell


No doubt you’ve heard the saying, “perception is reality.” Did you know the phrase was coined by Lee Atwater, President George H. W. Bush’s campaign tactician in 1988? The next year Canon launched an ad campaign for its Rebel camera featuring a young tennis star, Andre Agassi, delivering the slogan: “Image is everything.”


Since then, “branding,” whether politicians, public policies, or commercial products, has had more to do with optics and style than honesty and substance. As one commentator observed, political and marketing strategists have taken Atwater’s maxim to mean, “Forget the facts: if you can make people believe something, it becomes, if you like, a de facto fact,” that is, in fact a fact. In other words, a perception is reality.

 

As public rhetoric became more hyperbolic, spin increasingly displaced evidence, and in concert with other trends, the idea of truth itself came under considerable strain. By 2016, the term post-truth starting popping up during the U.S. presidential election and Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom.


And so Oxford Dictionaries designated post-truth Word of the Year, the term describing “circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Instead of referring to a time after an event, like post-9/11, the use of the prefix in terms like post-truth, post-racial, and post-Christian is more about “belonging to a time in which the specified concept has become unimportant or irrelevant (emphasis mine).” Apparently, the notion that people’s perceptions become their reality, that is, the truth, found some basis, well, in reality.

 

Doesn’t this help explain the intensity and fury of the way we have become so divided along ideological and cultural lines today? We’re not just talking about ideas and opinions, which can ordinarily be contentious enough, but what people actually perceive or believe to be different realities – the way things really are. And in today’s polarized climate, these different visions clash over the problems and their solutions, the values we should embrace, even the nature of good and evil.

 

Reporting on the post-truth phenomenon, Time repurposed one its most notable – and shocking – covers. The headline, in bold red type on a stark black background, asked “Is Truth Dead?” The editorial aim was to be just as provocative as the question raised in April 1966: “Is God Dead?”


Nothing marks the arrival of the post-truth era than a combative exchange between then Meet the Press host Chuck Todd and Kellyanne Conway, President Trump’s presidential advisor. When Todd pressed Conway on why the newly elected president had his press secretary make a false claim about the size of his inauguration crowd, she introduced the strange phrase “alternative facts” into the American lexicon.

 

“Alternative facts are not facts,” Todd insisted. “They’re falsehoods.”

 

Afterward, late night host Seth Meyers joked, “Kellyanne Conway is like someone trying to do a Jedi mind trick after only a week of Jedi training.” And reporting a spike in searches for the word “fact,” the publisher of the Merriam-Webster dictionary entered the fray calling Conway’s interview “fraught with epistemological tension” and tweeting its own definition: “A fact is a piece of information presented as having objective reality.”

 

The White House’s convenient disregard for the truth, as if “facts” were nothing more than evidence to a believer, is not to be taken lightly. Apparently, Conway’s use of alternative facts was not just to defend her boss, but a plain and transparent attempt to gaslight millions of viewers by making them doubt what they saw with their own eyes. And in this instance, as some journalists suspected, to undermine public confidence in the media, which was dubbed fake news.

 

After the 2016 election, Lesley Stahl, the veteran journalist of 60 Minutes, asked Trump why he relentlessly attacked the press. He replied:

You know why I do it? I do it to discredit you all and demean you all so that when you write negative stories about me no one will believe you.

The euphemism alternative facts was not simply a way to deflect criticism, nor to persuade based on evidence. The aim was to influence people’s perceptions of reality, in this case, to believe the press was not trustworthy. Likewise, the continuing rhetorical strategy – either I’m going to win (and the election was fair) or they cheated – an attempt to sow seeds of doubt in the fairness of the democratic process.

 

The post-truth zeitgeist, which means “spirit of the times,” has cast a long shadow over our culture, politics, and institutions. Frank Bruni, a New York Times columnist, remarked that we are living “in an age of rampant falsity.” We now have politicians, jurists, commentators, and religionists whose rhetoric and actions speak loudly and clearly: Truth be damned, and with it, moral integrity and social responsibility. What matters most is power and prosperity, an ideological end that by its very nature justifies unprincipled means.


Commentators were quick to connect alternative facts with newspeak, a term in George Orwell’s 1984 that refers to language used for thought control. First published in 1949, in the days after Conway’s comments, sales of Orwell’s classic dystopian 1984 skyrocketed 9,500 percent. The novel leapt to the top of Amazon’s bestseller list in the United States; sales in Britain and Australia increased by 20 percent compared to the same period a year earlier.


The assumption behind newspeak is that there is no objective reality, that is, a reality that exists apart from our perceptions, and to which life, law, art, politics, economics, and every other aspect of life must conform. Here’s how the Inner Party member O’Brien puts it to Winston, Orwell’s main protagonist.

But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes; only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party.

In a sharp piece on “Orwell, Atheism, and Totalitarianism,” a scholar explains that what Winston learns – the hard way – is this:

Unbelief in any external, objective reality gives the Party absolute power over the minds of its members. Or, to put it another way, this unbelief secures the abject intellectual slavishness of Party members, their willingness to accept whatever the Party hands out to them, however absurd it may be on its face, however obviously it contradicts what the Party has said previously.

Orwell invented a term for that too – doublethink – holding contradictory beliefs not realizing (or acknowledging) they conflict: War is Peace – Freedom is Slavery – Ignorance is Strength.


Unless we’re all living in the Matrix, it’s safe to say there is an objective reality that we understand and make sense of based in some measure by subjective means (which I’ll take up in a future blog post). Meanwhile, living in a post-truth age is like living in a theater of the absurd.

 

In June 2022, late night TV host Jimmy Kimmel joked about the televised congressional hearings on the January 6 insurrection.

I have to say, I watched it and it’s so crazy to see so much evidence confirming that Donald Trump did all the things we saw him do, on television, every day for three months straight, on television.

More recently, after President Biden’s debate debacle, actor, director, and film producer, George Clooney was dead serious when he told Democratic Party leaders “to stop telling us that 51 million people didn’t see what we just saw.” Even the royal family is getting in on the act, releasing a poorly edited photo of Catherine, Princess of Wales after she’d undergone surgery, and then refusing to release the unedited version.

 

The media – both mass and social media – is exacerbating the problem. Like all new communication technologies, both cable TV, and then the internet, were heralded as a boon for democracy. They promised to open public conversation, and by giving media access to a plurality of voices, expose factual deficiencies with truth emerging.



As it is, in concert with other trends, the new media environment has diminished the role of traditional gatekeepers, confounded matters regarding free speech and censorship, and, with conspiracy theories, disinformation, and other falsehoods running rampant online, stoked skepticism and a lack of trust in media and other institutions. Characterized by so much angst, doubt, and uncertainty makes the post-truth world an unsettling place.

 

This state of affairs does not bode well for the American experiment. As many commentators, both conservative and liberal, have been pointing out, the election this year is not about partisan priorities, but the future of our democracy, which, depending on the news channel you watch, is either about to become great again or teetering on the brink of a chilling authoritarianism.

 

That we have reached such a defining and alarming moment ought to be of great concern to people of goodwill. Insofar as the media is crucial to the functioning of our democracy today, so is media literacy for navigating the post-truth world. The health of our democracy depends upon an informed citizenry; questioning and a healthy skepticism, discovering and defending the truth are important critical skills that affirm democratic values.


I’m reminded of “Mad-Eye” Moody’s mantra in the Harry Potter films: “Constant vigilance!”







Photo Credits (in order of appearance)


William D. Romanowski is an award-winning commentator on the intersection of religion and popular culture and author of a number of books, including Reforming Hollywood: How Protestants Fought for Freedom at the Movies and Eyes Wide Open: Looking for God in Popular Culture. With his continuing commentary, he is trading footnotes for fiction, writing novels under the pen name (or nom de plume, as the French put it), Patmos Rhodes.


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