A theme one picks up from podcast discussions with cognitive scientists is that much of our perception — what we understand as real — is a matter of our choices about what we don’t pay attention to.  A fully capable human has five senses, all of which are constantly sending more data to the nervous system than we can (or want to) consciously consider, so we emphasize different senses, turned in different directions, focused on different aspects of the things we’re observing, and interpreting what we do let through in terms of the stories by which we organize our understanding.

Believing that consciousness is the experience of a relationship with God from moment to moment, I’ve summarized the idea theologically with a few lines of poetry:

Though through sin’s haze we strain to see,
God shows himself as we attend:
by when eyes look, what minds perceive,
where feet do bear, what acts portend.

This fact is starkly observable in the politics of our day, where the difference between Republican and Democrat, conservative and progressive, and engaged and disengaged has become a matter of what facts actually exist.  Just this week, for instance, the left-leaning “fact checking” website, Snopes, acknowledged that “No, Trump Did Not Call Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists ‘Very Fine People’.”  Anybody who took five minutes to review the claim back in August 2017 — seven years ago! — would have known this to be the case, yet Joe Biden ostensibly ran for president based on the partisan lie.

Many such instances exist, and while most active partisans probably know it’s deception, many Democrat voters do not.  Between these two are people who uphold degrees of the principle of “inaccurate, but true.”  They rationalize this instance of lying because they believe it crystalizes something more deeply true about Trump, which they hold to be true as a matter of faith, but of which the slippery salesman has managed to avoid concrete evidence.

One consequence of living in different realities — even in the ordinary sense that humanity always does, because each of us attends to Creation from a different perspective — can be seen in game strategy.  The winning team, whether in politics, sports, business, or any other arena, often succeeds by acting rigorously to execute a plan that the losing team does not recognize until it’s too late.  The losers are reacting to a reality that is not true.

Now look out upon the current political landscape and tell me what you think the acts portend.  Stories for each of the following items can easily be found, so I won’t provide links to each; I’m describing a perspective, not martialing evidence:

• Lenient district attorneys and judges let some protesters go (on American campuses and during elite-approved riots) while prosecuting others beyond reason (whether MAGA or pro-life).
• Some politicians get special treatment despite corruption (like all leading Democrats), while others see novel legal theories fired at them like a litigative shotgun blast.
• For favored criminals, parole terms are eased
• Illegal immigration is encouraged
• The attempt to restrict our right to self-defense through all means other than a Constitutional Amendment is relentless.
• The laws of which you’re supposed to be aware multiply beyond the ability of any human being to follow.
• Words can now mean anything at all, and change with the needs of the moment.
• The very same action or opinion by one person is a travesty, while it’s the height of moral rigor from another.

Where do these facts — which I hold them to be — all point?  To a system in which the only thing that’s really illegal is being out of favor with the regime.  Beyond the gaslighting, “benevolent” nudging, psychological manipulation, deep canvassing, propaganda, and plain ol’ lies, this fundamental goal stands out as the objective.

What this realization means for the team that’s currently on the defensive, I’m not sure, but the first step is acknowledging that we see it, so we at least be responding to the reality that the Machiavellians live by.

Featured image by Justin Katz using Dall-E 40 and Photoshop.