Article by J.P. Donnelly in The American Thinker
Perception is Not Reality
It started off as an ordinary day, working from home with my television playing in the background while typing at a computer. A talking-head appeared on the TV and uttered that famous phrase “We know it's not right, but perception is reality, so...” That's all it took for me close my laptop and unplug from the insanity of life for the remainder of the day.
Perception is reality. I was familiar with this phrase during my formative years, when educators made philosophical arguments about trees falling in forests that nobody heard, or about tigers lurking behind picket fences. I agree that what we perceive is subjective, with five witnesses to an event describing five different outcomes. Dali made a living painting optical illusions to trick our minds. I think we've all squinted at the animation of the spinning ballerina and asked ourselves – is she rotating clockwise or counterclockwise? There is no disagreement that the limits of perception influences how we interpret our world.
Perception, however, is just what we thought we saw, not what actually happened. It does not negate the effect of gravity. It cannot change the boiling point of water. It cannot make the sun rise in the West, nor can it make a boy into a girl or turn a power-point slide into limitless green energy.
In the past, choosing to believe in things that contradict reality was considered a sign of delusion. Nowadays it's called diversity of thought, while fact-based logical arguments are derided as being racist, narrow-minded or out-of-touch with the current, amorphous state, of modern thinking.
Enlightened leftists believe that their perceptions usurp all other aspects of reality. It's not a lie, because they think it to be true. The leftist feels that whatever they can imagine is thus manifest, having no awareness or respect for the harsh, uncompromising, judge known as reality. For a party of self-proclaimed intellectuals, they seem woefully ignorant of immutable facts, and science at large.
Real-world actualities are anathema to the left. In their minds, girls can become boys and men can become pregnant, if they simply choose to think so. If we squint our brains, we can all see that gang-bangers from the hood are actually model citizens of society; CEOs, bankers and pillars of virtue. We all just need to re-imagine our thoughts, and re-think them in a different way that conforms with the trending fictional narrative.
As a mindset and a belief system I've been okay coexisting with leftists. It takes a village to raise an idiot, after all. Leftists are often charming and funny characters, ideally suited to play clowns and jesters for the amusement of the public. The problem in 2021 is that our jesters have become too charming and influential, while the public has grown too lax and unable to distinguish between the clowns on TV and the darker motives lurking beneath the pancake makeup.
It goes without saying that the left owns the perception business. They employ professional jesters, actors, and actresses and have very talented writers and production crews who manifest dizzying visions of dystopia. They have perfected and polished their craft in recent decades and it's no coincidence that when a leftist was elected as president, Hollywood released The West Wing. When a female leftist was elevated to Secretary of State, Hollywood released Madam Secretary. In 2021 we are presented with Diary of a Future President which appears to be cast using a body-double of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Why stop with influencing adults, when even a cursory glimpse of children's programming today ought to have kids screaming “stranger danger!” at their televisions? The left are very meticulous and dutiful at what they do, which is to crowbar warped visions of their own dysfunction into America's psyche at every level, via every possible medium.
This is where gravity gets in the
way of their plans: the public isn't buying any of it. Television
ratings for sports, cable news, entertainment and children's programming
are all nose-diving in direct proportion to the amount of agenda-driven
ideology being pumped into the content. No amount of denial,
self-deception or spin among the left can change the fact that the
public wholly rejects their nightmarish fever-visions for humanity.
What was once a subtle and nuanced bias in the media has become a
sledgehammer of over-the-top propaganda, and the viewers are voting with
their wallets and TV remotes to reject such indoctrination tactics.
We shouldn't be shocked that leftists have slipped into the same, comforting, rut that bogged them down during their last attempts at global domination -- those days of the 20th century when leftists built empires of marble mansions, hosted dinner parties for themselves and their woken, elite friends while enslaving the masses to harvest their flesh for labor. It took America, Great Britain, Canada, Australia and an angry world populace to remedy the behavior of leftists, leaving them mostly dethroned or dead. Nations were freed, prison camps were emptied and genocidal tyrants were brought to justice for their crimes against humanity.
In 2021, modern leftists seek to emulate these dead legends of the past, but this time they imagine a different result. After all, it wasn't that Marx, Lenin, Mussolini, Hirohito or Hitler were wrong -- their tyrannical policies were sound; it was just their delivery that needed some improvement. The left has spent the past several decades polishing their messaging and in 2021 they've arrived to say that it's time to “Build Back Better.” It's time for a “Great Reset.”
To me, the new mantra for 2021 looks a lot like a bad sequel of their 1939 mantra, dressed-up in slick high-definition videos with a bouncy soundtrack, re-branded for a younger audience. Pay no attention to the pile of bones behind the curtain. Let's hope this sequel flops just as badly as did the original.
Perception is Reality: Current leftists believe they are entitled to rule the world, because other leftists and tyrants believed so in the past, and their sycophants in the media and business community believe so today, therefore it must be true.
Gravity and eight billion people might have a problem with that notion. Reality will sort it all out, but it could get messy.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/10/perception_is_not_reality.html
