Perceptions

In the movie, The Big Chill, there was a bit of dialog that has stayed with me over the years. "It's time you align your perceptions with reality." These days we are all in need of that reminder. On that note, our guest preacher the other day delivered a sermon that focused on the not so subtle distinction that should exist between our convictions and our beliefs or should I say our perceptions. Let me put it in simple terms. We all have beliefs--informally the concepts that we have formed about the world around us, and how it operates. Formally, we may have beliefs in a higher power, and in ethical and moral values that we have learned, or have been instilled in us by family, mentors or life experience. For most of us these are not convictions. They are not anything we are prepared to stake our lives upon, or the lives of our loved ones.

Maybe you think that is a stark divide. But beliefs are often highly conditional, changeable due to circumstance or even, but rarely due to new information. Convictions do not change, they are the cardinal, immutable essence of who we are and they remain constant even when our world view may not. But what happens when our perceptions of the world in which we live begin to show faults, when they no longer prove reliable? That is when we are --not so glibly-- in need of realignment, a dose of reality. That is what happened to me the other day in the course of what was an otherwise innocuous scroll through the back alleys of Facebook and it led me to give a good deal of thought to the ways our beliefs are being shaped in the world we now occupy.

Now to be clear, Facebook is not a site I frequent although I do visit it weekly to share these posts. I apologize to my friends who live south of the border In Florida, a state long defamed by a succession of stories about the flakey, weird, dare I say bizarre antics of its residents, but Facebook posts often feel the same. Maybe that is just what its algorithms are feeding me, however, I was wholly unprepared for an encounter with a video clip that I happened upon quite by accident.

The short video posed as an outtake from the popular program America's Got Talent. What captured my attention at first was the singer, Arthur Hayes, a somewhat scruffy looking bearded man of indeterminate age who appeared to be the offspring of Willie Nelson and Santa. He was dressed in street garb that had seen a better day. and played a well worn electric guitar. My first impression was of someone who slept rough and seldom in the same place.

His voice was a bit gruff, almost hoarse at first but built up to a warm and inviting huskiness. It felt authentic, a perfect match for the heart rending lyrics of his new age Christian ballad which spoke of a life of sin and pride that had been surrendered to Jesus. Regardless of one's religious beliefs it was a compelling performance. I let it play out to the end and am not ashamed to say I found it moving. I wasn't alone. Shots of an audience in tears, some with hands clasped in prayer, said, we too are moved by your story, Arthur. When it ended I scanned the comments. There were many, lifting Arthur up in praise and even a few who claimed to have been born again after watching the performance. Curious about him and why he had not risen to my attention I did a bit of searching. It took me just a few minutes to learn the truth.

Arthur Hayes does not exist. Arthur Hayes is an invented persona whose likeness, music and voice are all created by Ai. Together with his lookalike artificial brother, Michael Bennet, aka Mikhail Bennet, Arthur is one of a cast of carefully contrived characters, digital bytes of emotional artifice that can be found on YouTube, Facebook and who knows where else. In a word I was shocked. I was truly creeped out by the discovery that Arthur was a digital phantom, but even more shaken by the complete acceptance of so many who did not recognize he was a sham.

The longer I thought about it, the angrier I got. Go and look for yourselves and see how you feel about it. https://youtu.be/TOdPi7yLJnY?si=FKKk0tBpY1uNQWGW Where it led me though is the real subject of this post. It began with a sense of betrayal at the staggering manipulation of emotions and beliefs this video clip attempted. But it did not stop there. As creepy and unsettling as it was this violation pales beside the cynical, almost too obvious emotional manipulation that is going on in our world today, because there isn't much daylight between an ai generated video selling religious beliefs and the wholesale manipulation of the truth directed at public perception in every news cycle.

What is worse is that we've seen this before. We should have been prepared for it. But it has proven disturbingly easy for political leaders to stir up latent fear and prejudice against those of a different race or religion, to tell us that those who look different or believe in something we do not are our enemies We are told they possess 'weapons of mass destruction', that they will overtake us, poison our minds, pervert our morals, kill our children. We are told they wear the face of immigrants, foreigners that have lived beside us peacefully for decades but are newly found to be anarchists, murderers, and fiends. We are pitted against each other believing that honest differences make us enemies. We are frightened by the specters of socialism and communism, a tactic Jospeh McCarthy used to scare a country into submission in the 1950's.

We are told that crushing economics are just figments of our imagination, that it is we who have failed if we cannot afford to feed our families, obtain an education, own a home and we are manipulated into believing that health is not a fundamental right, that Government exists solely to protect us from enemies within and without justifying the diversion of our country's wealth from the welfare of the people to a money devouring military industrial complex and greedy oligarchs.

We are kept off balance by this unceasing stream of abuses and outrageous lies a third grader could unravel if only we had not dumbed down our schools by reviling teachers, tearing chapters out of history books, and pretending that our country's sometimes sordid but instructive past never existed. We buy into these ridiculous fictions, distracted by lead footed contrivance believing this politician or that will solve all our problems and make this a better world.

The Arthur Hayes clip reminded me that I am fallible, that I can be fooled, that I need to carefully evaluate my perceptions and look for the tells. The second time I watched the Arthur Hayes performance I saw them, the subtle clues. The fingering of chords that were wrong, the slightly out of sync lip movements, the over the top looks of adoration on the faces in the audience give it away if you look closely. But for a minute I was fooled, and so are we all when we abandon our common sense--when we accept the lies and the manipulations, when we stop thinking critically and for ourselves, when we see each other as foe not friend, It's long past the time ladies and gentlemen that we stopped believing and aligned our perceptions with reality.