In Harry Nilsson's strange little cartoon fable-for-adults The Point (1971), the character of the Rock Man tells the main character Oblio, "You see what you wanna see, and hear what you wanna hear, you dig?"
I dig. In fact, truer words never spoken. We take what we experience and shoehorn it into what we already believed; it's impossible to do otherwise, because we're constrained by our expectations and prior understanding. Science helps -- it's certainly a more objective approach than anything else I can think of -- but even it's not completely immune, something I wrote about in more detail a few years ago. Confirmation bias seems to be a built-in condition of the human brain -- something we could all bear keeping in mind, especially when it comes to topics about which we're dead sure we're right.
To start with a rather low-emotional-charge example, take the story of the Angels of Mons.
The claim is that in August of 1914, with World War I in full swing, some British, French, and Belgian soldiers on the battlefield saw an angelic apparition near Mons, Belgium. This happened during the middle of a battle where the Allied forces were greatly outnumbered by the Germans, and things were looking pretty bleak. The sudden spectacle of divine messengers over the field, leading an army of ghostly bowmen, was a turning point in the battle; encouraged by the fact that apparently God was on the side of the Allies, they fought with renewed energy, finally driving the Germans back with heavy losses. No less a figure than Brigadier General John Charteris spoke of there being widespread rumors of "an Angel of the Lord, clad in white raiment bearing a flaming sword, appearing before the German forces at the Mons battle forbidding their advance."
The trouble began when people started investigating who actually saw the apparition. Turned out that just about all the soldiers who were at Mons denied having seen it personally, but damn near every one of them "knew someone who had." Interestingly, the British soldiers claimed the ghostly bowmen were being led by St. George, while the French soldiers said they were led by Joan of Arc. More damning still, some of them said they hadn't heard about it, but had read about it -- and upon inquiry, what most of them had read was a (fictional) short story by Arthur Machen called "The Bowmen," published only a month after the battle in The London Evening News, recounting a tale of German soldiers driven back by the ghosts of British fighters who had died at the Battle of Agincourt.
The Society for Psychical Research, which then (as now) was one of the foremost groups evaluating paranormal claims through a skeptical, scientific lens, said about the Angels of Mons, "We have received [no first-hand testimony] at all, and of testimony at second-hand we have none that would justify us in assuming the occurrence of any supernormal phenomenon... The battlefield visions prove on investigation to be founded on mere rumor, and cannot be traced to any authoritative source."
Interesting that the ones who swore the visions were real were people who already (1) believed in angels, (2) thought that of course God was on their side, and (3) won the battle anyhow. There might be a little more credibility to the story if there was a single German report of having been driven back by St. George and/or St. Joan, the angelic host, and spectral bowman -- which, of course, there isn't. But even today, there are people who still claim fervently that it happened, and cite it as a real example of the existence of angels and of divine intervention in the course of human affairs.
Whatever happens to you, you make it fit whatever your perception of the world already was.
Which brings us to the higher-emotional-charge example, which is the assassination attempt on Donald Trump.
The best information we have at the moment is that the shooter was an odd, disturbed young man, whose real motives may never be known for certain. He was the registered Republican son of a Libertarian father and Democratic mother, and fit the almost-cliché picture of the mass shooter as a bullied, angry young loner. This hasn't stopped the Democrats from saying of course he was a Republican, and the Republicans from saying he was a closet Democrat who had registered as a Republican as a smokescreen. Anti-trans bigots made the claim the shooter was a trans woman -- a false story amplified by none other than Alex Jones, who just will not keep his stupid mouth shut despite his slander already having caused him to lose just about everything he owns. Despite the source, the rumor was immediately swallowed whole by members of the far-Right who are desperate to characterize LGBTQ+ people as inherently depraved.
An even closer parallel to the Angels of Mons, though, is the response some have had to Trump's near-miss. The pro-Trump Christians have been nearly unanimous in their claims that the bullet was deflected through direct divine intervention (never mind that a bystander was hit and killed; perhaps the Almighty didn't consider him as worthy of survival). Pictures of an angel, the Virgin Mary (in the Roman Catholic versions), or even Jesus himself pinging the bullet away at the last moment are making the rounds. On the other hand, a small, but growing, group of anti-Trump Christians are quoting Revelation 13:3, which is about the Beast (read, Satan) who "filled the whole world with wonder," whom people worshipped and followed without question -- and who received an apparently fatal wound to the head, but who miraculously escaped death.
Three guesses as to how they're interpreting that story.
You see what you wanna to see, and hear what you wanna hear.
Why is it so hard for people to confine themselves to the facts? As I mentioned at the start, there's a measure of confirmation bias that is unavoidable, but these people seem to be taking scanty information and then painting in the gaps with whatever they'd desperately like to be true. And it's unsurprising that much of it is given a religious slant; like the story of the angels over the battlefield, it's all too common to add in some divine providence to the mix -- where, of course, the angels you see conveniently make things work out in accordance with the way you'd very much like them to work out.
It puts me in mind of the trenchant quote by Susan B. Anthony, which seems as good a place to end as any: "I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires."
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