The Reality about Reality

Which part of elephant are you touching?

I recently had a conversation with a progressive liberal friend who casually mentioned the term "Genocide Obama" in the middle of his political rant, which completely stunned and confused me. I had one of those double-takes like in Bugs Bunny cartoons that I grew up watching. I had to maintain a level of calm and ask him to repeat himself so I could be sure I heard it correctly. He confirmed with the confidence of a scientist studying his field for decades that Obama was responsible for killing two million Yemenis through drone attacks in 2014. To which I said the only wise and sane thing I could at the time:

"Oh. I didn't know that", and we left it at that.

As soon as I got to my car, I started searching frantically: Obama, genocide, Yemen, millions of people, in case I had been living in a cave and missed something. I don't want to waste time here debunking this claim. The facts are available for anyone who wants to look them up. What happened in Yemen was a layered, complicated tragedy involving geopolitical issues, war, and famine, not a single person's genocide. The real question isn't what happened, but how we came to believe such different stories.

My friend wasn't malicious or stupid—he was simply operating from a completely different set of "facts" than I found. His search for truth told him one story; mine told me a different one. These days, we live in such distinctly separate realities, each with its own ecosystem and sophisticated informational network, that I can’t really blame anyone if they come to conclusions different than mine. How can we have meaningful conversations or trust one another when we don't even share the same reality?

We're all trapped in the constructed realities fed to us either by the ancient stories we have been told as we drift off to sleep, or by the algorithmic world of our online presence. Each platform, each news source, each social media algorithm creates its own version of what's happening in the world. And they all sound, feel, and look true.

This fracturing of shared reality isn't just a product of our digital age—it points to something deeper about our relationship to the nature of reality itself. Our inability to agree on basic facts forces us to confront an essential question:

What is reality?

Reality is often described as the world that exists independently of subjective worlds, such as feelings, thoughts, and experiences. The only way to access reality is through our filter of self, which is filled with feelings, thoughts, experiences, and stories we have acquired through our lifetime. We each carry unique sensory apparatus, cognitive frameworks, and lived experiences that shape how we interpret the world around us. What we call "objective reality" is always filtered through these individual lenses. Our mind is not a fact-checker, nor does it have an accountability feature. What it does best is an attempt to convince us of certain truths that fit the narrative it carries. It's a sophisticated system whose primary design is to protect itself the best way it knows how through its own twisted logic.

Look at any group that holds fundamentally different worldviews—flat earthers and climate change scientists, conspiracy theorists and mainstream media consumers, or any other group that creates terror, pain, and chaos for people, such as the Proud Boys, Antifa or jihadists. They inhabit a different reality and operate from a very specific set of truths and values, which are difficult to grasp unless seen from within their perspective. Trying to understand or see the reality of a group with which we ethically and morally disagree does not justify their actions. It's merely an exercise that can help us understand the possible flaws in our own narratives and assumptions.

It's like the well-known parable about a group of blind men who encounter an elephant for the first time—each touching a different part of the elephant, and based on that single point of contact, forming a conflicting idea of what the elephant is like.

But, today, we're not just blind men touching different parts of the same elephant—we're being shown entirely different animals by our algorithms and information sources. This makes the skill of being in touch with reality, "seeing things as they are", essential for navigating a world where the line between real and manufactured is increasingly blurred. What's terrifying isn't just that we receive dissimilar information or even that we arrive at different conclusions; it’s the confidence we bring to those conclusions, as if they were objective truths, even when they may be completely false. We're stuck in our own certitudes, rarely venturing outside our echo chambers except by misfortune or sheer willpower.

This raises an essential paradox: if all reality is filtered, how can we ever truly "see things as they are"?

The answer isn't to eliminate our filters (that's impossible) but to become aware of the existence and edges of our narratives.

One of the main and oldest methods of becoming aware is through nonjudgmental observation. This means catching ourselves when we're adding our own commentary to what we observe. When my friend told me about "Genocide Obama", observation without judgment would mean noticing both the claim and my emotional reaction to it, without immediately accepting or rejecting either as "the truth".

Another method is developing the habit of questioning our automatic interpretations. When we read a headline, can we pause before our emotions take over? When someone disagrees with us, can we hear their actual words instead of assuming their meaning, character, or motives?

These practices of aware observation and asking questions, although very simple, are highly effective and extremely difficult to do, but they are the best tools we have. They won't give us access to some pure, unfiltered reality. The goal isn't to change one another's realities either—any attempt to alter the hardware and the software of a person or a group to match our own never ends in the equilibrium we all so desperately desire. It's about recognizing our own biases clearly enough to navigate beyond them, creating space for common ground and genuine dialogue.

Admittedly, these perceptual flaws aren't entirely negative. The same tendencies that divide us can also lead to extraordinary creativity and insight, cultivating a diverse, visionary species of artists, philosophers, scientists, writers, and musicians who interpret their reality in ways that lead to beauty, self-expression, justice, and harmony.

Perhaps this is what my friend and I missed in that moment. Instead of "Oh, I didn't know that", I could have said, "That's not what I've read. Where did you see that?" Not to change his mind, but to understand which part of the elephant he was touching. Because even if we're all touching different parts of the elephant, we're still human beings trying to make sense of a confusing world.

And that, at least, is a reality we share.

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