We have all seen the picture: an elderly man playing a drum stands in front of a teenage boy wearing a MAGA hat. A short video of the story quickly went viral through social media, labeling the boy slightly below Satan in the evil scale. The elderly man, in contrast, was touted as a secular saint.
We now know that the elderly man is one Nathan Phillips, a decades-long provocateur, while the teenage boy is named Nicholas Sandmann, and he appears to be a slightly awkward bright teen. The initial viral story was wrong in about every possible way. Rather than go over the details, I want to explore a different question: why so many people thought they know the truth from an ambiguous short video?
Believing is Seeing
Even the initial deceptively-edited video is ambiguous. One dude with a drum and his acolytes chant while a group of teenage boys chant along or smile while the boy is the MAGA hate wears a semi-confused expression. From that alone a comedy writer offered a sexual favor to whomever punched the boy. Tough man Reza Aslan declared his face punchable. Nicholas Frankovich of National Review declared the boys were ‘spitting on the cross’.
Your expectations determined what you saw. If you thought teenage boys from a Catholic high school are evil, then you expected them to act like entitled brats. If you thought the words ‘Native America elder’ automatically confer moral authority, then you believe Nathan Phillips, in all versions of his story. Conversely, those with different worldviews saw the video with far more skepticism.
It has been said that what you see is what you get. That is already a fallacy; what you see is only a portion of reality and likely misleading of the world at large. This incident suggests a second problem with the ‘seeing is believing’ and other similar mantras; sometimes even our senses are compromised. In emotionally-charged instances such as this one, what you see is what you expect.
