There’s a concept called Object Permanence coined by Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget. It describes the moment where an infant realizes that an item that they cannot see still exists. The most commonly used example of this is the game Peek-a-Boo. Throw your hands over your face and the baby thinks your whole ass head disappeared. Eventually, though, the baby will attempt to find your missing head behind your hands. The baby develops a curiosity for reality and an understanding that your head didn’t really go anywhere.
I feel like Object Permanence is the perfect micro of our larger social understanding these days:
“Ain’t nobody talking about…..”
“Mainstream media don’t want y’all to know about….”
“They distracted y’all with Janet’s Titty and Will’s Slap, meanwhile…..”
The biggest irony, probably, about the guy who’s always explaining to us that he knows, 100%, that there’s a face behind those damn hands is that even HE had to learn that at some point. If you learned it, shouldn’t it stand to reason that others have as well? It’s like telling a room full of Hip Hop heads that Sean P used to go by Ruck. Sure, everyone in the room may not know that, but knowing it doesn’t make you special.
We have somehow come to believe that anything we don’t see on our Social Media feeds or our particular News sources simply isn’t cared about or being covered by the greater world around us. We don’t see it, so nobody sees it. “Peek-a-Boo”!
Though this particular article focuses more on the Political, this phenomenon is fairly universal. In March 2019, rapper Nipsey Hussle was gunned down in front of a business he owned in South LA. As with all untimely and devastating deaths, rumors began to circulate. The biggest was that Neighborhood Nip had been working on a documentary about enigmatic and controversial Honduran Herbalist Dr Sebi. Sebi, amongst other things, claimed to be able to cure Aids with natural remedies. He was known to have big names such as Left Eye, Eddie Murphy and Michael Jackson as clients. He was arrested for Money Laundering and ultimately dies in custody from “Pneumonia” (quotes intentional). His followers didn’t buy it. Sebi was SILENCED! Then, by extension, Nipsey was SILENCED! But, they didn’t want y’all to know that. Y’all believe anything. I would tell y’all about Big Pharma, but y’all only listen to booty claps.
A quick Google search of Nipsey and Dr Sebi yields almost 33 thousand results. Websites from every lane like BBC, BET, APNews, BuzzFeed, Men’s Health to Essence have reported on the Nipsey/Sebi connection. The SocMed consensus however is that no one knows about or talks about the story. That’s odd.
In January 2019, a video went viral of a group of Catholic high school kids on a field trip in DC wearing MAGA hats and apparently taunting a elderly Native American man playing a drum. Another video later emerged of some of the boys seeming to also harass some teenage girls. The interwebs were on fire. The kids were roundly condemned by everyone from news outlets, to politicians, to the Catholic diocese itself. A later investigation by the Diocese concluded that the man had actually been the one who approached the teens, as a tense confrontation was building between the teens and a group of Black Hebrew Israelites. It also concluded that the kids made no racist comments to the man. Right wing outlets lost their collective minds. Opinion hosts called everyone under the sun purveyors of Fake News. Parents threatened to sue outlets and the Native American for defamation. But the culmination of it all was that no Liberal or Mainstream outlets were correcting the story. They got the outrage they wanted and just moved on. “Peek-a-Boo”!
A quick Google search of Covington Catholic Teen Cleared returns approximately 1.6 million results. Websites from the Washington Post, CNN, ABC, MSNBC, NPR and just about every outlet on the planet following this story closely. Wait! You mean outlets ARE actually reporting updates of these stories? That’s peculiar.
Politics has become a special kind of animal, in that many times it is not just about your message. It’s about how much your message can overpower the other guy’s message. It’s about who can tell the story more impressively, even if everybody involved is telling versions of the same story. There’s a storytelling device known as Unreliable Narrator. This is where the narrator’s perspective is thought to be true, but at some point during the story, their perspective becomes obviously compromised. Think: Fight Club. When there are multiple Unreliable Narrators, it becomes the device known as Rashomon (Effect), coined from the 1950s Japanese movie of the same name. Politics is the Rashomon Effect in real life. Left and Right leaning TV stations take the same nugget of information and form its own universe based on their viewers’ sensibilities. Take for instance the 2016 Clinton/Trump debates. Fox News rejoiced that Trump hammered Clinton where it hurt, on emails, Trans-Pacific Partnership and Isis. Meanwhile, MSNBC walked away feeling like Trump was exposed as a misogynistic bully, liar and unprepared. Same 2 hours. Vastly different recaps.
Then there’s Barack Obama’s Unemployment numbers. When Obama’s Unemployment rate went from 7.8 percent to 10, and then finally down to 4.7 percent, Democrats gave a resounding “We told yall bum asses we knew what we were doing!” Republicans, on the other hand, were spreading the doom gospel that all this news showed was that people didn’t want to work anymore and had completely dropped out of the workforce. You see, people who quit working AND quit looking for jobs don’t get counted as Unemployed. In an ironic twist though, when Trump’s rate reached 3.5 percent, our Republican Narrators understood this to mean that people really were working again. Go figure.
So what do we do about our mutual bubbles? Our social bubbles? How do we re-teach ourselves Object Permanence? How do we convince ourselves that news isn’t hiding from everyone but me? What does that training look like? How about a game of Peek-a-Boo.