Brainwashed

"Life imitates Art" as the saying goes.  We see enough television shows, advertisements,  or movies and it starts to get into our heads.  We see how various personalities interact with one another and how various age groups and social groups tend to dress and we begin to think "everyone" is a certain way.  Of course, none of these cultural phenomena we see on TV or movies have any evidence to back them up aside from other TV shows, other adverts, or other movies.  At best, when "everyone" knows something about the way our society works in these "modern times," the "everyone" is really just you and maybe half of another person.  But then when the general TV and movie audience thinks that way, it's almost as if our society's behaviors mimic the way they've almost universally been portrayed by the popular culture media, all without non-self-referencing evidence.

On the other hand, we see how our own parents, our closest co-workers, and our friendliest schoolmates are and we often don't even notice them.  We notice the more glamourous minority of other parents, more distant co-workers, and less familiar schoolmates whose lives seem to more closely imitate popular culture.  We either feel that our own lives are directionless and mundane by comparison and therefore just simply directionless and mundane, or we think our workplace or school is no good and shallow and full of people who are full of themselves with parents who are equally despicable.  The truth is, the way the people close to us behave in each aspect of our lives is real.  The evidence lies in how people in other aspects of our lives behave, especially when they don't all know one another and their parts are not written by script writers.  But in spite of the evidence, we do not believe our own life experiences to be a fair representation of society.  Yet we allow the popular culture media to influence how we see society.  In other words, Art persuades Life to imitate it because we let it get away with doing that.

John 5: 31-47