The Virgin In The Taco

For a while a few years back, there was a phenomenon that captured the public attention. People were claiming that they saw the face of the Virgin Mary or Jesus, or some such other personage in the patterns on a wall or a tree, or a shadow or even on a taco. All I can say is I hope Mary was pleased by her likeness.

Since nobody really knows what Mary or Jesus looked like, the claim that those “faces“ were theirs is ridiculous on its, pardon my pun, face. The question is, however, what prompted those people to see what they believed they were seeing?

The answer is it’s a combination of instinct and bias. Babies are born with an instinct to search out clues in random patterns for facial recognition. This is helpful for their survival. This instinct remains active throughout life and helps us to recognize and differentiate between individuals and also to differentiate between those we can probably trust and those we cannot. If we view a random pattern of markings on any surface and let our gaze soften, these soon coalesce into face-like images. Perhaps many readers have noticed this themselves.

The tendency to fill in the blanks and associate what we “see” with our preconceived notions, such as religious beliefs that lead to assuming a “face” is that of Mary, also helps artists to make their paintings appear more realistic than are the actual markings they place on them with their brushes. The viewer can be induced to “see” individual leaves on the tree, for example, that are merely random brush marks.

When I view the markings on my wife’s abstract paintings, I often see faces and other human or non-human images where none was intended. In fact, one of her abstracts actually took on its final, semi-representational, form when she noticed a “face” in it that resembled Marilyn Monroe’s. She proceeded to structure the rest of the painting around that face to create a woman in an evening gown reclining on a piano and titled it “Divine Diva “.

Facial recognition instinct combined with trust or distrust of perceived “otherness” play into xenophobia and anti-immigration hysteria when the facial features or coloring of asylum seekers differ from those of a large number of citizens already populating a country.

This tendency to fill in with our own imaginations extends also to information that we are subjected to by all visual media. This is why I long ago stopped watching the news on TV. The selection of images and the order in which they are presented has the power to strongly bias the viewpoint of the viewer about what they are seeing. The written word, if it is factual, is a much more reliable source of objective information.

Since almost everyone is constantly exposing themselves to visual stimuli on their phones, they are ripe for being indoctrinated with whatever interpretation the creators wish to induce. The gullibility of viewers to propaganda via visual media is being capitalized upon by political entities with increasing frequency and with increasing effectiveness. To add to the confusion, AI cherry picks “information” that misleads the viewer to embrace falsehoods or to reinforce pre-existing fallacious beliefs.

Many people have been so confused by the propaganda they are constantly being exposed to that they believe such absurdities as there is no difference between one or the other political party, or that a stated policy or clearly observable action of a party represents the opposite of what they claim to endorse or actually do. This has induced many voters to ignore, or fail to expose themselves to, factual information that may have guided their votes in the opposite direction.

Perhaps true religious believers can be forgiven for falling prey to a claim that a taco, miraculously, is a representation, or even an actual earthly appearance of some religious figure. This is harmless illusion. But the religious-like ardor with which voters embrace their chosen political party, combined with instinct and prejudiced, preconceived fallacious assumptions, is dangerous when it is capitalized on by bad actors..

Our inborn instinct to fill in the blanks with what we wish to see has contributed mightily to the success of the malign forces that now rule the destiny of our nation.