Who’s Choosing? Consciousness, Attention & Choice

Propaganda, Coercion & AI

The Fate of Democracy & World Depends on Our Conscious Attention

Good Decisions Require Sapient Attention

What will you choose: Fate or Destiny… always begins with attention, noticing, and contemplation of motives, especially when what we notice is human actions, words, or performances.

A month from now, Americans will head to the polls for the 2026 midterm elections. But the moment of choice begins long before anyone marks a ballot.

It begins when we encounter a headline.

When we watch a video.

When someone tells us whom to fear, whom to trust, whom to blame, and whom to believe.

It begins when we feel the sudden surge of anger that makes us want to share a story before we’ve checked whether it is true.

And it begins when we decide that someone who agrees with us must be telling the truth—or that someone who challenges us must be lying.

We tend to think of voting as an individual act of judgment. Yet the information, emotions, assumptions, and loyalties that shape that judgment have been accumulating for years.

So here’s the question I want us to consider: When we make a choice, who—or what—is actually doing the choosing?

Our conscious minds? Our fears? Our identities? The people we trust? The media we consume? The algorithms that learn what makes us react?

Or some combination of all of them?

The question matters in every election. It matters even more in an age when artificial intelligence can generate convincing images, videos, voices, and messages at a speed and scale that would have been difficult to imagine only a few years ago.

But AI is not where this story begins.

It begins with us.

1. Human Need to Trust & Role of Attention

Human beings are social creatures. We build relationships through cooperation, shared experience, emotional connection, and trust. We listen to one another, recognize familiar expressions, notice patterns of behavior, and make judgments about whether another person is safe.

We need these abilities. Without them, ordinary human relationships would become almost impossible.

Most of us don’t approach a new friendship by conducting an investigation into the other person’s motives. We assume a reasonable degree of goodwill until experience gives us a reason to reconsider.

That openness makes connection possible.

It can also make us vulnerable.

In his discussions of pathological relationships, psychotherapist Dr. Peter Salerno examines how people with strongly antagonistic or exploitative traits may use charm, mirroring, and manufactured intimacy to gain another person’s trust. His work with evolutionary psychologist Dr. Debra Lieberman explores biological and evolutionary contributions to dark personality traits, including the possibility that some people are more disposed toward exploitation and antagonism than others.

Their perspective challenges the assumption that every harmful personality pattern can be explained primarily by childhood experiences or that everyone shares the same motivations for social connection.

These are important questions, although the scientific evidence does not justify reducing personality to genetics or assuming that a particular trait inevitably produces abusive behavior.

The useful question for our purposes is this:

What happens when someone recognizes that another person’s natural inclination to trust can be used as a tool?

2. Predators Don’t Always Break the Door Down

In a healthy relationship, kindness, attention, and shared vulnerability can be expressions of genuine attachment.

In a manipulative relationship, similar behaviors can also be used strategically.

Consider the early stages of a relationship in which someone appears almost impossibly attentive. They share your interests, mirror your values, affirm your dreams, and seem to understand wounds you’ve rarely discussed with anyone else.

You feel seen.

You feel understood.

You may begin to believe you’ve found someone unusually compatible with you.

Sometimes that connection is genuine. Intense affection, shared interests, and early intimacy are not, by themselves, evidence of manipulation.

But when those behaviors are deliberately used to accelerate trust, establish dependency, or gain control, they can become part of a very different process.

This is often discussed in the context of love bombing and mirroring.

The manipulator doesn’t necessarily need to force their way into your psychological world. They may persuade you to open the door.

And this brings me to a metaphor I’ve been developing for Sapience.

The most effective predator may not need to destroy your defenses. They may simply need to convince you that you no longer need them.

Once trust is established, warning signs can become harder to interpret. A contradiction is explained away. A hurtful act becomes an exception. A broken promise is blamed on stress. The person who once seemed so loving is still the person you believe you know.

You may begin to question your own perceptions rather than the relationship.

Salerno calls attention to a phenomenon he describes as traumatic cognitive dissonance: the conflict between a person’s lived experience and the incompatible account of reality they have been led to accept. He also discusses reality confidence—the ability to trust one’s own observations and judgment.

These terms are useful for understanding the experiences Salerno describes, but they should not be mistaken for universally accepted diagnostic categories.

The larger insight is that manipulation can affect more than our emotions. It can affect the framework through which we interpret what happens to us.

The programming metaphor

In computer systems, a change to an underlying instruction can alter how subsequent information is processed.

Human psychology is not literally computer code, but the analogy helps illustrate what can happen when trust becomes the foundation of an increasingly distorted interpretation of reality.

If I believe someone is safe, I may interpret their behavior differently than I would if I believed they were dangerous.

If I believe someone has my best interests at heart, I may give their explanations more weight than the available evidence warrants.

If I have invested deeply in a relationship, acknowledging that my understanding of it was mistaken can be painful.

The original belief becomes a filter through which new information passes.

The manipulation of self-concept can become a manipulation of perception.

This is one reason education about abusive patterns can matter. The goal isn’t to teach people to distrust everyone. It’s to help them recognize patterns, preserve their independent judgment, and seek outside perspectives when their experience and another person’s explanations repeatedly contradict each other.

It also raises a larger question: Can similar mechanisms operate in our public lives?

We must be careful here. Political persuasion is not automatically psychological abuse, and a disagreement with a politician or political movement is not evidence of a personality disorder. But the human vulnerabilities that make interpersonal manipulation possible are also relevant to how we receive political messages.

3. Attention & the Question that Already Contains the Answer

On September 29, 2026, former special counsel Jack Smith appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee to answer questions about his investigations of Donald Trump.

During the hearing, Republican Senator Eric Schmitt questioned Smith about an alleged visit to an Atlanta Hawks basketball game on February 3, 2024. The questioning suggested that Smith’s whereabouts might connect him to Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.

Smith said he had attended a University of Maryland women’s basketball game against Iowa in Maryland, where Caitlin Clark was playing.

The distinction matters. Iowa’s team is known as the Hawkeyes, not the Hawks. The Associated Press reported that Schmitt’s questioning appeared to conflate the Iowa Hawkeyes with the Atlanta Hawks, and the exchange became a prominent moment in coverage of the hearing.

Read the Associated Press report on the Hawks/Hawkeyes exchange.

The hearing involved broader, contested questions about Smith’s investigations, prosecutorial authority, and political impartiality. Those questions deserve examination on their own evidence. The basketball exchange does not resolve them.

But the exchange does give us a concrete example of something worth studying: the power of an accusation to shape an impression before the underlying facts have been adequately established.

A question can do more than request information. Its wording can introduce an allegation, direct attention toward a particular interpretation, and invite an audience to reach a conclusion.

Consider the difference between these two questions:

What evidence establishes where this person was that day?

And:

Why did this person go to that game, and what does it reveal about their relationship with someone else?

The second question already invites us to imagine a connection. We may begin evaluating the person through that imagined connection before we’ve established whether the premise is correct.

If the question is accompanied by a confident accusation, an authoritative voice, or an emotionally charged description, the effect can be even stronger.

This does not establish that the questioner deliberately intended to mislead anyone. We cannot infer private motives from an exchange alone.

It does, however, demonstrate why questions, accusations, and evidence must be evaluated separately.

A question is not proof. An accusation is not a finding. Confidence is not verification.

Watch the exchange and compare the coverage for yourself:

• MS NOW’s coverage
• Good Morning America’s coverage
• Additional video coverage

Then ask yourself: What did I actually see? What was asserted? What was established? What remained unproven?

This is not an invitation to decide that one politician is good and another is bad. It is an invitation to examine the construction of a claim before adopting the conclusion attached to it.

That distinction is essential to sapient consciousness.

4. When Reality Confidence Breaks Down Your Attention Capacity

Let’s return to Salerno’s work for a moment.

In an abusive relationship, a person may be confronted repeatedly with conflicting accounts of what happened. They remember an event one way; the other person insists it happened differently. They experience hurtful behavior; the other person denies it, minimizes it, or says the victim caused it.

Over time, the person may become less confident in their own memory and judgment.

Now consider a different, broader situation: an information environment in which conflicting claims are constantly presented with certainty, corrections receive less attention than accusations, and people are encouraged to treat their political identity as a test of loyalty.

These are not equivalent experiences. A political disagreement is not the same thing as interpersonal abuse. Yet both situations raise a question about how we determine what is true.

When a claim conflicts with what we have previously been told, do we investigate?

Or do we dismiss the new evidence because accepting it would threaten our identity, our loyalties, or our image of someone we trust?

Do we become more curious when we encounter a contradiction—or more defensive?

And when we cannot resolve a question ourselves, do we seek reliable evidence from more than one source, or simply hand the decision to the person whose account feels most reassuring?

A healthy response to uncertainty isn’t blind faith in our own instincts. Our memories can be mistaken, our perceptions incomplete, and our intuitions wrong.

Reality confidence should not mean believing that we are always right. It should mean retaining the confidence and willingness to investigate when we might be wrong.

That is a very different kind of confidence from certainty.

5. From Attachment to Utility: Who Benefits by Capturing Your Attention

Lieberman’s evolutionary psychology examines the ways human beings navigate social relationships, cooperation, attraction, and competing interests.

One question we can extend from that work is how people are treated when a relationship becomes primarily instrumental: when another person’s value is measured by what they can provide rather than recognized as a person with independent needs and agency.

This question extends beyond intimate relationships.

Political campaigns need votes. Businesses need customers. Media organizations compete for attention. Social platforms seek engagement. Technology companies develop systems that can predict and influence behavior.

These activities are not inherently abusive or malicious. Persuasion is part of public life, and commercial and political communication can provide useful information.

But incentives matter.

If a system is rewarded primarily for keeping people engaged, it may favor content that provokes anger, anxiety, or fascination over content that helps people understand complicated issues.

If a campaign benefits from an audience believing a claim, it has an incentive to present that claim persuasively. That is precisely why independent reporting, evidence, transparency, and accountability matter.

The question isn’t whether every participant has malicious intentions.

The question is whether the system rewards behavior that undermines our ability to make informed choices.

This is where interpersonal manipulation and public persuasion begin to intersect—not because they are identical, but because both can exploit the gap between what captures our attention and what deserves our considered judgment.

6. Alan Watts, the Lost Moment & Attention

This is where I want to bring in Alan Watts.

Watts spent much of his life exploring the relationship between thought, identity, anxiety, and direct experience. In The Wisdom of Insecurity, first published in 1951, he examined our attempts to secure ourselves against uncertainty and our tendency to become absorbed in thoughts about life rather than being fully present to it.

Watts was not writing about social media algorithms or generative AI. He died in 1973. But his philosophical questions remain useful when we consider how modern information systems compete for our attention.

We can become so immersed in a story about the world that we stop examining the world itself.

We identify with a political tribe and begin to experience criticism of that tribe as criticism of ourselves.

We encounter a claim that confirms our fears and feel the satisfaction of having our suspicions validated.

We see a disturbing video and react before checking its date, context, source, or authenticity.

We may even become so invested in being right that the possibility of being wrong feels intolerable.

Watts invites us to consider the space between our immediate experience and the stories we construct around it.

That space is important.

It is where we can notice anger without allowing anger to dictate our conclusions. It is where we can recognize fear without automatically accepting the story that produced it. It is where we can tolerate uncertainty long enough to investigate.

And it is where we may recover a little freedom from our automatic responses.

The pause is not the absence of action. It is the opportunity to choose our action consciously.

7. AI Doesn’t Need to Be a Predator, Humans Do That Just Fine

Now we arrive at artificial intelligence.

The 2026 midterm election cycle is already providing examples of AI-generated and AI-altered political advertisements. The Washington Post reported on September 30 that researchers had identified at least 164 AI-generated or AI-enhanced political ads, including material that portrayed candidates in synthetic or misleading circumstances. Disclosure practices and state regulations vary. Read the reporting.

AI can make it faster and cheaper to create persuasive content. It can generate many variations of a message, imitate recognizable styles, produce synthetic images and voices, and help tailor communication to different audiences.

These capabilities can be used for legitimate purposes, including accessibility, translation, and explaining complicated issues. They can also be used to misrepresent a candidate, fabricate a scene, or give a false claim the appearance of independent confirmation.

We should not assume that every AI-generated political message is deceptive, that every campaign uses these tools in the same way, or that AI necessarily changes how people vote. The effects depend on the content, distribution, audience, and context.

But the underlying challenge is clear.

Humans have always had the ability to flatter, frighten, deceive, persuade, and manipulate one another. AI can make some of these activities easier to scale.

A misleading claim can become a series of images, clips, posts, and personalized messages. An error can be repeated until it appears familiar. A narrative can be adapted to the anxieties and identities of different audiences.

And synthetic media can make the old instruction to trust our eyes and ears less reliable than it once seemed.

The system does not need to possess malicious consciousness. It does not need to hate anyone. It may simply be executing instructions or optimizing for a particular objective.

Which brings us back to the humans who design, deploy, fund, and use these systems.

What are we rewarding? What are we optimizing? And what happens when the ability to capture attention becomes more important than the responsibility to inform?

Perhaps the most immediate danger isn’t that machines become conscious predators.

Perhaps it is that human beings build increasingly capable machines without adequately considering how those machines can amplify our own predatory tendencies.

And perhaps we should ask an equally uncomfortable question:

What happens when our technological intelligence grows while our capacity for reflection, discernment, and empathy fails to keep pace?

8. Predatory Consciousness & Sapient Consciousness Begins with Attention

In developing Sapience, I’ve been exploring a distinction between predatory consciousness and sapient consciousness.

Predatory consciousness, as I use the term, is not a clinical diagnosis. It is a framework for examining behavior organized around exploitation, domination, or the use of other beings as instruments.

Sapient consciousness is not simply the opposite of predatory behavior, nor is it synonymous with intelligence.

It involves noticing a situation, examining what is happening, considering consequences, recognizing the humanity of others, and consciously choosing a response.

The distinction becomes clearer when we consider the questions each orientation asks.

Predatory consciousness asks:

What can I make you do?

How can I use your fear?

What can I gain by controlling your attention?

Sapient consciousness asks:

What is actually happening here?

What evidence supports my interpretation?

What might I be missing?

What are the consequences of my response for other people?

Am I treating another human being as a person—or merely as a means to an end?

An intelligent person can still exploit others. A sophisticated AI can still optimize for a harmful objective. Neither intelligence nor technological capability automatically produces wisdom, empathy, or responsibility.

Sapience requires something more: the ability to notice, evaluate, and choose with an awareness of consequences.

And that begins with attention.

9. Before You Vote, Notice

I am not writing this to tell anyone which candidate or party to support. The responsibility for that choice belongs to each voter.

I am asking something more fundamental.

Before accepting an accusation, examine its evidence.

Before sharing a video, check its source and context.

Before assuming that a correction is dishonest because it comes from someone you distrust, investigate whether the correction is accurate.

Before dismissing an uncomfortable fact because it threatens your preferred narrative, ask whether you would apply the same standard to someone on the other side.

Before trusting a message because it confirms what you already believe, consider what evidence might change your mind.

And before deciding that your opponents are incapable of reason, remember that human beings are vulnerable to confirmation bias, emotional framing, and misinformation across political affiliations.

This is not a demand to abandon conviction. It is an invitation to make conviction answerable to evidence.

Democracy requires more than the opportunity to vote. It also depends on the quality of the information available to citizens, the accountability of public institutions, the integrity of political communication, and our willingness to examine claims rather than merely inherit them.

No individual can solve all of those problems alone.

But each of us can practice the habits that make manipulation more difficult.

We can pause.

We can investigate.

We can tolerate uncertainty.

We can correct ourselves.

We can refuse to confuse confidence with truth.

And we can remember that the person who disagrees with us is still a human being, not simply an enemy to defeat.

Conclusion: The Moment Before the Choice

Somewhere between the headline and the reaction, between the accusation and the judgment, between the image and the belief, there is a moment.

It may last only a few seconds.

But in that moment, we can notice what is happening inside us.

We can ask whether we are responding to evidence or to fear.

We can examine whether our trust has been earned.

We can distinguish what we know from what we assume.

We can recognize when someone—or something—is trying to direct our attention, and decide whether that direction serves our understanding or merely serves someone else’s objective.

That moment does not guarantee that we will always choose wisely. Sapience is not perfection. It is the ongoing practice of becoming more aware of what we do, why we do it, and what our choices may mean for others.

And that practice matters far beyond a single election.

It matters in our relationships, our communities, our institutions, and the technological systems we create.

The question is not simply whether AI will shape the future.

The question is whether we will remain conscious participants in shaping it.

So, before the next headline, the next video, the next accusation, or the next ballot:

Notice.

Then discern.

Then choose.

Because the most important question may not be who has captured your attention.

It may be whether you are still able to direct it yourself.

Who is choosing?

And what will you choose begins with attention, noticing, contemplation of motives.

Fate or Destiny?

Bonus: Alias Grace & William Lyon Mackenzie

Perhaps a poetic proclamation from a previous revolution and century is in order here. This is a time when the poor were being trampled by a rich and tyrannical government, which seems fitting for a final thought on choice now. The proclamation comes from Alias Grace (a book by Margaret Atwood that has also been made into a Netflix mini-series).

In the the second episode of Netflix’s Season 1, Grace is trying to help Mary get through the night after enduring a blotch abortion. She asks Grace to tell her a story. Grace tells her the only stories she knows are the ones she told her. Mary asks Grace to tell her about William Lyon Mackenzie’s escape. They recite it together:

“Tell me about William Lyon Mackenzie’s escape.

William Lyon Mackenzie was a great man who led the rebellion here.

After the rebellion was lost and Montgomery’s Tavern was burned to the ground, he made his way towards the United States.

Many, many people hid him and protected him in their farm houses and kept their mouths shut when they saw him because Canadians want liberty and freedom.

They don’t have it yet, but one day they will.

Because we didn’t lose, we just haven’t won yet.

Say the speech that I taught you.

“The law says that we shall not be taxed without our consent by the men of our choice, but a wicked and tyrannical government has trampled upon that law, divided the plunder, and declared that, regardless of justice, they will continue to roll in their splendid carriages and riot in their palaces at our expense, that we are poor, spiritless, ignorant peasants, who were born to toil for our betters.

But the peasants are beginning to open their eyes and feel their strength.

Too long have we been hoodwinked by Baal’s priests, who take the wages of sin and do the work of iniquity, each one looking to gain in his quarter.

Canadians! Do you love freedom?

I know you do.

Do you hate oppression?

Who dare deny it?”

— SubLike Scripts

Today, we could replace carriages with private jet planes and riot in palaces with Mar A Lago, Epstein Island, and the Epstein Memorial Ballroom being built on the rubble of the East Wing of the White House.

Oh how history takes wicked loops along endless curves of time.

Sources & Further Exploration

Peter Salerno and Debra Lieberman

• Peter Salerno and Debra Lieberman, conversation on dark personality traits and evolutionary psychology.Watch on YouTube. A discussion of biological and evolutionary contributions to dark traits, manipulation, relationships, and psychoeducation.
• Dr. Peter Salerno, official website and professional resources. Dr. Peter Salerno. See his work on pathological relationships and Traumatic Cognitive Dissonance. His concepts are presented here as his framework, not as universally accepted diagnostic terminology.
• Lieberman Labs. Research and publications. Explore Dr. Debra Lieberman’s work in evolutionary psychology.

The Schmitt–Smith hearing

• Associated Press. Hawks? Hawkeyes? Schmitt in probing Smith mistakes basketball mascots. Reporting on the September 29, 2026, exchange.
• Reuters. Former Trump prosecutor Jack Smith tells Senate he won’t be silenced by prosecution threats. Broader reporting on the Senate hearing and its disputed claims.
• Video coverage: MS NOW · Good Morning America · Additional coverage

Alan Watts

• Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety (1951). Publisher’s book page. A philosophical exploration of anxiety, uncertainty, awareness, and the present moment.
• Alan Watts Organization. Official archive and original recordings. A resource for exploring Watts’ work in its original context.

AI and the 2026 midterms

• The Washington Post, September 30, 2026. How AI is revolutionizing campaign advertising. Reporting on AI-generated and AI-enhanced political ads during the 2026 midterms.
• Brennan Center for Justice, August 11, 2026. Does AI Fight or Fuel Election Disinformation?. Research examining how AI tools can help people assess election claims while also enabling the creation of deceptive media.
• Federal Election Commission. Election results and voting information. Official information for U.S. federal elections.

Alias Grace & Willian Lyon Mackenzie

• Proclamation by his excellency Sir Francis Bond Head … to the Queen’s faithful subjects in Upper Canada, by Upper Canada. Lieutenant-Governor (1836-1838 : Head)
• William Lyon Mackenzie, Proclamation to the People of Upper Canada, 1837
• Proclamations by William Lyon Mackenzie and Sir Francis Bond Head, December 1837
• R29 Binge Club: Alias Grace Season 1 Recaps; ARIANA ROMERO, LAST UPDATED NOVEMBER 3, 2017, 5:00 PM
• Storytelling and Power, Theme Analysis of Alias Grace, Litcharts
• Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood is a historical fiction novel published in 1996 that fictionalizes the notorious 1843 double murder of Thomas Kinnear and Nancy Montgomery in Upper Canada

Archetypal Animation

Music: The Deliberate Pause — 03:10 Stability: Moderate, unhurried tempo. Felt piano, restrained strings, soft analog synths, and a low pulse build from uncertain minor harmony toward an open, hopeful resolution. No solos or vocals; leave space for narration. Briefly thin the arrangement during the voting pause. Created with Genolve.

Images/Animations: Created with Genolve.

Archetypal Merch