Requiem for George Santos's Congressional Tenure...and the Concept of a Fixed Reality
Tales of the stupidest thing that you could possibly imagine!
This is a health themed newsletter written by Owen Scott Muir, M.D. It is hand crafted satire journalism for our absurd age. Support the work by sharing and subscribing.
George Santos is indicted. People close to George Santos have been indicted. George Santos is a weird character. If you haven't been following the George Santos story— you're forgiven— I'll give you a brief summary.
George Santos is a self-made man, according to George Santos. George Santos was elected to the US Congress House of Representatives. He represents Queens, New York.
He ran for Congress on a bold platform of something or other. According to a federal indictment, he's a goddamn liar. But he's not the traditional politician sort of liar. According to the federal prosecutor he's a different sort of liar than most politicians. He tells stories that are so strange it's hard to believe anyone would bother. Here is where, as a Psychiatrist, I get to explain —this is not specific to George Santos.
Some of our human co-travelers have a relationship to the truth that is different than most of us would imagine.
And much to my surprise, my story, somehow, intersects with that of George Santos in a way that has actual relevance for federal prosecution around federal election law.
What is true?
People tend to assume that there is objective reality. And for the purpose of this column, I'm going to assume two things. One of them is that there is such a thing as objective reality. The more important assumption is that objective reality doesn't matter at all. Because nobody has access to objective reality, directly.
Now, a little bit of neuroscience, because it will make this whole exercise a lot easier.
I am going to describe the process by which a visual object in the world becomes represented in our brains. My actual neuroscience colleagues please do not need to pick this apart too much. This is a simplification.
I'm going to show you the picture of what I'm looking at right now:
I am sitting in my office, and in front of me is a window, some plants, and a medical device. It is one of the tools we used to get depression to remission without any medication. That remission is in people have responded to nothing else.
This article is also not about that.
If you were to ask me the question: “what do you see?” Here's how I would get to the answer:
The photons from the sun fly 146.9 million km to the earth at 299,338 km per second in the vacuum of space. When they hit the Earth's atmosphere, some of those photons will hit atoms in the atmosphere, and others will not. When a photon “hits” an atom, it can cause an electron to absorb the energy and bounce up to a higher energy state. This excited electron rapidly falls down to a lower energy state, and then it re-emits the photon…this process takes a little bit of time.1
When it hits the building across the street, those photons bounce. Some of them bounce, after that absorption and re-emission process, and fly through space, through the window, bounce off some things in my office.
Eventually enough of them hit my eyeball. The lucky photons will land on my retina.
There is a process of transcoding that takes place—in retina it’s cell that has the ability to create an electrical signal2. photons get absorbed by specialize cells in the eye, and then output a pattern of firing by those neurons.
Both eyes get lights in, and they project electrical patterns of firing into the brain. There is a parsing of that info, the information from the left and right eye gets combined, and then it's actually split into separate left and right visual fields — after crossing over at the optic chiasm—through a series of different nerves to the posterior part of the brain, call the occipital cortex.
The visual fields get represented, not just a separate eyeballs. The left field of vision from both the left and the right eye go to the same place in the visual cortex. It's a pretty neat trick. We have a bunch of complex visual processing that figures out “what we see.”
Some brain regions work out lines and orientations, some of it colors, some of it does contrast. There is a pattern of input in a pattern of output of each group of neurons. Next, this information has to be routed to our conscious experience! What we see with her eyeballs and what we experience as seen with our conscious mind is different. I'll prove it to you.
Let's imagine I had a strange neurological event. It's like a stroke, but I don't lose my vision. I have a weird phenomenon that doesn't allow my visual cortex to process TMS machines. I know. That sounds horrifying. It is really easy to simulate though—I'm just gonna focus on what's out the window:
We have processes for selective attention. Maybe the thing that's really important is a sniper! Or, I think it's a sniper? Maybe he's on top of that building looking to kill me? I'm gonna look closely:
No sniper! Thank God.
But what if I had a stroke? I am going to simulate a stroke:
This new hemi-field cut is brought to you by Apple Vision Pro.
They are a sponsor of this newsletter!
Nobody thinks Apple is actually sponsoring my visual field cut illustration. Our brains are what regulate whether that visual field cut happens or not. They also tell us if we believe something.
Everybody reading this thinks they saw an apple logo. What if I told you everybody reading this abruptly had a visual field cut that only existed in the shape of an apple with a little bit of it chopped out? That mass transient ischemic attack resolved, and there is no Apple logo to interrupt that picture. It was all blood clot you had in the midst of reading this newsletter. Look again:
It's just medical devices by top-performing public company Brainsway. We're all gonna be fine. You didn't have any permanent damage.
You can scroll up, and look at the other picture. You can scroll down, and see the picture right above this block of text. There is no objective way for any individual to prove one hypothesis more correct than the other without additional information.
The objective reality is either one thing happened or another thing happened. On your own, you can not come to any conclusion that has some special objective truth. You're either having a series of recurrent ischemic attacks, and so is everybody else, and something very rare is happening all at once, or Owen Muir used Mematic on his phone to fake it. And Apple Sponsored the whole exercise!
The unlikeliness of the above scenario, especially if you compare your experience to that of others, is likely to convince you that there is objective truth, and that it is agreed by all observers. Welcome to science. It takes enough separate observation, and agrees that if it's highly unlikely, that's not what's happening.
This is usually a really good way to go about things. It doesn't prepare you for the very strange world that we're about to enter.
A Denial of Objective Reality is Here 👏 Not 👏 Leaving!
Let’s say you're spending the night excited about a new social media platform. let us imagine it's invite only.
It uses AT protocol, which means that the invite tree and all activity on the platform has a similar audit mechanism to blockchain for cryptocurrency.
I was an early invite. In its early days, it had a very silly vibe. There were glitches in the code that led to confusing “hellthreads” that would suck you in and break the ability to escape. It was light hearted fun! I wrote two books of poetry about it—one was just the title, but one was actually written a hard copy published in a day and both are available on Amazon!
The hellthread was opportunistic title, but Why We Skeet is sincerely poetry…about blue sky social before the George Santos…incident…
Then…someone invited George Santos.
Who invited him is a matter of indelible record, because of AT protocol—the invite tree is not accessible to the public, but exists forevermore. Here is the picture he posted on his arrival:
His accompanying message?
“The conservatives are here and we 👏aren’t 👏leaving.👏”
Keep in mind, this was the heady early day (singular) of as of yet not-under-indictment Mr. Santos on Blue Sky. I used mematic to give him a tour around the platform. I even made a video of the process:
I took George’s photo and placed him in front of other trending photos of that day. For example:
Flowers?
Well, in my mind, the conservatives were here, and they're not leaving the flowers either. A little bit of Mematic, and we are done:
What about the desert planet of Arakis? From the movie Dune? With the giant sandworms?
The conservatives weren't leaving there either. Not according to my cheesy meme-making!
There he is. Hanging out in front of a giant sandworm. Reminding us all that fear is the mind-killer.
It was nice to see that George also liked my book. All of this was silliness, and all of it was a day before that particularly strange man got very indicted the very next morning:
Holy crap. Federally indicted? I knew he was a weirdo, but my God. This is just bizarre.
This means the invite to Blue Sky took on a whole new significance! At the time, people were selling Blue Sky invites for money. They had a cash value. Which means they would have to be disclosed as a campaign contribution!
And, spoiler alert: it was not disclosed. I checked. While checking, I was taken down a wormhole of…the unreal. I don’t known who invited him, but it was a crime for his campaign to not disclose the in-kind contribution with a cash value. Not the kind of crime anyone would notice, until there were 23 other counts waiting for him.
Here is what the Department of Justice had to say that day:
A 23-count superseding indictment was filed today in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, charging George Anthony Devolder Santos, better known as “George Santos,” the United States Representative for the Third District of New York, with one count of conspiracy to commit offenses against the United States, two counts of wire fraud, two counts of making materially false statements to the Federal Election Commission (FEC), two counts of falsifying records submitted to obstruct the FEC, two counts of aggravated identity theft, and one count of access device fraud, in addition to the seven counts of wire fraud, three counts of money laundering, one count of theft of public funds, and two counts of making materially false statements to the United States House of Representatives that were charged in the original indictment.
These are not trivial criminal charges. There were multiple schemes, including:
To create the public appearance that his campaign had met that financial benchmark and was otherwise financially viable, Santos and Marks agreed to falsely report to the FEC that at least 10 family members of Santos and Marks had made significant financial contributions to the campaign, when Santos and Marks both knew that these individuals had neither made the reported contributions nor given authorization for their personal information to be included in such false public reports. In addition, understanding that the national party committee relied on FEC fundraising data to evaluate candidates’ qualification for the program, Santos and Marks agreed to falsely report to the FEC that Santos had loaned the campaign significant sums of money, when, in fact, Santos had not made the reported loans and, at the time the loans were reported, did not have the funds necessary to make such loans. These false reported loans included a $500,000 loan, when Santos had less than $8,000 in his personal and business bank accounts.
As well as committing credit card fraud for anyone foolish enough to make real, actual contributions to his campaign:
In addition, between approximately December 2021 and August 2022, Santos devised and executed a fraudulent scheme to steal the personal identity and financial information of contributors to his campaign. He then charged contributors’ credit cards repeatedly, without their authorization. Because of these unauthorized transactions, funds were transferred to Santos’s campaign, to the campaigns of other candidates for elected office, and to his own bank account. To conceal the true source of these funds and to circumvent campaign contribution limits, Santos falsely represented that some of the campaign contributions were made by other persons, such as his relatives or associates, rather than the true cardholders. Santos did not have authorization to use their names in this way.
For example, in December 2021, one contributor (the “Contributor”) texted Santos and others to make a contribution to his campaign, providing billing information for two credit cards. In the days after he received the billing information, Santos used the credit card information to make numerous contributions to his campaign and affiliated political committees in amounts exceeding applicable contribution limits, without the Contributor’s knowledge or authorization. To mask the true source of these contributions and thereby circumvent the applicable campaign contribution limits, Santos falsely identified the contributor for one of the charges as one of his relatives. In the following months, Santos repeatedly charged the Contributor’s credit card without the Contributor’s knowledge or authorization, attempting to make at least $44,800 in charges and repeatedly concealing the true source of funds by falsely listing the source of funds as Santos himself, his relatives and other contributors. On one occasion, Santos charged $12,000 to the Contributor’s credit card, ultimately transferring the vast majority of that money into his personal bank account.
The Modus Operandi of Mr. Santos appears to be abject denial of objective reality? For example:
Santos claims he was oblivious to the existence of the frequently NSFW site OnlyFans until “about three weeks ago.” The November House Ethics report showed that he spent campaign money on the platform in the months before his comments.
He denied any validity of the ethics investigation as well, as reported by politico:
Nov. 16: Santos announces in a fiery post on X that he will not seek reelection in 2024 after a House Ethics Committee report found that he misused campaign funds and violated the Ethics in Government Act. “If there was a single ounce of ETHICS in the “Ethics committee”, they would have not released this biased report,” he writes. “It is a disgusting politicized smear … I will remain steadfast in fighting for my rights and for defending my name in the face of adversity. I will however NOT be seeking re-election for a second term in 2024 as my family deserves better than to be under the gun from the press all the time.”
I’m resisting the urge, profoundly, to grammar-police Mr. Santos for the use of “if there was a single ounce…” in the above statement, given the urgent need for the word “were” to be used in its stead, given the grammar-police will have to wait in line behind all the other enforcement actions waiting for him.
As far as I can tell, the least objectionable thing George Santos ever did is his life-affirming work as a drag performer. His campaign treasurer, Ms. Marks, admitted that her work for him was a scam before sentencing for prison time:
Speaking to the judge, Marks said that, among other things, she and Santos had falsely recorded in campaign finance reports that he had loaned his campaign $500,000 even though, in reality, he did not make that loan and did not have the money to do so. She said the purpose of the fake loan was to make it look like he had a well-funded campaign, which might attract other donors.
When Ms. Marks needed to be replaced, it seems as if Santos might have just…made up someone to fill the role:
But Saurav Ghosh, a former FEC enforcement lawyer who now works with the Campaign Legal Center watchdog group, said the initial report “reflects a complete lack of sophistication and lack of diligence with the details about what they are filing.”
“It seems like his campaign has never done any of kind of reasonable job of filing accurate and complete statements, which is why the FEC has asked them so many questions and why the public, justifiably, is asking them so many questions,” Ghosh added.
Election watchdogs say they have been stumped when they have sought to learn more about Olson. “I’ve never seen this before: Having a complete mystery as a treasurer for a sitting member of Congress,” said Jordan Libowitz of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
The address for the new campaign treasurer's legal filing was shared by Mr. Santos and his sister…and its is at a moment like this that we all might need to accept:
For some people, objective reality is NOT THAT IMPORTANT. Most of us assume it’s important. That it is somehow real.
For other people what is in their mind is what is real. That is the only real. And it turns out for most of us, we have the same basic system in place. What is in our mind is real, and our mind convinces us that it is the same real for everybody else. Some outstanding individuals do a fine job of highlighting the difference between the reality inside your mind and the reality that other people might experience.
It's nice to have an objective anchor—legal discovery, blockchain ledgers—as tools to confirm our suspicions! AT Protocol doesn't care what you believe. Blockchains (and other sophisticated cryptography) do a good job of creating an indelible record. Human Minds? They are more fallible, more flexible. We still have to interpret all of the technologies we create through our subjective experience.
Some remarkable individuals… like George Santos …have the ability to ignore “so called” objective reality, and embrace their own internal experience as the only reality. To everybody else, this feels like lies.
I don't get to know if George Santos knows he's lying. Nobody does. For some of us, the only truth is the truth that they experience. The complete lack of doubt, it makes me uneasy, but it doesn't make me sure that George Santos knows he's a liar.
Our own belief in what we believe? That is the speed of light when it comes to humans. The DSM alternate model for personality disorders has a nice anchor point for extreme impairment in identity function:
And another for extreme impairment in self direction:
It's quite an indictment…of the assumption that everybody has the same relationship with objective reality. At least in this case, it has led to literal indictments.
This is how light “slows down” when it's not moving through a vacuum, without changing the actual speed of light.
For 460 nm light, specifically, there is a third photo receptor that doesn't get a lot of press, but does not project a visual cortex. It only projects to the superchiasmatic nucleus and serves to set the day/ night clock in your brain.
This was a long and winding read, but it delivers on Footnote 2 alone. Thanks for lesson on personality disorder and demonstration of flexible reality. Its one thing to amuse (and annoy) and another thing entirely to defraud.
It's interesting that the DSM describes so many traits that CHILDREN have. In adulthood it's a condition. In childhood, I assume?--it's a developmental stage.
I remember a teacher getting upset with my child when very young because he couldn't tell the difference between things he imagined and reality. I was supposed to be really tough on him until he stopped believing what he imagined was REAL. But he simply wasn't able to make the distinction. I assumed he was going to outgrow this, as I recalled having a similar experience in childhood, and believed my home was surrounded by monkeys living in trees. But one day I just stopped believing this and other things like a giant heap of dirt in a nearby field covered a working Pontiac that I simply needed to uncover and could drive.
My child did outgrow his tendency as well.
This perhaps explains why I feel oddly protective of George Santos though--he reminds me of a child. I maybe have a gut instinct when an adult reminds me of a child, like 'oh no! He's gonna get in so much trouble now!' And I feel distressed. Of course I realize the law is the law, he's not a child, etc. Some people do have a way of cognizing though that's clearly lacking some capacity other adults tend to have. It's very curious. Is there any understanding of the actual cause--like a structural deficiency or something?