You Can’t Trust Your Eyes, Your Ears Or The Traitor Within

The Traitors castle dark and forbidding — The Traitor’s Castle Image adapted from Pixabay

Seeing is not believing.

We say that seeing is believing, and yet we know that’s not true. Since the advent of deep fakes, particularly, we can’t trust any videos we see online anymore.

We don’t know if that video we’ve just watched of a celebrity doing something, or a normal member of the public doing something, is true.

Why you can’t trust your eyes, your ears or The Traitor Within. Seeing is not believing.#TheTraitors #TheTraitorsUK #Psychology #deception pic.twitter.com/HmFOlsp74v

— Adrian Warnock (@adrianwarnock) January 27, 2026

Also available as a podcast

It could be a sort of drama that someone’s made up, or more than that, it could be something that a computer has made up.

I watched one just recently of a gorilla, I think, and a child had fallen into his cage, or his enclosure, and he picked up this child and passed him up to the parents to rescue.

It all looked very convincing, and then I saw, right on the video description, it said, this has been created by AI.

So it was complete nonsense, and it was not true. It does mean, though, that we can’t trust anything we see with our eyes anymore.

But optical illusions have for centuries highlighted the many ways that we do not even see the world accurately. Our brains take signals from our optic nerves and creates an approximation of the reality which serves us very well but can mislead us in many ways.

The same is true of listening to or reading other people’s words. When we speak, there is an intent we have set in our heart, that gets translated into verbal words, which is then associated with nonverbal cues like the expression on our face, the volume, speed, and tone of our voice, and whether we are using too much or too little eye contact.

The people listening sometimes mishear our actual words, and frequently will assume all kinds of things about our message and motives from those accompanying signals.

As they process the message and compare it to their own internal assumptions, the message again often gets misinterpreted and we can think we have said one thing, and our hearer thinks we have said something altogether different, and with different motives to those we actually had.

There is a simple old game where a person whispers a message into their neighbor’s ear, who then passes it on to the next in a chain. By the time it has gone through just a few people, the message is usually completely wrong and based on all kinds of errors and false assumptions.

So we also can’t trust anything that we hear. There are certain politicians, and I’m not going to name names at this point, who seemed to just love lying to us all the time.

Lies, lies, lies, lies, lies.

And yet, perhaps, it’s inside of us, The Traitor Within, that is the biggest liar of all. Do you trust what your heart tells you? Do you follow your heart?

I would suggest that you have as much scepticism about what’s in your heart as you do when you see a video that you think might be a deepfake.

Explore these ideas further in my book

The Traitor Within: Understanding and Healing Our Deceitful Hearts

BUY HERE

“The human heart is the most deceitful of all things, and desperately wicked. Who really knows how bad it is?” (Jeremiah 17:9, NLT).

And yet our culture tells us to “follow your heart”. No wonder it too is now desperately sick and beyond cure. This book will explore the cultural phenomenon The Traitors as a modern parable as it unmasks the human heart.

Adrian blends his medical insights gained from his work as a doctor and psychiatrist with pastoral wisdom gathered from twenty-five years serving as part of a church leadership team. He witnessed a period of church growth from less than twenty members to thousands.

In recent years Adrian has also experienced chronic illness following his diagnosis with blood cancer, and this book reflects his passion to help others face all kinds of suffering with hope and compassion.

This book is available as an early access preview edition which includes free updates.