It's obviously a combination of both. You're just not opened to seeing it.

Think about incredibly religious people: they see the same thing as other people as being extremely different from how someone else sees it.

For someone that is supposedly the opposite of an idealist, you seem like you avoid reading or studying or learning anything new. If everything is empirical, and not effected by ideas, then you should studying what is empirically there fastidiously and with great passion, but you just preach and have no practice.