Usually refering to works of fiction, movies, TV etc.
But I think it’s a much larger phenomenon. It has esaped fiction, entered real life and politics. It drives a lot of people these days to stick with bad narratives instead of facts and, yes, truth.
Meaning: they’re willing to swallow tons of contradictions, plot holes etc. because they want to be convinced by what they’re seeing or being told. That enables certain public people to tell them very flimsy stories.
This is not purely about people choosing bad input because it suits them. It’s not only about being lied to and believing those lies. It’s about being lied to badly and still not letting go of the narrative. Wanting to take it for real so badly.
edit: I’m beginning to realize that people who don’t know or haven’t known suspension of disbelief will try to explain it with something similar that they’re more familiar with.
And it is very similar to things we see happening in so-called political discourse these days, esp. in the USA.
But many have known this since before Trump1.0, see e.g. TVTropes and Wikipedia.
I think this is a fascinating idea.
And I just tried to explain it to a friend and she didn’t get it, then I came back to the thread to find respondents who didn’t get it in the same way she didn’t.
She kept trying to warp it into something like confirmation bias, even though I kept trying to get her to see that the significant thing about suspension of disbelief is that truth and reality don’t even enter into it - they aren’t even meaningful concepts.
The only thing that’s necessary when disbelief is suspended is that the narrative remain acceptably internally consistent. Whether itt true or not or corresponds with reality or not is entirely irrelevant, since the entire process of expectng and testing for those qualities has been set aside.
Again, that’s a fascinating idea. I’ve long suspected that Trump is unable to distinguish between truth and falsehood, but that that was a consequence of his narcissism and egotism - that effectively the only measure he has for truth or falsehood is whether he believes something to be true or not - that the concept of consensual reality isn’t even coherent in his entirely self-absorbed internal reality.
But I’ve long wondered how the at least somewhat more sane people following him manage it. Something like confirmation bias would only work up to a point that Trump has long since gone beyond.
And I think you might be on to something - just as I do when I sit down to read a novel or watch a movie or a series, when they start engaging in politics, they switch the parts of their brains that track truth and reality entirely off and instead just follow along with the narrative, whatever it might be.
“Acceptably” is holding it together there. Do you mean everyone has a range of what’s acceptable? I agree with that, in that there’s may be some personal threshold before they snap out of it and say “Hang on, this doesn’t make sense any more”.
Yeah this exactly.
Something else that might play into it: so many conspiracy nuts refer to movies as if they were history, or prophecy, or scientific research. As if they were valid in a way they clearly aren’t, because they’re fiction. Maybe they really do live in a world where these things are interchangeable.
This exactly. Learning programming was a HUGE hit to my understanding and trust of myself.
Most people don’t go through the visceral experience of seeing how shitty the human experience lines up with reality. Such people absolutely believe in bullshit for the simple reason that it feels correct.
…there might well be something to that.
Yes - exactly as you say, research needs to be done on suspension of disbelief.
And thanks for sharing that fascinating idea.