July 30, 2018--The Willing Suspension of Disbelief

I continue struggle to understand more fully why so many Americans believe Donald Trump when so much of what he says is blatantly false. What causes them to suspend the ability to think clearly and instead simply believe.

One explanation put forth by some is that there is a belief gene, a wired human propensity to believe bold narratives and follow without questioning charismatic leaders and non-verifiable doctrines. This would be one reason all peoples through all of history appear to have powerful belief systems that they eagerly follow.

For early humans, some claim, this was essential to survival. Hominoids on their own would be easy prey in a survival-of-the-fittest environment so to increase their chances to thrive it was important for them to band together into hunting and gathering groups. And to coordinate their defenses against those other animals who saw them as potential sources of protein. 

In these kind of tribal realities, to assure working together rather than struggling on their own, various forms of coordinated activity were beneficial. Important to that was the ability to identify and follow capable leaders. To subsume aspects of oneself for the sake of our species living on. 

Tribes not only required strong leaders but also willing followers. Hierarchies emerged as a result and it was helpful if individuals found ways to fit comfortably within them. In contemporary terms this meant the willingness to "sacrifice" aspects of one's individuality and freedom of action. All presumably for the greater good.

It helped if proto-leaders were charismatic, shamanistic, and thus could appeal to the emerging consciousness of the human spirit and that proto-followers, over evolutional-time, would develop the capacity to feel secure when submitting to leaders' origin narratives, promulgated codes of behavior, and ultimately to tribal belief systems.

All aspects of this that added to the likelihood of survival and propagation, over millennia, likely led to natural selection with these survival adaptions entering the human gene pool.

To survive our distant ancestors needed to learn to believe.

Another way of thinking about how this works when most effective is from an insight by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. As a poet and aesthetic philosopher, in 1817 he of course was thinking about the force of artistic narrative--how we willingly suspend disbelief for the sake of enjoyment.

He suggested that if a writer could infuse "human interest and a semblance of truth" into a fantastic tale, readers would suspend judgement concerning the implausibility of the narrative.

There also is a potential dark side--"cognitive estrangement" can take advantage of a person's ignorance to promote the suspension of disbelief.

Either way, at the level of literature or in regard to human social behavior (including the propensity to believe things that are not based on truth or evidence) these capacities are pervasive and powerful. 

To bring this to today we can see the same mechanisms occurring in our politics; and though we no longer need to believe to survive, we may be seeing these residual instincts still operating. And if cognitive estrangement is in play, there are forces at work to manipulate and control our thinking and behavior.