The Willing Suspension of Disbelief

The most interesting thing about human beings, next to consciousness itself, is what Coleridge called the “willing suspension of disbelief.” As Coleridge pointed out, we are wholly capable, indeed we are eager, to “pretend” any number of things we know are not true. This is how art works: we knowingly buy into an invented world.

Take, for example, a Hollywood movie. We know perfectly well that it is completely imaginary, that the people we are watching are not real people, but actors acting the parts. We have seen the same actors in other movies, in other parts. We even know more or less how it must end—we know, for example, that the hero is not going to get killed. We know, as Chekhov observed, that a gun visible in a drawer early in the movie, will be used by the final curtain. Yet we readily become quite wrapped up in it, feel real emotions for the images on the screen, real fear and concern, “forget” that we know the ending, “forget” everything outside the movie itself.

In fact, mostly we do not really forget. It is a question of splitting off our consciousness, so that one part of our mind knows all this, while another does not.

It is a talent even the smallest children have. It is the ability to “make believe.”

We are the same with sports and games: while they are perfectly useless, and what happens in them means nothing beyond themselves, we become very powerfully wrapped up in their progress and outcome. We yell; we cheer; we demand that the referee be hanged. Then we go home and go about our lives.

And we find this experience infinitely enjoyable.

This is a good thing; and it is a bad thing.

For something like the same thing happens with fanaticism, with true believers of all kinds. We are perfectly able, when presented with an attractive and emotionally satisfying theory, to “believe” things that are obviously false to reason and to evidence. Once people have a comfortable fixed idea, they will positively ignore evidence that contradicts it. As Churchill once observed, people occasionally stumble upon truth. But most of us just stand back up, dust ourselves off, and continue on our chosen way.

But the same ability gives us release, as Aristotle noted, from the stresses and the tribulations of life. When things are bad, we can step into a good book, or a beautiful painting, and escape the horrors of the everyday.

This profound human ability was mistaken, by Freud and Jung, for an “unconscious,” or “subconscious.” But this way of looking at it is completely wrong. For at least the vast majority of us, I would think—certainly for me--we are perfectly able to distinguish the dream from the waking world, and are never fully unconscious of either. We are not genuinely unconscious when we are reading a book; we have simply split our consciousness, so that we are aware of two levels of reality at once. As Blake described it:

Now I a two-fold vision see;
And a two-fold vision is given to me.
Tis fourfold in my supreme delight;
And threefold in the darkest night;
And twofold always; May God us keep
From single vision, and Newton’s sleep.

This ability of ours to split our consciousness is of obvious value in explaining the nature of the Trinity. For, if we can split our consciousnesses in such a way, so surely can God, who is much greater than we, creating separate “persons,” including one provisionally unaware of his Godhood in order to share completely in our sufferings. Father, Son, incarnation, Holy Ghost.

It is also helpful in understanding the “problem of evil”—why this world, though created by an all-powerful and good God, has undesirable things in it. As Aristotle explained, in this game of suspended disbelief, we actually enjoy the experience of fear and pity—we go to the theatre or the cinema repeatedly to experience them. Children play tag in part in order to get scared; and no game is fun if you cannot possibly lose. So too, this world can be seen, as Shakespeare said, as a stage, and our little lives as dreams or sports we are enjoying in the manner of an instructive performance.

Life, in the end, is a two-ring, or a three-ring circus. On the one hand, there is our little diurnal performance on the stage. On the other, happening concurrently, is our eternal life in heaven. And also perhaps again, eternally present, the New Jerusalem at the end of time—the perfection, not just of our individual souls, but of all things. Given the latter two, the unhappy events of the former one are, perhaps, sheer playful joy. And perhaps we are all along conscious, in some part, of the latter two, even as we lose ourselves, by willing suspension of disbelief, in the former.

The trick is to remain always somewhat aware of the reality behind it all: of God and of his kingdom. And perhaps the point of life is learning that trick.

… be cheerful, sir.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.