A CrazyMaking Project
Shortly after Osama bin Laden was killed by US forces in Abaddabad in 2011, my oldest boy had a classmate over for dinner. When the conversation turned to the week’s weighty events, I was surprised to learn that he didn’t believe a word of it. This 13-year old, suburban, son of a single, left-ish mother counted himself wise to the work-a-day mendacity of the powers that be. Little dude was all in for the hermeneutics of suspicion. Well, bully for him. Personally, even at my most defiant, I’ve never been persuaded that impulsive and comprehensive dismissal of the dominant narrative is, overall, better than a sweeping trust of the same. So I pressed him on this, respectful and a little cautious. I have passing familiarity with, and curiosity about, the recent history of American conspiracy paranoia. I am aware that while these schemas can be emotionally charged, they are also usually supported by some kind of internal consistency, and I was curious to see what that logic might be. After some cagey back and forth, though, it became apparent that there was something overriding the need for this rationality. It became apparent that while he believed bin Laden was still alive, he also believed (his word) that he had been killed years earlier. Like Schroedinger’s Cat, bin Laden was somehow both alive and dead.
Initially, I thought this was a fluke, an idiosyncrasy of an adolescent figuring things out in a turbulent world. But it turns out he was far from alone. In fact it’s a common enough phenomena, this believing both that bin Laden is still alive and that he was killed years before 2011, to register statistically. And it was presaged by ideas about the death of Princess Diana 14 years earlier, ideas that she was both killed by the royal family and somehow secretly alive somewhere. This cognitive dissonance is apparently preferable to, or more sustainable than, the dissonant menace of the randomly brutal world portrayed in our news cycles.
It is an interesting time for beliefs, for believing in things. It is an interesting time for propositional statements in general, and our relationships with them. What do we believe, and why do we believe it? In the Post-Truth Age of Dis/Information what, specifically, does it mean to believe something?
Leonard Pozner used to dabble in conspiracy theories. Before the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting took the life of his son Noah, he enjoyed what he described as “suspending your disbelief.” “It's like sitting down and watching a science fiction movie, and then looking at the what if,” he said, “And it's just fun, especially if there's no price to pay in your life, and there's no cost to that way of thinking, then it's just a game.” Such consequential “ifs.”
Another way of saying “suspension of disbelief” is, well, belief. Except of course that the former has a sort of boundary around it, like the borders of a chess board, or the boundaries of a soccer pitch. Both are commitments of sorts—ontological, epistemological commitments—but the former is held within the confines of a kind of eruv, a more-or-less ritualized field of engagement. That playing field may be the theater stage, the pages of a novel, or, today, a Reddit thread, Twitter post or YouTube channel.
Belief mediates our relationship with a broad range of ideas and phenomena—belief in conspiracy theories, in climate change, in the opinions of experts, in placebo effects and the effects of vaccines, in the valuation of the stock market and the value of a work of art, in the Nicene Creed, in a flat Earth. A vast, churning sea of competing ideas and ideologies, of data sets and delusions, facts and fantasies and outright lies, blasts at us through the firehose of our digital devices. It buffets us through an ever-expanding ecosystem of screens; in airports, bars and gyms, in cars and taxis and trains, at the gas pump and in the dentist’s waiting room.
So how do we regard this mob of truth-claims which petition us for loyalty? We can double down and commit to any of a range of possible fundamentalisms, whether secular, religious or political. Alternately, we can suspend any commitment to truth propositions altogether. We can detach ourselves from any emotional or intellectual investment in fact-claims beyond our immediate ken, throw up our hands and surrender to the great cloud of unknowing. Powerful interests seem dedicated to this outcome. While this posture can bring a measure of solace to the mystically-minded, it is also, notably, the dynamic evident in successfully subjugated populations.
Or we can make a game of it. It’s this last approach that I invite you to explore with me.
We live in the time of the kayfabe President; when we can put on and take off digital avatars at will; when conspiracy peddlers defend their sociopathy in court with claims that they are “performance artists”; when trolls perform their antisocial rhetoric for the gamified metric of likes and shares; when white supremacists can say things like “the holocaust never happened, and if you Jews aren’t careful, it will happen again.” Beliefs are donned and doffed at will, juked and framed for maximum virality. They are deployed strategically and cynically to, well, game the myriad systems that map our lives.
Just now, we hear about the gamification of everything; of mental and physical health, of diet and education, of energy conservation, of prayer, of work, of driving. You may indeed feel that this rubric is played out. It is also entirely possible that “Gamification of Beliefs” is too narrow a frame to put on what’s going on right now. Or it may just not map well onto what you’re perceiving.
And in some regards, there is nothing new about some of these game dynamics infiltrating the phenomena of beliefs. Coleridge first deployed the term “willing suspension of disbelief” in 1817, though the idea dates back to Aristotle. Superstitions have been with us forever, and are an easy example of this. Otherwise rational, nominally sane people will often conform their behavior to patently fictional propositions of causality. OCD represents an equally timeless if involuntary variation of this. Even the idea of freewill can be seen as an enduring semantic shell-game. Find that Locus of Control! Is it here, is it there? Pay your money and take your chances. Step right up step right up!
(to be continued)
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