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.

  • harmbugler@piefed.socialEnglish
    1·
    23 hours ago

    The only thing that’s necessary when disbelief is suspended is that the narrative remain acceptably internally consistent.

    “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”.

    • WatDabney@sopuli.xyz
      1·
      9 hours ago

      Well… yeah. I thonk it’s fairly self-evident that individuals have different threaholds for suspension of disbelief, and that the thresholds even vary between subjects with a given individual (for example, it’s harder to maintain suspension of disbelief relative to an area in which one has expertise).

      But that’s not really relevant - I just included “acceptably” to be more precise and accurate.

      The relevant part is the core idea that the mechanism by which at least some seemingly rational people support blitheringly insane and factually unsupportable political views is not really some combination of prejudices and biases by which they convince themselves of the nominal truth and correspondence to reality of their beliefs, but by engaging in suspension of disbelief - by entirely switching off the parts of their brain that measure truth and correspondence with reality, just as I do when I read a novel or watch a movie.

      I certainly don’t know that to be the case, but it’s a fascinating possibility