Your Ability To Suspend Reality Is Scary
You can suspend reality in order to make yourself feel good. If you don’t believe me, kindly recall the last time you settled down for a movie. Every time you draw for the popcorn and play a title on Netflix, you are preparing yourself to willingly be fooled for the next hour or two. The interesting part is that there is a complete willingness to do so in exchange for dopamine, aka feeling good. When you are watching that horror movie or playing that video game, you know it isn’t real but you are able to relax the enquiring, sceptical side of the brain with relative ease for the sake of entertainment.
The term suspension of disbelief or willing suspension of disbelief has been defined as a willingness to suspend one’s critical faculties and believe the unbelievable; sacrifice of realism and logic for the sake of enjoyment
But what about when it’s not for entertainment? What about grieving? I recently unfortunately attended a funeral for the devastating death of a friend of mine who passed away very young. The ceremony was a religious one and although a strong non-believer myself, I quickly noticed that the suspension of reality in order to summon the supernatural was an effective way of easing the grieving process and helping the family come to terms with the burial of their beloved boy.
It’s almost like a flick of a switch, a binary thing which we can turn on and off although some people can’t distinguish between the two and reside somewhere in the middle. If we can suspend reality in order for it to suit our own personal needs and comfort; then it begs the question “Does this not make us open to manipulation in the form of an illusion for the sake of comfort/ feeling good?” This beseeches a second question “How easy is it to be manipulated willingly for the sake of comfort/ feeling good?”
Willing manipulation/ willing suspension of disbelief; i.e. getting somebody to do what you want but also make them want to do it; well that is a powerful tool and a dangerous one in the wrong hands. Now we are swimming in the more choppy waters of this topic because all of a sudden, the credibility of everything you believe in is at stake. You can live life in the bliss of believing whatever makes you feel better but for some of us there is no substitute for the truth whether it comes in a negative form or not, fact and enquiry reigns supreme over the sanctity of our consciousness. The purpose of this article then, is not to alarm but to disarm the teachers of the school of thought which argues credulously for a belief system based on how it makes one feel.
At the same time, the purpose is to remind ourselves that an escape from reality is a medicine but it is not a cure nor something which ought to be a permanent fixture in one’s daily consumption. A person who takes medicine all day every day is either chronically ill or blinded and numbed by the effect of the drug. Remember that, the next time you are invited to suspend reality or make special means for those who wish to make their own reality suspension a part of all of our lives. Tolerate it we must of course but to accommodate and appease is to surrender our existence and leave ourselves vulnerable to the easily manipulated and quickly corrupted human imagination.
