I Believe in a Fiction and I Believe in It Willingly — Do You?
I’ve always been fascinated by the human propensity to create and believe in our own creations. These beliefs can be so engrained that believers are willing to die for them. Ideologies, philosophies, religions, myths.
Admittedly, I am guilty of existing in the liminal space between reality and myth. To so many of us, a belief is not merely a hunch, but the knowledge that something is real, actual, and true despite the fact that possibly no one else can see it, hear it, or experience it.
Wallace Stevens, the Pulitzer-winning mythopoetic philosopher and poet (and lawyer), stated that:
The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.
I have never been caught by the fervor to validate my specific “inner truth” as others do. I understand that there is a shared reality I must adhere to. My internal actualities are private. Anything can go there, but they can never penetrate the reality we all share.
According to Kurt Anderson, author of Fantasy Land: How America Went Haywire, A 500-Year History, my penchant for the fantastic is nothing special. Americans, in fact, have a particularly strong predilection for suspending disbelief.
I may be a die-hard fantasist, but I admit when an experience may be just a fantasy, no matter how “real” it seems to me:
1. I remain skeptical of my inner actualities, forever questioning if I’m crazy or simply suffering from an overactive imagination. What’s real to me is real, whether it’s real for you or not. I don’t care if you believe me, or believe with me.
2. I have no desire to convince anyone that my inner actuality is in any way a reality we can share (think evangelism, homeopathics, UFOs, etc.).
I’m a lover of speculative and hard-boiled-science fiction. In other words, I fall hard for the Great Big Ifs of our future, our past, and our present. Key words here: speculative; fiction.
I’ll entertain a conspiracy theory but I won’t hold to it without incontrovertible, empirical evidence.
Anderson quoted Philip K. Dick, one of my favorite speculative fiction authors, on the matter of conflating the real with fantasy, and I’ll do the same:
We have fiction mimicking truth, and truth mimicking fiction. We have a dangerous overlap, a dangerous blur. And in all probability it is not deliberate. In fact, that is part of the problem. . . . Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups — and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into the heads of the reader, the viewer, the listener….
And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. . . .
I am guilty of creating and living in whole universes on a daily basis. I am guilty of continuing to commune with what many would label “imaginary friends” — figments of the imagination that should have disappeared as childhood waned.
Am I crazy, or simply suffering from an overactive imagination? I can distinguish actual fantasy from reality — is it a psychological coping mechanism?
While I maintain the presence of mind to distinguish those universes from this reality we supposedly share, I also argue that it is our imagination that defines the “authentic human.”
Without imagination, we would never come up with new stories, technologies, or feats of engineering and survival.
Mr. Dick continues:
I consider that the matter of defining what is real — that is a serious topic, even a vital topic. And in there somewhere is the other topic, the definition of the authentic human. Because this bombardment of pseudo-realities begins to produce inauthentic humans very quickly, spurious humans — as fake as the data pressing at them from all sides. . . .
It is easy now to find communities by which we can pretend to validate our particular pseudo-realities. Are certain quantities of belief enough to make something real? That’s a rabbit hole I won’t go down today…
Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves. So we wind up with fake humans inventing fake realities and then peddling them to other fake humans. It is just a very large version of Disneyland.
The problem with pseudo-realities is they break down, sooner or later. The high of consumerism wears off fast, as does the high of religiosity. People fall into despair. There’s a reason so many of us need selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (e.g. Prozac).
My question is: Is there a way to find a balance between fantasy and reality without selling ourselves short one way or another? Or is every step we take in life just another sip of someone else’s Kool-Aid?