Every so often, I want to post little essays on writing craft here, partially to help others and partially so I’m not storing them as fragmentary thoughts in my notes app. Gonna have a go at one today. They are basically all going to be focused on writing characters with more realistic behavior and interiority. They also might reveal some juicy insight into my personal life, so voyeurs, take note. It’s hard to be a writer if you’re not some stripe of voyeur anyway.
Today I want to talk about belief, which plays a very central role in people’s behavior and choices, and which I have observed that westerners in particular understand very poorly, often at our peril. An example of this:
In early 2017, Donald Trump claimed his inauguration had drawn the highest attendance of any in history, despite very conclusive evidence to the contrary. However, none of the news coverage of these claims referred to them as “lies,” due to one pretty universally-held best practice in journalism writing. To wit: a statement can only properly be called a “lie” if the person speaking it demonstrably knows it to be false, and says it for the specific purpose of misleading; if Donald Trump genuinely believes himself to be telling the truth about his attendance numbers, then the statement may be demonstrably false, but it is not a lie per se.
This principle has hamstrung western journalism’s credibility for a long time. It proceeds from a puerile understanding of both belief and knowledge, and a false assumption that the former can fully override the latter.
In the first place, it is fully possible to believe things that you know aren’t true. In fact, everyone does this. Understand me: everyone. If you meet someone who claims they don’t do it, that person is lying, most likely to themselves as well as to you. Everyone believes things that they know are wrong, and any character you write who sees reality through perfectly unclouded eyes from the get-go is going to feel quite flat to the reader.
Even if you ignore the fact that belief and knowledge can be mutually exclusive, there is more than one kind of belief. Ideally, it would be an absolute requirement for journalists to understand this, and to be able to distinguish between the different forms it takes. In fiction writing, being cognizant of this allows you to add great depth to characters. The more subtly you can work it in, the better.
I’m going to lay out some terms here. Just to be clear, this is not scientific terminology in any way. It’s a categorization I’ve come up with to describe my personal observations of human behavior, for use in my own writing and outlining. In this case, I came up with it to distinguish between two main varieties of belief:
- Active Belief is my term for the things we choose to believe, that we believe consciously. Often, these are beliefs that contradict what we know to be true, that we hold onto for comfort in a chaotic, uncertain world, and that we use to justify our behavior to ourselves.
- Implicit Belief is my term for beliefs that are less more foundational; things we believe so deeply that we may not even be aware of the fact that we believe them, or that others may not believe them. Even if it’s a choice, it’s a choice we make unconsciously.
In the above case of the Trump inauguration, the pitfall of modern journalism is that it tends to treat all belief as the latter kind. In other words, journalists proceed under the assumption that nobody chooses to believe anything, and that if someone genuinely believes a thing to be true then they can’t possibly know that it isn’t. This is a false assumption.
If you’re part of the target audience for this essay, then the good news is that you’re a fiction writer, not a journalist, and nobody in editorial is going to require you to think this way. Instead, you can focus on the fascinating interplay of active and implicit beliefs, the ways they support or undermine or pull taut against each other, and the otherwise baffling choices people make as a result. I’ll follow with some of the forms those interplays can take.
Active belief proceeding from implicit belief
Letting go of the things you believe implicitly is hard. Hard to the point that most people will avoid having to question them at nearly any cost. Quite a few of us manage to avoid it for our entire lives. This generally isn’t good for us and doesn’t lead us into happiness, but it does keep us comfortable, and comfort takes a lot less work than happiness.
This fact is one of the sources of what psychology calls “confirmation bias.” Meaning, when we are presented with new information – especially if it might contradict what we already believe to be true – we will selectively interpret and/or ignore it in whatever ways allow us to avoid questioning those implicit beliefs.
In the case of the Trump inauguration, the question was never “Does he believe it,” which, yes, he does, but that by itself doesn’t really tell us anything. The man’s track record is very clear on the fact that he believes whatever he wants (a fact that separates him from basically no one). Even if that weren’t the case, it was certainly known that 1) he was presented with accurate attendance figures at some point, and 2) he is not known to have a learning disability that prevents him from understanding which of two numbers is larger. The question should have been, “Why does he want to believe it? What is the core belief giving rise to this belief?”
In my own estimation, that core belief could likely be summed up as “there’s no such thing as reality,” or at least, “my reality is the only one that matters.” It’s pretty easy to draw this conclusion based on a survey of his other behavior. Of course, he’ll never come out and say it directly (not on purpose, anyway). It can only be puzzled out and inferred from the outside.
That last bit is what makes this so useful as a narrative device, especially in the writing of fictional antagonists. With a character like Trump, people who can’t (or refuse to, journalists) puzzle out the underlying implicit beliefs tend to find his behavior perplexing and unpredictable. That kind of puzzling out takes time and observation. It’s never clear upfront, not even to the person who holds the belief.
You can do a lot with this. A realistically-written character will have implicit beliefs that are hidden from the world at large, but that are hinted at by the things they believe more consciously. LIttle by little, those hints start to add up. This creates a fantastic way of building suspense in narrative, among other things.
Active belief covering up implicit belief
A case study in this from own life involves a former friend who revealed to me, during our falling out, that they were engaged in a full-time game of pretend. In their words, they had to believe that other people only ever wanted to get close to them because they were interested in their personality and intellect, that their interest was never sexual. This – laid out with unusual clarity, in that conversation – was the active belief.
The reason they clung to it so dearly was to cover up a conflicting implicit belief, a worldview ingrained in their youth which was actually the polar opposite. Growing up pretty and AFAB in a deeply patriarchal culture, they had had it drilled into them that their only value was in their sexual availability, and that that was the only reason anyone would ever show any interest in them. Obviously they didn’t want to believe this, but internalized misogyny is one hell of a real thing. When it’s so omnipresent from such a young age, it’s inevitable that you will internalize some of it.
Of course, the ideal way to confront this would be with a lot of conscious work to deprogram the ingrained assumptions, but that kind of work takes time and resources that most people don’t have, especially when they’re young and financially precarious and need to ingratiate themselves to people who certainly do not have their best interests at heart in order to survive. In lieu of doing that ideal work, most of us need to come up with cognitive patches, ways to grapple with our cognitive dissonance until we get into a place where we can do the work. This is less ideal, certainly, but more realistic.
However, it is also possible to work yourself into a rut. Virtually everyone, at some point in their life, works themselves into a rut that they never climb out of, which we often refer to as being “set in their ways.” We find something that works well enough to get by and cling to it like a life preserver until we can’t anymore.
In this case, the rut was born from the fact that this person had a lot of other behavior patterns that tend to undermine interpersonal relationships. Another friend once summed up their pattern as “stir up a bunch of drama, refuse to take any accountability, blame everyone else, then go nuclear and cut off contact when you’re called out for it.” This is not a pattern that many people are willing to tolerate for long. No matter how interesting someone’s personality and intellect are, patterns like this one become a deal-breaker sooner or later, as people decide that it’s just not worth the cost of admission to take on all the thankless work of maintaining the friendship while the other person blows things up over and over.
Unless, of course, they’re trying to get in your pants. People who are trying to get laid will tolerate all kinds of shit that they otherwise wouldn’t, maybe because they’re see the behavior through rose-tinted glasses, or maybe as a way of out-competing other potential suitors with healthier boundaries (which I’m told is now known as “simping”). When you consistently behave in a way that selects for that special tolerance, you end up constantly surrounded entirely by people whose interest in you is sexual – thus confirming the implicit belief and reinforcing the need to cling to the conflicting active belief all the more strongly.
Thus the active belief doesn’t just cover up the implicit belief, but comes to pull taut against it, creating a truly vicious cycle. If the person gives up their full-time game of pretend, then they’re left stranded in a predatory world where no one truly cares about them, especially since they’ve already alienated all the people who did. Even if they were able to make space within that world for the herculean personal work of deprogramming an implicit belief, they would find themselves starting from zero, having left behind the, uh, “simps” as well as having lost the friendship of everyone they previously alienated. Many people would not survive this. The options are to either keep perpetuating the cycle, or risk self-annihilation to escape it. And the older you get, the deeper into the rut you’ve dug.
If you want to use this exact scenario in your own writing, you have my leave to go nuts. I’ve got more projects on my plate already than I know what to do with, and living through the scenario once was enough for me. Even if you don’t want to adopt it, you can see how this push-and-pull of different varieties of belief can be used to produce some really compelling character work. I’ve heard it said that stories often start with good people making bad decisions and/or bad people making good decisions, and dynamics like this one can be an incredible source of that. And iff a character decides to take the risk of confronting their self-sabotaging implicit belief in order to grow, then you have some of the makings of a truly compelling redemption arc, something lots of writers fetishize but that very, very, very few are any good at.
Active belief for me becoming implicit belief to thee
The line between active and implicit belief is generally less than crystal-clear (as is the line between implicit belief and knowledge, but that’s a topic for another day). One often has some characteristics of the other, bleeds into the other, or even becomes the other over time.
Religion is a great source of examples of this, some much more than others. For a specific example, I’ll use the dominant religion of the country I live in, one with hundreds of millions or adherents globally, one that has, over the course of its (relatively brief, as religions go) tenure has caused staggering harm and death to untold millions all over the world. I refer, of course, to… Reaganomics.
Going from the oral history of the movement as I know it, the originators of “trickle-down economics” and its related quack theories knew that they were all bullshit, or at the very least duplicitous. Reaganomics were and are a scam to extract more wealth and concentrate within the existing ruling class, dressed up with a lot of pseudo-science to make it seem credible and even compelling to the masses, even as its policies rob them of their livelihood.
The thing is, in order to sell the scam, you have to believe in it yourself. This was quite easy for its framers, whom it would pretty universally benefit. They believed in Reaganomics because it would work for them; all they had to do was avoid publicly explaining exactly why that was, and pretend it was going to work for everyone.
This, of course, was an active belief. However, with the full truth of that belief kept under wraps, people who learned its publicity-approved tenets later on (especially those who were born or came of age decades after its inception) came to structure their belief somewhat differently. When you are stewarded through the early phases of your life by the pious who proselytize the relevant beliefs endlessly (usually priests; in this case, economists), it takes on a veneer of universality. You get the impression that you can safely accept it as true without direct proof, or with fragmentary proof, or even just with the sense of comfort that agreeing with the status quo confers.
In terms of US presidents, you can see this in the progression from Bush 1, whose economic policies involved a lot of doublespeak that he didn’t cover up especially well because he did have at least some modicum of a conscience, to Bush 2, who was a true believer, covered nothing up, and had no conscience because he wasn’t smart enough to do any of that.
Interestingly, this made Bush 2 a far more effective president, at least in terms of his administration’s ability to accomplish its own goals. Those goals involved wrecking the economy, slaughtering millions, and leaving millions more homeless, but these were features, not bugs, for the people behind them. Being a Reaganomics partisan lent a clarity of purpose that wasn’t shared by his father, a Reaganomics shill whose single-term presidency kept stumbling over itself until the ’92 election put it out of its misery.
This plays out all the time in larger and smaller ways. For instance, the subtext of Alan Moore’s Watchmen becomes less compelling when you learn that the news media’s coverage of the Kitty Genovese murder and the “bystander effect” were heavily sensationalized, and had very little in common with what actually happened. Someone cynically peddles an active belief for personal gain; others become immersed in its narrative and, having no particular reason to disbelieve it, run with the increasingly implicit belief, and run harder and longer than its active originators ever could have. There’s loads of ways to use this in fiction, but it most appeals to me personally based on the fact that it’s fertile ground for unreliable narrators on both sides of this equation.
As I’m working on tying this off, I want to state at last that this is by no means an exhaustive list of the different varieties of belief out there, or the only way to break them down, or certainly the most thorough possible listing of examples of the ways they interact with one another. I’ll emphasize again that this a breakdown I personally have come up with based on my own observations and applied to my own writing style. Adopting my vocabulary and methods may serve you well if it resonates, but I don’t think it will ever serve you better than putting together your own examination of the ways people do and don’t believe and developing your techniques based on your own perspective. Even then, you can use this a springboard towards thinking about ways you might be able to do that.