A Suspension of Disbeliefs

February 20, 2011 by David Everitt-Carlson

If you enjoyed the Wild Wild East Dailies, welcome to A Suspension of Disbeliefs. I’ve moved on because I want to broaden beyond Asia, marketing and involve the world and world ideas. And I’d like to write a little better and quite a bit more influentially. A year ago, I had an interchange that simply told me that sheer desire, love and imagination were just massively more powerful than logic. And so I learned a lot. And I believe we can grow well. I realised with the Wild Wild East Dailies that it was never about me at all. It was about the readers. Join us again, please.

Suspension of Disbelief

“The temporary acceptance as believable, events or characters that would ordinarily be seen as incredible. This is usually to allow an audience to appreciate works of literature or drama that are exploring unusual ideas.” The term was originally coined by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1817 with the publication of his Biographia Literaria. The state is arguably an essential element when experiencing any drama or work of fiction. We know very well that we are watching an actor or looking at marks on paper, but we wilfully accept them as real in order to fully experience what the creator is attempting to convey.

The thesis here is that we all create realities that are essentially states of suspended disbelief by our choices of religion, political persuation, career, country, love, belief or not in the magic bullet theory, or choice of architecture. What makes us unhappy is when others fail to share in our beliefs. The trick, over time of course, is to structure a story line that works for us and those around us in real life in the most positive way possible.

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