The Believing Game

The believing game is an exercise I first learned about from an essay by Peter Elbow. Where the doubting game is an exercise to find doubt, the goal of the believing game is to find truth. In the essay, Elbow says that we should look for any grains of truth in what we see.

I have to admit that the first time I read the essay, I hated it. Everything I read either sounded painfully obvious or patently absurd. Though I largely dismissed it, I couldn't get it out of my head. It was not for several months before I had a realization.

The war cry of doubters is "you can't prove that's true." The war cry of believers is "you can't prove that's not true."

Consider things like spiritual healing. Whether it be prayer, crystals, herbs, massage, or anything else, there is no proof this stuff works. And yet, the people who believe in it seem to do well. They are in better moods, get more energy, and can often fight off illnesses that other people couldn't. There are ethereal forces that we can neither prove nor disprove. Those who doubt are called cynics. Those who believe are faithful.

Essentially, those with faith are the opposites of cynics. They have hope. They look for the best. If they have an opportunity to try something, they'll go for it. If somebody questions them, they respond, "why not?" Believers come in all shapes and sizes (which should not come as much of a surprise). Some people are pie in the sky, others try to be as rational as they can and use faith to fill in the blanks.

Ultimately, people come down as either cynics or faithfuls. As such, they play their respective games. Whichever one you happen to be, you will likely never be able to comprehend how the mind of the other one works. I wish I could say that this post and the previous one will help in some way, but from my own experiences, you can never understand what goes through their heads until you have had it go through yours. With any luck, though, you can at least sound like you know what you're talking about and create realistic characters, even if you still can't figure out why they act the way they do.