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Unreliable Narrators

One of my (many) favorite films is The Usual Suspects. The cast is superb, the story twisty, but it is all based on the concept of an unreliable narrator.  I have seen a few other such films (Rashomon is in its own category) and read several novels using this technique.

It is deeply unsettling, to me at least, to have entered a narrative that I know is fictional and have willingly suspended my belief only to find that I have been thoroughly misled. My consent to believe in the story has been abused on some level.

It is a fact of life that outside of explicit fiction we rely on unreliable narrators 24/7. The people I have learned to trust over decades of reliability still only share their perspective on events, while folk on the internet trying to sell me things often are at the other extreme. There is no way for sentient beings to tell some kind of absolute truth because ultimately that requires omniscience which I believe to be the province of God and God alone.

Absolute skepticism is not an option, for me at least. That would completely separate me from others and I would die spiritually if not physically from loneliness. Absolute gullibility is not a better choice, for to cast away your judgment to those in your environment and take no responsibility of your own is another form of spiritual death.

So yet again we are faced with some kind of middle ground that somehow optimizes our ability to be part of the world even without a full accounting of the facts. In my youth I simplified this to the notion of keeping score; of roughly assigning to all people in my life, near and far, a score of how many times I have been able to independently check the version of reality they describe to me and the proportion of those times their stories have been corroborated. It is not the same as grading by an answer key for corroborated realities can still be false, but it is a rough pass that saves me from the worst extremes on the gullibility/skepticism scale.

I regularly encounter people in my life who do not keep score in any way, who treat each new story told to them as a completely new thing, unrelated to the narrator's past veracity. Oft times they rely upon how much they want to believe what they are told; that way lies folly and I seek to avoid that path.

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