Toilet Roll & Belief
Think back to the toilet paper shortages in the early days of Covid. Everybody thought that actually running out of simple loo roll was genuine crazy talk. Because let's face it, there are only a couple of actual wack-jobs raiding supermarket shelves right? Yet most people acted against their own logic on the assumption that other people would believe there was a shortage and start hoarding, so they had better get in first. Everyone acted on a belief they ascribed to an imagined other, thereby creating the very shortage that should never have existed. This is Slavoj Žižek's concept, the subject supposed to believe: you act not on your own conviction but on the conviction you imagine the other to hold. Your belief is sustained by a belief you project onto someone else.
The strange thing is that this mechanism does not require anyone to actually believe anything. The panic is not driven by genuine conviction but by the anticipation of someone else's conviction. And so the shelves emptied. The imagined belief of an imagined other produced a very real effect. This is not just a quirk of crisis behaviour. It is the structure of how belief functions in social life most of the time, quietly and invisibly, underneath the surface of what we think we are doing.
Ironically, in this mutually imagined and sustained belief, you create the very reality you were only anticipating. In a sense this is how faith and religious community work. As G.K. Chesterton observed, when you pray you are not simply sending a private message to God, you are praying on behalf of the community of the faithful itself. You step into the breach because you know others will too, and they step in because they know you will. It is not that everyone secretly has rock solid faith. It is that everyone shows up, and in showing up, gives everyone else permission to show up too. At some point the subject supposed to believe stops being someone else entirely. It turns out to be you.
This is also, less comfortingly, how conspiracy theory works. The conspiracy theorist does not usually hold their theory with the kind of calm, reasoned certainty we associate with someone who actually knows something. What they really believe is that somewhere out there, someone does know. A shadowy elite, a deep state, a cabal with a filing cabinet full of the real version of events. The conspiracy theorist is not the one who knows. They are the one who suspects, who has seen enough to feel certain that the truth is being hidden by someone who possesses it. And then something interesting happens. The community of fellow suspectors becomes its own kind of church. Nobody fully believes, but everyone believes that everyone else believes, and so they keep the whole thing standing together. The toilet paper logic again, just with higher stakes and a worse Reddit thread.
Social media has turbocharged this. The algorithm does not need you to believe anything sincerely. It just needs you to engage, to share, to react, because engagement produces more engagement. You can spend an afternoon sharing things you are not entirely sure you believe, half on instinct, half out of a vague sense of solidarity with the people you imagine already believe it. Nobody stops to ask whether the belief is actually theirs. The sharing is the believing. The subject supposed to believe is now scalable, automated and monetised.
So if a Spiderman-meme-esque pyramid of believing on behalf of everyone else is all we have, can we actually do anything about it. We cannot opt out of collective belief entirely, because that is impossible. You cannot think or act outside the shared assumptions that structure social life. The move is rather to become conscious of the mechanism, to notice when your belief is really a projection onto an other, and to ask whether you would actually hold this conviction if you had to stand behind it yourself, alone, without the imagined community of others who believe it on your behalf.
This is harder than it sounds. But it is the difference between beliefs you carry because they are genuinely yours and beliefs you are holding in place for an imagined other who may not even exist. The moment you stop outsourcing your belief to them is the moment you have to decide what you actually think. So we are left with a question: what would remain of your convictions if the imagined other, the one you have been believing on behalf of, turned out never to have existed.