Neonchameleon
Legend
The problem though is that it is not collective unconsciousness. You've used a straw man example. Those people believe a million different things. They are not unified in their thinking at all. The CIA, the Mafia, Fidel Castro, bla bla bla you can go on forever. So this is a false analogy.
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It would be amazing and worth note if the vast majority of people after examining the evidence came to the SAME conclusion about it.
What do you mean "the vast majority of people"? A lot of people have independently come up with the idea September 11 was an inside job from the US government.
I'm becoming more convinced every day. It's like you can't see the color red and you keep trying to explain how it's just like black. Whereas those who can see red keep scratching our heads.
Oh, no, it's not that. When I was sixteen I'd probably have agreed with you. I've learned a lot in the meantime - and when I was sixteen I made a lot of mountains out of molehills.
Here is a mental exercise to help you. The follow are completely and absolutely unrelated. There may be correlations but there is no true connection.
1. Realism.
2. Abstraction.
3. Plot Coupons/Dissociative Mechanics/Metagame Dissonance
Until you can truly understand that those three are unrelated. I can have a thing which is 1,2,3 or Not 1, Not 2, 3 and I can have every other combination.
And once again you turn out to make a statement that is almost completely wrong.
Plot Coupons are absolutely linked to abstraction. The link is not, however, a directly causal one normally. The link is that both are saying "We want the world to work this way, and to not sweat the small stuff". They are focussing on different areas; abstractions are about not getting bogged down in operational details whereas plot coupons are generally about pacing and narrative ebb and flow, and giving people incentives to do things that would work out badly from an operational standpoint. Without some sort of plot coupon you end up with almost all fights ending up like Indiana Jones vs the swordsman. And while that's one of my favourite fight scenes in film it works precisely because it's a subversion.
Both abstraction and plot coupons are about getting the game to flow smoothly without getting bogged down in mechanics - and to have both inputs and outcomes like the ones you'd expect based on the setting. They just do it at slightly different levels of zoom and control. If you want me to understand that they are unrelated then you are asking me to understand something that simply isn't true.