How to accurately depict an opposing belief

When you start to develop your craft, one of the hurdles you'll run into quite early is learning how to accurately depict an opposing belief.  How to create characters that embody beliefs that you do not personally hold, with a credibility and a realism that makes the character believable.

If you only ever wrote about characters that reflected your own opinions and your own beliefs, the inherent bias in your work would show through quite quickly.  When I first started writing, this was a problem for me.  Writing about characters that reflected my own beliefs was an easy task because in a way every character that embodied those beliefs was essentially an avatar, an extension of myself.  When it came to writing about characters that opposed my beliefs, the main obstacle to overcome was the desire to write those characters as caricatures, in other words to write characters that reflect your perception of those opposing beliefs rather than attempting to create accurate depictions.

The terms 'author' and 'writer' can be interchangeable, for the most part they refer to the same person, but I would argue that the individual terms actually refer in particular to two distinct sides of your mentality.  The 'writer' in many ways can be compared to the traditional concept of the ego, that is to say that the writer is the mediator that takes thoughts, ideas, impulses, and our compulsions, and attempts to maintain some structure and balance or regularity to our flow of consciousness.  This flow is analogous in this regard to the creative flow experienced when we write and we feel the words come from us with ease without having to think about things in excess.  The 'author' on the other hand I would argue is more akin to the traditional concept of the superego, that is to say that the author is the jealous, protective, obsessive, controlling nature that wants to be an authority figure, and if you are wondering which came first 'author' or 'authority' the answer is the former, the latter is derivative.   

Finding a balance between these two distinctions is an extension of the problem of realistic representation versus that of a caricature.  It is the 'author' or the superego that wants complete control of the perception of a character, to not only control the elements of the character but also the way the reader perceives that character.  It is this impulse that drives the desire to write caricatures.  This impulse is marked by a fear that a realistic representation of an opposing belief might create a character which you yourself, or your readers, might actually like and come to identify with more than the protagonist.  If you can imagine a soda commercial that shows your own brand and your competitor, the desire here is to make the competitor look bad and make your brand look good.  Being fair and portraying the competitor as a viable choice is not desirable because it risks inadvertently promoting the competitor.  The superego fights against favourable portrayals of opposing beliefs which might then lead you to challenge your own internalised belief system.  To put it another way, the bad guy must be unlikeable to the superego else the superego may come to question if the bad guy is actually the good guy and it is on the wrong side.

To write fully formed characters that are realistic depictions of opposing beliefs, you have to accept the possibility that your reader might identify more with the antagonist than with your protagonist.   In many ways this can be compared to that insidious cake argument where the question is asked whether a baker should have to bake a cake that endorses a message the baker does not agree with.  There are those that argue they should not have to bake the cake, they are the equivalent of a writer that will only write about characters that reflect their beliefs.  That is a valid choice, just as it is a valid choice to only write about characters that reflect your beliefs, as long as you accept that your work will be biased and that you are not attempting to make your antagonist realistic.  Then there are those, myself included, that argue if you engage in business, your personal beliefs need to be separated from your professional beliefs.  I am a gay man, and there are a lot of political beliefs I do not agree with.  If I was a professional baker and someone asked me to bake a cake that endorsed one of those beliefs I am opposed to, I would do it, for the simple reason that I believe that separation has to exist, and it is that separation between creator and creation that I believe is important here.

To write a character that is realistic and believable to the reader you shouldn't attempt to write every opposing character as a caricature, you need to make peace with the possibility, maybe even the inevitability, that some readers are going to identify more with the other side.  You can't control who will read your work if you release it for public consumption and it is debatable whether you should even try.  If you created works that were inherently biased you would limit the reach of those works, you would also succumb to ceding ground to the idea that the author has to appease the reader.  That is a topic in and of itself but for the sake of brevity you can never please everybody and if you try to then you end up creating content that is generic.

Beyond realism however, there is also the element of credibility that will often come into play.  An adversary has to be both realistic in their depiction as well as credible in the threat that they pose.  A villain is not substantial if they have no power over the hero.  A villain without the means to destroy the hero or destroy the thing they seek to protect, poses no existential threat.  This is one reason why I do not like prequels, you already know which characters survive so there is never any credible threat to those characters.  Any desire to consume prequel content is driven by curiosity alone.

So how do you write about characters that accurately depict an opposing belief?  The first step is to accept that you need to explore their belief system before you start writing about those characters and subsequently accept that there will be the possibility that you will agree with some or even many of their beliefs.  That doesn't necessarily mean that your entire belief system will change as a result, you have to remember that throughout human history, mankind was never taught to be evil, it is in our nature, just as it is in our nature to be good, but not only this, it is also in our nature to have a remarkable inability to identify which is which.  Every "evil" person you can think of throughout history, no matter how much their beliefs will oppose those you hold now, you have to realise that in the vast majority of cases those people believed they were good.  That can be a tough pill to swallow because it can seem incomprehensible that people could ever see those ideologies and those beliefs as "good" but that is the reality we live in.  Even today when you look at society and see how polarised it is, as hard as it can be to accept, the 'other side' whatever the definition therein may be for you, they think they are good and you are bad, with just as much conviction as you hold the inverse to be true.