I’ve come to accept that reality is far less important to our daily lives than narratives.
I mean, it’s a real depressing understanding of the world, but after you embrace it, you learn to work around it and it can even be a huge asset or tool for getting results and interacting with others.
For me personally, I want to learn the disappointing truth about everything, but for the vast majority of people, they will live their whole lives without ever needing or wanting to learn who actually said or did what in history. It’s fine. We can keep building stories to influence people to do better things. There is no cosmic arbiter of truth who is going to judge people for spreading a story that leads to better outcomes.
You know that episode of The Simpsons where Lisa hides the fact the town founder is a bad person because it’d make the town sad?
That is me trying to hold back that, upon research (reading the Wikipedia page), I found out that Fatima al-Fihriya is probably not a real person :(
I’ve come to accept that reality is far less important to our daily lives than narratives.
I mean, it’s a real depressing understanding of the world, but after you embrace it, you learn to work around it and it can even be a huge asset or tool for getting results and interacting with others.
For me personally, I want to learn the disappointing truth about everything, but for the vast majority of people, they will live their whole lives without ever needing or wanting to learn who actually said or did what in history. It’s fine. We can keep building stories to influence people to do better things. There is no cosmic arbiter of truth who is going to judge people for spreading a story that leads to better outcomes.
Sometimes legends are important.
Lies that white wash one of the most horrendous religions in the world are indeed important - just not the way you imply.