Contenting Ourselves With Stories
I just started a rewatch of Chernobyl and was struck by the opening lines of the first episode spoken by Jared Harris, who plays Soviet nuclear physicist Valery Legasov:
What is the cost of lies? It’s not that we’ll mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all. What can we do then? What else is left but to abandon even the hope of truth and content ourselves instead with stories? In these stories, it doesn’t matter who the heroes are. All we want to know is: Who is to blame?
Which reminds me of what historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt said in a 1974 interview:
The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie-a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days-but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.
And also what On Tyranny author Timothy Snyder wrote a few days after the January 6th attack on Congress:
Post-truth is pre-fascism, and Trump has been our post-truth president. When we give up on truth, we concede power to those with the wealth and charisma to create spectacle in its place. Without agreement about some basic facts, citizens cannot form the civil society that would allow them to defend themselves. If we lose the institutions that produce facts that are pertinent to us, then we tend to wallow in attractive abstractions and fictions. Truth defends itself particularly poorly when there is not very much of it around, and the era of Trump — like the era of Vladimir Putin in Russia — is one of the decline of local news. Social media is no substitute: It supercharges the mental habits by which we seek emotional stimulation and comfort, which means losing the distinction between what feels true and what actually is true.
Discussion 5 comments
Not to change the subject, but I believe there is a larger context of how acceptance of responsibility and acknowledgement of consequences are increasingly absent in our society.
Probably because people can never truly be responsible if they are not first informed and educated. We don't educate our populace to think; we train them to be obedient.
Some of the greatest lines from that show to ever exist. It was so profound. This one too:
"When the truth offends, we lie and lie until we cannot even remember it's there. But it is still there. Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, the debt is paid."
It was almost 20 years ago when Ron Suskind wrote a piece in the NY Times about the Bush administration and the "reality based community." (I can't read that piece, because I unsubscribed to the Times some years ago because I'd concluded they no longer served the truth, only themselves. There are many things I enjoyed about the Times, but I can't support them anymore.) It was only 12 years (4 more of Bush, 8 of Obama) before Trump, et al., embraced "alternative facts" as a legitimate mode of discourse.
It seems that technology disrupted "reality." Blew it to smithereens.
It was never "perfectly known," (the enduring myth of the Lost Cause) but there was at least the idea that it could be known, and that it was a goal worth pursuing.
Now it's all a zero-sum contest for attention.
There was a line Petyr Baelish uttered at least once in Game of Thrones.
That guy still haunts me. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do." It's like somebody finally said the quiet parts out loud.
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