Narratives

The outcome is shaped by the goal. Do you want truth or a judgment-free soccer game tilted so everyone wins?

There is nothing necessarily wrong with narratives, but the narrator is typically unskilled, sloppy, illogical, timid, self-justifying, a liar, and a salesman. Facts are conveniently overlooked and excluded, irrelevant events are included and inflated, emphatic accents are put in all the wrong places as clumsy sleight of hand, and the presentation is organized around an ideological fiction that is "proven" by the unfolding of the phony story.

This work of alley graffiti is encased in a museum ready frame and put on display as a respectable educating tale. The information presented, whether someone's cleansed and oblivious rendering of an event in their life or a scholar's mangling of history or art, is shamelessly promoted as truth from which others can gain insight, despite the deceiver's typically transparent motives and biases.

To most this is a mere detail. Life is easy; what does truth matter? The lie is the same as truth -- just another opinion, and the liar is forgiven and considered equal to a truth teller. That scientists and scholars are corrupt propagandists is similarly excusable. After all, they too need to eat, which they afford by vouching for positions their patrons favor while staying silent about problematic truths. Their goal is victory at any price, with deception and fraud excusable means for their end.

We have 500+ channels of irrelevant nonsense, though with little more effort they could say something that matters. Rather than discarding narratives, we should discard narrators who fail to apprehend reality and honor truth by retelling stories without distortion, censorship, and swindling.