False Narrative Quotes

There's always a moment when you start to fall out of love, whether it's with a person or an idea or a cause, even if it's one you only narrate to yourself years after the event: a tiny thing, a wrong word, a false note, which means that things can never be quite the same again.

That’s what we both hate about fiction, or at least crappy fiction—it purports to provide occasions for thinking through complex issues, but really it has predetermined the positions, stuffed a narrative full of false choices, and hooked you on them, rendering you less able to see out, to get out.

But I should be false in the earliest sentiments of my soul, if I suppressed the opinion. I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and incur my own abhorrence.

I may be deemed superstitious, and even egotistical, in regarding this event as a special interposition of divine Providence in my favor. But I should be false to the earlierst sentiments of my soul, if I suppressed the opinion. I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and incur my own abhorrence. From my earliest recollection, I date the entertainment of a deep conviction that slavery would not always be able to hold me within its foul embrace; and in the darkest hours of my career in slavery, this living word of faith and spirit of hope departed not from me, but remained like ministering angels to cheer me through the gloom. This good spirit was from God, and to him I offer thanksgiving and praise.

A worldview is a commitment, a fundamental orientation of the heart, that can be expressed as a story or in a set of presuppositions (assumptions which may be true, partially true or entirely false) which we hold (consciously or subconsciously, consistently or inconsistently) about the basic constitution of reality, and that provides the foundations on which we live and more and have our being.

False Narrative: The Kingdom of God is Future No serious biblical scholar would deny that Jesus’ proclaimed the kingdom of God. However, many scholars conclude that Jesus was not talking about our present world but rather an epoch in history that has not yet begun.

Recovering from family scapegoating requires recognizing that being the ‘identified patient’ is symptomatic of generations of systemic dysfunction within one’s family, fueled by unrecognized anxiety and even trauma. In a certain sense, members of a dysfunctional family are participating in a ‘consensual trance‘, i.e., a ‘survival trance’ supported by false narratives, toxic shame, anxiety, and egoic defense mechanisms, such as denial and projection.

I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and incur my own abhorrence

The idea has come to me that what I want now to do is to saturate every atom. I mean to eliminate all waste, deadness, superfluity: to give the moment whole; whatever it includes. Say that the moment is a combination of thought; sensation; the voice of the sea. Waste, deadness, come from the inclusion of things that don't belong to the moment; this appalling narrative business of the realist: getting on from lunch to dinner: it is false, unreal, merely conventional.

As the years progress and we experience more and more, the mini-narratives that make up our lives are distorted, corrupted, so that every one of us is left with a false history, a self-created fiction about the live we have led. pg 163

...and yet the idea is hard to accept, it's so hard to succeed in making something happen, even what's been decided on and planned out, not even the will of a god seems forceful enough to manage it, if our own will is made in its semblance. It may be, rather, that nothing is ever unmixed and the thirst for totality is never quenched, perhaps because it is a false yearning. Nothing is whole or of a single piece, everything is fractured and evenomed, veins of peace run through the body of war and hatred insinuates itself into love and compassion, there is truce amid the quagmire of bullets and a bullet amid the revelries, nothing can bear to be unique or prevail or be dominant and everything needs fissures and cracks, needs it negation at the same time as its existence. And nothing is known with certainty and everything is told figuratively.

here’s a thing I’ve learned: Perfection is deception. An illusion. It’s a carefully curated but false narrative. The golden family you think you know from the luxury home down the street—they’re not who you believe they are. They have faults, secrets. Sometimes dark and terrible ones.

expatriation, like love, is not only a condition that devastates and reconfigures the self; it is, like love, a trope, a figure with which we try to explain, try to narrate profound psychological disruptions in terms of very measurable entities: a person, a place, an event, a moment, etc.

Our war against the three enemies of the soul is not a war of guns and bombs. It’s not against other people at all. It’s a war on lies. And the problem is less that we tell lies and more that we live them; we let false narratives about reality into our bodies, and they wreak havoc in our souls.

The narcissist cannot admit that he had toiled and sweated to achieve his goal and, with this confession, shatter his alleged omnipotence and grandiose False Self. He must belittle every accomplishment of his and make it appear to have been a routine triviality. This is intended to support the dreamland quality of his fragmented personality. But it also prevents him from deriving the psychological benefits which usually accrue to to goal attainment… The narcissist is doomed to roam a circular labyrinth. When he does achieve something, he underestimates it in order to enhance his own sense of omnipotence, perfection, and brilliance. When he fails, he dare not face reality. He escapes to the land of no narratives where life is nothing but a meaningless wasteland. The narcissist whiles his life away.

I must admit there are 'memories' in my head that are curious even to me.

If not, a person might find himself standing at a funeral, spinning a false narrative to mask a guilty conscience.

The future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think. It’s an extraordinary declaration, asserting that the unknown need not be turned into the known through false divination or the projection of grim political or ideological narratives; it’s a celebration of darkness, willing – as that “I think” indicates—to be uncertain even about its own assertion. Most people are afraid of the dark. Literally when it comes to children, while many adults fear, above all, the darkness that is the unknown, the unseeable, the obscure. And yet the night in which distinctions and definitions cannot be readily made is the same night in which love is made, in which things merge, change, become enchanted, aroused, impregnated, possessed, released, renewed.

The mystique and the false glamour of the writing profession grow partly out of a mistaken belief that people who can express profound ideas and emotions have ideas and emotions more profound than the rest of us. It isn't so. The ability to express is a special gift with a special craft to support it and is spread fairly equally among the profound, the shallow, and the mediocre.

One of our greatest failures in our busy, driven culture is that we don't celebrate the temporary untying of a complex narrative...What is your style of celebrating an ending? Do you only throw large parties after someone graduates, gets married, or dies? If so, then all the other endings in your story are lost in the wake of another day's busyness. Perhaps one of the reasons you and I don't party well, is that we don't know what to do with the tragedies that linger in our life...Can you imagine receiving an invitation "JOIN ME IN A CELEBRATION OF NO LONGER BELIEVING I'M STUPID"? We don't allow endings to be noted, let alone celebrated. Therefore we never allow denouement to be invigorate the upward movement of a new story.

My reflections amount to a love story that is mostly made up, from memories that are mostly false, between people who were mainly not there. The things for which she was not there have her in them now more deeply because of her absence, and her effect on my way of seeing them. Anytime I note her absence from a thing, she arrives at once, as if summoned, entrenching herself more deeply than she exists in my memories of times when she was there, so that time, the sequence of what really happened, seems to curve around her.

Our culture reinforces accumulation, spending on luxury items and focusing too much time on material things instead of experiences and relationships. We’ve been taught the false narrative that more stuff equals greater happiness.

Even though I have not mastered it, I now have a better sense of what makes us want others to think well of us, and how we can prevent that desire from ruling in our hearts. False Narrative: My Value Is Determined by Your Assessment

Perfection is deception. An illusion. It’s a carefully curated but false narrative. The golden family you think you know from the luxury home down the street—they’re not who you believe they are. They have faults, secrets. Sometimes dark and terrible ones.

we are at one of those critical moments in American history when we will either double down on romanticizing a false narrative about our violent past or accept that there is something better waiting for us, if we can learn to deal honestly with our history.

The framing of women’s abuse narratives as quasi-legal testimony encourages the public, as interpreters, to take the stance of cross-examiners who categorize forgetting as memory failure and insist on completeness and consistency of memory detail through all repeated tellings. The condensed, summarized, or fragmentary nature of abuse memories will rarely withstand this aggressive testing. Few people’s memories can.

Conspiracy theories are really attractive. Figuring out patterns is one of the things that gets your brain to give you a nice dose of chemical reward, the little ping of dopamine and whatever else that keeps you smiling. As a result, your brain is pretty good at finding patterns, and at disregarding information that doesn’t fit. Which means it’s also pretty good at finding false patterns, and at confirmation bias, and a bunch of other things that can be fatal. Our brains are also really good at making us the center of a narrative, because it’s what we evolved for.

Right now, you lack the capacity to receive the good stuff you want in this life, because you are still holding onto the painful things that have happened to you. False narratives that you believed, grudges that consume you, and secrets that you’ve never shared occupy the real estate of your mind.

Unfortunately a religious group defines itself foremost by its creation story, the supernatural narrative that explains how humans came into existence. And this story is also the heart of tribalism. No matter how gentle and high-minded, or subtly explained, the core belief assures its members that God favors them above all others. It teaches that members of other religions worship the wrong gods, use wrong rituals, follow false prophets, and believe fantastic creation stories. There is no way around the soul-satisfying but cruel discrimination that organized religions by definition must practice among themselves. I doubt there ever has been an imam who suggested that his followers try Roman Catholicism or a priest who urged the reverse.

It is too easy, then, as someone who’s felt rejected, let down, even made fun of by church people, to simply refuse to love them. It’s too easy to live my life in reaction to them. Yes, I can easily craft a false narrative about how awful others are and how much better than them I am, but it excuses me from the hard work of forgiveness and patience.

American history is explained poorly by modern morality but effectively by simple economics and power dynamics.

When analyzed by serious people, across the sweep of history, slavery is revealed to have been not a “Western” practice but rather a universal one largely ended by Western arms.

political, or ethnic narrative is ipso facto false. Social scientists have described such theories as having a “self-sealing quality” that makes them “particularly immune to challenge.

Once upon a time I was liberal. Well, to be honest, less than a year ago I was still a liberal,” he announced in a video. “But I reject a system which allows an ambitious, misinformed, dogmatic group to suppress free speech, create false narratives and apathetically steamroll over the truth. I reject hate. These are the reasons why I became a liberal. And these are the same reasons why I am now walking away.

Between 1870 and 1905 Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens) tried repeatedly, and at long intervals, to write (or dictate) his autobiography, always shelving the manuscript before he had made much progress. By 1905 he had accumulated some thirty or forty of these false starts—manuscripts that were essentially experiments, drafts of episodes and chapters; many of these have survived in the Mark Twain Papers and two other libraries. To some of these manuscripts he went so far as to assign chapter numbers that placed them early or late in a narrative which he never filled in, let alone completed. None dealt with more than brief snatches of his life story.

But I should be false to the earliest sentiments of my soul, if I suppressed the opinion. I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and incur my own abhorrence.

It was not only that false biographies tended to overshadow true ones, they obscured a hard fact that all fiction writers know—which is simply that real life is far less believable than fiction. That is in fact part of the power of nonfiction narratives. To take details from “real life” into fiction and make them believable requires careful work: creating characters the reader can believe would do the unbelievable and setting up a scene where those events make some kind of sense.

WCCO isn’t every news station or media outlet in America. But there are so many stories that haven’t been told because the media and the Left have been pushing false narratives without any concern for the lives they destroy along the way. They provide a platform for those demanding accountability, yet they never hold themselves accountable. In this case, the media and the Left wrongfully accused four officers before any of the facts were known. They helped stir the outrage that left Minneapolis in ruins for reasons that hardly resemble the truth.

The stories others tell about you and the stories you tell about yourself: which come closer to the truth? Is it so clear that they are your own? Is one an authority on oneself? but that really isn't the question that concerns me. The real question is: In such stories, is there really a difference between true and false? In stories about the outside, surely. But when we set out to understand someone on the inside? Is that a trip that ever comes to an end? Is the soul a place of facts? Or are the alleged facts only the deceptive shadows of our stories?

Logic might be imagined to exist independent of writing—syllogisms can be spoken as well as written—but it did not. Speech is too fleeting to allow for analysis. Logic descended from the written word, in Greece as well as India and China, where it developed independently. Logic turns the act of abstraction into a tool for determining what is true and what is false: truth can be discovered in words alone, apart from concrete experience. Logic takes its form in chains: sequences whose members connect one to another. Conclusions follow from premises. These require a degree of constancy. They have no power unless people can examine and evaluate them. In contrast, an oral narrative proceeds by accretion, the words passing by in a line of parade past the viewing stand, briefly present and then gone, interacting with one another via memory and association.

Therefore, “A man will act right for the right woman” is not only false, but an unhealthy narrative to continue propagating. With this mindset, men will continue being unprepared for relationships, and women will continue hurting themselves in efforts to love unprepared men or even worse,

The witch-hunt narrative is a really popular story that goes like this: Lots of people were falsely convicted of child sexual abuse in the 1980s and early 1990s. And they were all victims of a witch-hunt. It just doesn’t happen to line up with the facts when you actually look at the cases themselves in detail. But it’s a really popular narrative — I think it’s absolutely fair to say that’s the conventional wisdom. It’s what most people now think is the uncontested truth, and those cases had no basis in fact. And what 15 years of painstaking trial court research (says) is that that’s not a very fair description of those cases, and in fact many of those cases had substantial evidence of abuse. The witch-hunt narrative is that these were all gross injustices to the defendant. In fact, what it looks like in retrospect is the injustices were much more often to children.

It was bewildering at such an advanced age to understand that the narrative of your family which you had carried within you--within which, in a way, you had lived--was false, or, at the very least, that you had been ignorant of its most essential truth, which had been kept from you. Not to be told the whole truth, [...], was to be told a lie. That lie had been his truth. Maybe this was the human condition, to live inside fictions created by untruths or the withholding of actual truths. Maybe human life was truly fictional in this sense, that those who lived it didn't understand it wasn't real.

The degree of rigidity is a matter of profound interest in the study of literary fictions. As an extreme case you will find some novel, probably contemporary with yourself, in which the departure from a basic paradigm, the peripeteia in the sense I am now giving it, seems to begin with the first sentence. The schematic expectations of the reader are discouraged immediately. Since by definition one seeks the maximum peripeteia (in this extended sense) in the fiction of one's own time, the best instance I can give is from Alain Robbe-Grillet. He refuses to speak of his 'theory' of the novel; it is the old ones who talk about the need for plot, character, and so forth, who have the theories. And without them one can achieve a new realism, and a narrative in which 'le temps se trouve coupé de la temporalité. Il ne coule plus.' And so we have a novel in which,. the reader will find none of the gratification to be had from sham temporality, sham causality, falsely certain description, clear story. The new novel 'repeats itself, bisects itself, modifies itself, contradicts itself, without even accumulating enough bulk to constitute a past--and thus a "story," in the traditional sense of the word.' The reader is not offered easy satisfactions, but a challenge to creative co-operation.

There is an odd psychology amongst those who inherit great wealth, because deep down inside, they realize that they did nothing to earn it, that it really was just a matter of luck, and yet how can it be that they are not special? My father suffers from this malady. “I have all this,” the thinking goes, “ergo I must be somehow superior.” This leads to a constant internal battle to maintain the false narrative of somehow “deserving” all these riches, of being “worthy.” You push away the obvious truth—that fate and happenstance have more to do with your lot in life than your “brilliance” or “work ethic”—so as not to shatter your self-created myth.

Beyond these things is the folding and unfolding of meaning. The rearrangement of the map onto the creature. The branching out of possibility, the warmth of light exploring the darkness of uncertainty. The reconnecting of the thing I once loved. I don't remember how it was lost, I think the map misled me, there was a branch leading to nowhere but the map showed a certain promise of redemption, a chance to see the child, no, the union of the mother and child. The way seemed blocked by expectation and false narrative. There would be a struggle for control. There was no control, only the path and in the end, lost connections, the fading of meaning into madness.

In many advanced democracies there is now no common debate, let alone a common narrative. People have always had different opinions. Now they have different facts. At the same time, in an information sphere without authorities--political, cultural, moral--and no trusted sources, there is no easy way to distinguish between conspiracy theories and true stories. False, partisan, and often deliberately misleading narratives now spread in digital wildfires, cascades of falsehood that move too fast for fact checkers to keep up. And even if they could, it no longer matters: a part of the public will never read or see fact-checking websites, and if they do they won't believe them.

in an information sphere without authorities—political, cultural, moral—and no trusted sources, there is no easy way to distinguish between conspiracy theories and true stories. False, partisan, and often deliberately misleading narratives now spread in digital wildfires, cascades of falsehood that move too fast for fact checkers to keep up.

We have trouble digesting a narrative that doesn’t fit our worldview. It’s actually easier for us to believe a false narrative that fits our outlook on the world than a true narrative that shakes and shatters our perspective. And that is true regardless of where we stand. However, a Christian worldview, marked by the biblical storyline, stands apart from ordinary, conventional storylines. It shows that in the grand scheme, we are all guilty. We are all villains, the bad guys. The true evil is sin showing its face through broken humanity, and it touches every one of us. The one true hero is Jesus and his power to restore broken hearts and repair the infrastructures corrupted by sin.

One of the hardest lessons I have learned social justice work is that, even when oppressive systems are confronted and dismantled, those responsible will- more often than not- take hold of the narrative to mitigate responsibility. As a result, the oppressed still tend to bear the brunt of the fallout. And what makes that even harder to process is that many people who would declare themselves "allies to the cause" will passively or actively buy into that false narrative because it is far easier and less costly than to walk in genuine solidarity. I don't say this so that people will feel hopeless about their commitments to justice. Quite the opposite. If you know that this happens, you won't be as crushed when it does.

We make up hidden stories that tell us who is against us and who is with us. Whom we can trust and who is not to be trusted. Conspiracy thinking is all about fear-based self-protection and our intolerance for uncertainty. When we depend on self-protecting narratives often enough, they become our default stories. And we must not forget that storytelling is a powerful integration tool. We start weaving these hidden, false stories into our lives and they eventually distort who we are and how we relate to others. When unconscious storytelling becomes our default, we often keep tripping over the same issue, staying down when we fall, and having different versions of the same problem in our relationships—we’ve got the story on repeat. Burton explains that our brains like predictable storytelling. He writes, “In effect, well-oiled patterns of observation encourage our brains to compose a story that we expect to hear.” The men and women who have cultivated rising strong practices in their lives became aware of the traps in these first stories, whereas the participants who continued to struggle the most appeared to have gotten stuck in those stories. The good news is that people aren’t born with an exceptional understanding of the stories they make up, nor does it just dawn on them one day. They practiced. Sometimes for years. They set out with the intention to become aware and they tried until it worked. They captured their conspiracies and confabulations. Capturing

5.4 The question of accumulation. If life is a wager, what form does it take? At the racetrack, an accumulator is a bet which rolls on profits from the success of one of the horse to engross the stake on the next one. 5.5 So a) To what extent might human relationships be expressed in a mathematical or logical formula? And b) If so, what signs might be placed between the integers?Plus and minus, self-evidently; sometimes multiplication, and yes, division. But these sings are limited. Thus an entirely failed relationship might be expressed in terms of both loss/minus and division/ reduction, showing a total of zero; whereas an entirely successful one can be represented by both addition and multiplication. But what of most relationships? Do they not require to be expressed in notations which are logically improbable and mathematically insoluble? 5.6 Thus how might you express an accumulation containing the integers b, b, a (to the first), a (to the second), s, v? B = s - v (*/+) a (to the first) Or a (to the second) + v + a (to the first) x s = b 5.7 Or is that the wrong way to put the question and express the accumulation? Is the application of logic to the human condition in and of itself self-defeating? What becomes of a chain of argument when the links are made of different metals, each with a separate frangibility? 5.8 Or is "link" a false metaphor? 5.9 But allowing that is not, if a link breaks, wherein lies the responsibility for such breaking? On the links immediately on the other side, or on the whole chain? But what do you mean by "the whole chain"? How far do the limits of responsibility extend? 6.0 Or we might try to draw the responsibility more narrowly and apportion it more exactly. And not use equations and integers but instead express matters in the traditional narrative terminology. So, for instance, if...." - Adrian Finn

Gratitude is not a psychological or political panacea, like a secular prosperity gospel, one that denies pain or overlooks injustice, because being grateful does not “fix” anything. Pain, suffering, and injustice—these things are all real. They do not go away. Gratitude, however, invalidates the false narrative that these things are the sum total of human existence, that despair is the last word. Gratitude gives us a new story. It opens our eyes to see that every life is, in unique and dignified ways, graced: the lives of the poor, the castoffs, the sick, the jailed, the exiles, the abused, the forgotten as well as those in more comfortable physical circumstances. Your life. My life. We all share in the ultimate gift—life itself. Together. Right now.

Tears fall down my cheeks while I drive home, trying desperately to process everything. Laura suggested that Mom was abusive. My whole life, my entire existence has been oriented to the narrative that Mom wants what's best for me, Mom does what's best for me, Mom knows what's best for me. Even in the past, when resentments started to creep in or wedges started to come between us, I have checked those resentments and wedges, I have curbed them so that I can move forward with this narrative intact, this narrative that feels essential to my survival. If Mom really didn't want what's best for me, or do what was best for me, that means my entire life, my entire point of view, and my entire identity have been built on a false foundation. And if my entire life and point of view and identity have been built on a false foundation, confronting that false foundation would mean destroying it and rebuilding a new foundation from the ground up. I have no idea how to go about doing this. I have no idea how to go about life without doing it in the shadow of my mother, without my every move being dictated by her wants, her needs, her approval.

There are four distinct references to Jesus’ silence along this trail to His death. Let us probe them. The first occurs when He is standing before the Sanhedrin, as narrated in Mark 14:60. Conflicting testimony was given by false witnesses. Their charges did not add up, yet Jesus remained silent. Contradiction itself ought to be self-indicting. When it is not, either truth or truthfulness has died. The second silence occurred when, in the presence of Pilate, the high priests repeated their charges of treason, and Jesus remained silent. He knew that they were determined to crucify Him. It is difficult to bring a defense against religion without truth, especially when it is galvanized by a crowd. Any words of self-defense on Jesus’ part would have been pointless. I believe that Jesus’ demeanor here is profoundly exemplary. It was the silence of truth in the midst of the noise of prejudice and hate. I have personally experienced situations like this and have witnessed others in a similar position. The one who stands silently in the face of mocking and hate-filled people exposes the scandalous capacity of hatred and, in his silence, speaks volumes of God’s character. The

Reading 1: What is the narrative, the story? Reading 2: What is the play about? Reading 3: What does my character say about himself? Reading 4: What do other characters say about my character when he is present? Reading 5: What do other characters say about my character when he is absent? Reading 6: What is true in the play? Reading 7: What is false in the play? Reading 8: What does the character actually do?

If what I have called the “value gap” is the idea that in America white lives have always mattered more than the lives of others, then the lie is a broad and powerful architecture of false assumptions by which the value gap is maintained. These are the narrative assumptions that support the everyday order of American life, which means we breathe them like air. We count them as truths. We absorb them into our character.

The FMSF achieved prominence partly as a response to increased possibilities for women to institute criminal or civil proceedings that relate to historical abuse, and women do not often take their abusers to court. The foundation's framing of abuse serves an ulterior strategic purpose of constructing a narrative position that isolates the incest survivor in an adversarial setting of interpreter distrust and challenged.

People have always had different opinions. Now they have different facts. At the same time, in an information sphere without authorities—political, cultural, moral—and no trusted sources, there is no easy way to distinguish between conspiracy theories and true stories. False, partisan, and often deliberately misleading narratives now spread in digital wildfires, cascades of falsehood that move too fast for fact checkers to keep up.

The Legend of Robert Halsey This article examines the criminal conviction of Robert Halsey for sexually abusing two young boys on his school-van route near Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Mr. Halsey's name has been invoked by academics, journalists, and activists as the victim of the “witch hunt” in this country over child sexual abuse. Based on a comprehensive examination of the trial transcript, this article details the overwhelming evidence of guilt against Mr. Halsey. The credulous acceptance of the “false conviction” legend about Robert Halsey provides a case study in the techniques and tactics used to minimize and deny sexual abuse, while promoting a narrative about “ritual abuse” and “witch hunts” that apparently requires little or no factual basis. The second part of this article analyzes how the erroneous “false conviction” narrative about Robert Halsey was constructed and how it gained widespread acceptance. The Legend of Robert Halsey provides a cautionary tale about how easy it is to wrap even the guiltiest person in a cloak of righteous “witch hunt” claims. Cases identified as “false convictions” by defense lawyers and political activists deserve far greater scrutiny from the media and the public. journal: Cheit, Ross E. "The Legend of Robert Halsey." Journal of child sexual abuse 9.3-4 (2002): 37-52.

interview from Ross E. Cheit about The Witch-Hunt Narrative: Politics, Psychology, and the Sexual Abuse of Children (Oxford University Press, February 2014). In the foreword to your book you mention a book titled Satan’s Silence was the catalyst for your research. Tell us about that. Cheit: Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker solidified the witch-hunt narrative in their 1995 book, Satan’s Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt, which included some of these cases. I was initially skeptical of the book’s argument for personal reasons. It seemed implausible to me that we had overreacted to child abuse because everything in my own personal history said we hadn’t. When I read the book closely, my skepticism increased. Satan’s Silence has been widely reviewed as meticulously researched. As someone with legal training, I looked for how many citations referred to the trial transcripts. The answer was almost none. Readers were also persuaded by long list of [presumably innocent] convicted sex offenders to whom they dedicated the book. If I’m dedicating a book to fifty-four people, all of whom I think have been falsely convicted, I’m going to mention every one of these cases somewhere in the book. Most weren’t mentioned at all beyond that dedication. The witch-hunt narrative is so sparsely documented that it’s shocking.

Of course one’s sense of identification with the nation is inflected by all kinds of particulars, including one’s class, race, gender, and sexual identification. … But [regarding] national character …, aside from references to a national aesthetic — literary, musical, and choreographic, there are two poles I reference: minimalist and maximalist. I love them both — the cryptic poems of Emily Dickinson folded up in tiny packets and hidden away in a box, the sparse, understated choreographies of Merce; but also the “trashy, profane and obscene” poems of Whitman and Ginsberg, [and] Martha Graham’s expressionism. I am, myself, a minimalist. But I love distortion guitar and the wild exhibitionism of so many American artists. Also, these divisions are false. Emily Dickinson, in fact, can be as trashy and obscene as the best of them! Anyway, Dickinson and Whitman are at the heart of this narrative. They are the Dancing Queen and the Guitar Hero.

Nowhere is the sense of medium felt more strongly, even by the casual reader, than in a story about to end. For the novelist the problem is no longer how to tell his tale, but how to close it down; how to switch imaginative energies which have been used in sustaining the tale, into energies which will not just stop it, but will resolve it. The process of telling must be made to predicate its own conclusion. For the reader, in sight of an ending, the mode of attention shifts, the rhythm alters, and a pressure of significance begins to build up behind the closing chapters. The pace of the narrative begins to slow, the 'ever after' looms, past and present emerge in ever sharper juxtaposition. It is this heightened attention to the medium that characterises the ending and we are not surprised to find that for some novelists 'endings' seem to play false to the narrative which leads to them. 'Conclusions are the weak points of most authors', George Eliot wrote, 'but some of the fault must lie in the very nature of a conclusion which is at best a negation'.

Narrative horror, disgust. That's what drives him mad, I'm sure of it, what obsesses him. I've known other people with the same aversion, or awareness, and they weren't even famous, fame is not a deciding factor, there are many individuals who experience their life as if it were the material of some detailed report, and they inhabit that life pending its hypothetical or future plot. They don't give it much thought, it's just a way of experiencing things, companionable, in a way, as if there were always spectators or permanent witnesses, even of their most trivial goings-on and in the dullest of times. Perhaps it's a substitute for the old idea of the omnipresence of God, who saw every second of each of our lives, it was very flattering in a way, very comforting despite the implicit threat and punishment, and three or four generations aren't enough for Man to accept that his gruelling existence goes on without anyone ever observing or watching it, without anyone judging it or disapproving of it. And in truth there is always someone: a listener, a reader, a spectator, a witness, who can also double up as simultaneous narrator and actor: the individuals tell their stories to themselves, to each his own, they are the ones who peer in and look at and notice things on a daily basis, from the outside in a way; or, rather, from a false outside, from a generalised narcissism, sometimes known as "consciousness". That's why so few people can withstand mockery, humiliation, ridicule, the rush of blood to the face, a snub, that least of all ... I've known men like that, men who were nobody yet who had that same immense fear of their own history, of what might be told and what, therefore, they might tell too. Of their blotted, ugly history. But, I insist, the determining factor always comes from outside, from something external: all this has little to do with shame, regret, remorse, self-hatred although these might make a fleeting appearance at some point. These individuals only feel obliged to give a true account of their acts or omissions, good or bad, brave, contemptible, cowardly or generous, if other people (the majority, that is) know about them, and those acts or omissions are thus encorporated into what is known about them, that is, into their official portraits. It isn't really a matter of conscience, but of performance, of mirrors. One can easily cast doubt on what is reflected in mirrors, and believe that it was all illusory, wrap it up in a mist of diffuse or faulty memory and decide finally that it didn't happen and that there is no memory of it, because there is no memory of what did not take place. Then it will no longer torment them: some people have an extraordinary ability to convince themselves that what happened didn't happen and what didn't exist did.

Nothing is easier than to be original thanks to a false absolute, all the more so when this absolute is negative, for to destroy is easier than to construct. Humanism is the reign of horizontality, either naive or perfidious; and since it is also — and by that very fact — the negation of the Absolute, it is a door open to a multitude of sham absolutes, which in addition are often negative, subversive, and destructive. It is not too difficult to be original with such intentions and such means; all one needs is a little imagination. It should be noted that subversion includes not only philosophical and moral schemes designed to undermine the normal order of things, but also — in literature and on a seemingly harmless plane — all that can satisfy an unhealthy curiosity: namely all the narrations that are fantastic, grotesque, lugubrious, "dark," thus satanic in their way, and well-fitted to predispose men to all excesses and all perversions; this is the sinister side of romanticism. Without fearing in the least to be "childlike" or caring in the least to be "adult," we readily dispense with these somber lunacies, and are fully satisfied with Snow White and Sleeping Beauty.

marveling, as he always did in the aftermath of his spells, just how much they resembled tropical storms. As they approached, he often could sense the change in barometric pressure, as he had done on the ferry, even though the storm was still far out at sea, churning away, gathering force, bearing down. When it finally came ashore there wasn’t much to do but ride it out, just let it howl and rage and do its worst. At some point his buffeted, terrified psyche simply gave way to a profound sense of calm, there in the storm’s gentle eye. It wasn’t unlike what people coming down from acid trips often described—the self simply dissipating. To Teddy, a breathtaking moment of splendid, weightless drifting away. In another second or two the world and its cares would cease to matter. In their place, blessed oblivion. But then the winds returned, the shard pierced flesh, and he would know the truth—that escape was yet another false narrative. Later, bloodied and chastened and exhausted, he would do what he always did—claw up into the light, blinking, and survey the damage. Make an inventory of what was irretrievably lost, what was merely damaged and in need of mending, and then, most vitally, somehow locate and reestablish that charmless but necessary even keel that allowed for smooth, if unadventurous, sailing. What he called his life.

It is in the context of this mid-Sasanian era edict reported by Elishe that the myth of Zurvan as hypostatized “Time” is outlined. Another fifth century CE Armenian, Eznik of Kølb, narrates the myth in more details and with some variations. It describes Zurvan as progenitor of both Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu. This myth of a common progenitor seems to have been one way that Zoroastrians in the Sasanian period understood the separate origins and natures of good and evil. Although in this schema Zurvan is the source of both, he is not a creator god—that role belongs to Ahura Mazda. The Zurvanite “twinning” of Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu as “brothers” from a common origin is rejected as a false teaching in the Middle Persian Denkard.

Ultimately, however, what happened to Humanity does not matter. Like every other story, it was a temporary one; indeed long but ultimately ephemeral. It did not have a coherent ending, but then again it did not need to. The tale of Humanity was never its ultimate domination of a thousand galaxies, or its mysterious exit into the unknown. The essence of being human was none of that. Instead, it lay in the radio conversations of the still-human Machines, in the daily lives of the bizarrely twisted Bug Facers, in the endless love-songs of the carefree Hedonists, the rebellious demonstrations of the first true Martians, and in a way, the very life you lead at the moment. Many throughout history were unaware of this most basic fact. The Qu, in dreams of an ideal future, distorted the worlds it came across. Later on the Gravital, with their insane desire to recreate the past, created the biggest massacres in the history of the galaxy. Even now, it is sickeningly easy for beings to get lost in false grand narratives, living out completely driven lives in pursuit of non-existent ultimates, ideals, climaxes and golden ages. In blindly thinking that their stories serve absolute ends, such creatures almost always end up harming themselves, if not those around them. To those like them; look at the story of Man, and come to your senses! It is not the destination, but the trip that matters, and what you do today influences tomorrow, not the other way around. Love Today, and seize All Tomorrows!

I may be deemed superstitious, and even egotistical, in regarding this event as a special interposition of divine Providence in my favor. But I should be false to the earliest sentiments of my soul, if I suppressed the opinion. I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and incur my own abhorrence. From my earliest recollection, I date the entertainment of a deep conviction that slavery would not always be able to hold me within its foul embrace; and in the darkest hours of my career in slavery, this living word of faith and spirit of hope departed not from me, but remained like ministering angels to cheer me through the gloom. This good spirit was from God, and to him I offer thanksgiving and praise.

In all human transactions, the highest degree of assurance to which we can arrive, short of the evidence of our own senses, is that of probability. The most that can be asserted is, that the narrative is more likely to be true than false; and it may be in the highest degree more likely, but still be short of absolute mathematical certainty. Yet this very probability may be so great as to satisfy the mind of the most cautious, and enforce the assent of the most reluctant and unbelieving. If it is such as usually satisfies reasonable men, in matters of ordinary transaction, it is all which the greatest sceptic has a right to require; for it is by such evidence alone that our rights are determined, in the civil tribunals; and on no other evidence do they proceed, even in capital cases.

The maxim, by which we commonly conduct ourselves in our reasonings, is, that the objects, of which we have no experience, resemble those, of which we have; that what we have found to be most usual is always most probable; and that where there is an opposition of arguments, we ought to give the preference to such as are founded on the greatest number of past observations. But though, in proceeding by this rule, we readily reject any fact which is unusual and incredible in an ordinary degree; yet in advancing farther, the mind observes not always the same rule; but when anything is affirmed utterly absurd and miraculous, it rather the more readily admits of such a fact, upon account of that very circumstance, which ought to destroy all its authority. The passion of surprise and wonder, arising from miracles, being an agreeable emotion, gives a sensible tendency towards the belief of those events, from which it is derived. And this goes so far, that even those who cannot enjoy this pleasure immediately, nor can believe those miraculous events, of which they are informed, yet love to partake of the satisfaction at secondhand or by rebound, and place a pride and delight in exciting the admiration of others. 17 With what greediness are the miraculous accounts of travelers received, their descriptions of sea and land monsters, their relations of wonderful adventures, strange men, and uncouth manners? But if the spirit of religion join itself to the love of wonder, there is an end of common sense; and human testimony, in these circumstances, loses all pretensions to authority. A religionist may be an enthusiast, and imagine he sees what has no reality: He may know his narrative to be false, and yet persevere in it, with the best intentions in the world, for the sake of promoting so holy a cause: Or even where this delusion has not place, vanity, excited by so strong a temptation, operates on him more powerfully than on the rest of mankind in any other circumstances; and self-interest with equal force. His auditors may not have, and commonly have not, sufficient judgment to canvass his evidence: What judgment they have, they renounce by principle, in these sublime and mysterious subjects: Or if they were ever so willing to employ it, passion and a heated imagination disturb the regularity of its operations. Their credulity increases his impudence: And his impudence overpowers their credulity.

From the colonial era to the Trump era, the “They Keep Coming” immigration myth has been used by xenophobes to demonize immigrants and lobby for immigration restriction. It has created a climate of fear and fueled discrimination and exploitation. At the same time, it has promoted a false and incomplete narrative of how immigration works. No part of the myth is actually true. Immigrants are not outsiders. “They” are “us.” Immigrants have not “kept coming.” They have been driven, recruited, lured, and incentivized to come to the United States, often with the direct help and encouragement of the US government and businesses. Only by fully understanding the origins, endurance, and contemporary relevance of the “They Keep Coming” myth can we begin to dismantle it and the xenophobia and racism that it fuels.

The book argues that even though many cases have been held up as classic examples of modern American “witch hunts,” none of them fits that description. McMartin certainly comes close. But a careful examination of the evidence presented at trial demonstrates why, in my view, a reasonable juror could vote for conviction, as many did in this case. Other cases that have been painted as witch-hunts turn out to involve significant, even overwhelming, evidence of guilt. There are a few cases to the contrary, but even those are more complicated than the witch-hunt narrative allows. In short, there was not, by any reasonable measure, an epidemic of “witch hunts” in the 1980s. There were big mistakes made in how some cases were handled, particularly in the earliest years. But even in those years there were cases such as those of Frank Fuster and Kelly Michaels that, I believe, were based on substantial evidence but later unfairly maligned as having no evidentiary support.

The current crisis has led to renewed discussions about a universal basic income, whereby all citizens receive an equal regular payment from the government, regardless of whether they work. The idea behind this policy is a good one, but the narrative would be problematic. Since a universal basic income is seen as a handout, it perpetuates the false notion that the private sector is the sole creator, not a co-creator, of wealth in the economy and that the public sector is merely a toll collector, siphoning off profits and distributing them as charity. A better alternative is a citizen’s dividend. Under this policy, the government takes a percentage of the wealth created with government investments, puts that money in a fund, and then shares the proceeds with the people. The idea is to directly reward citizens with a share of the wealth they have created. Alaska, for example, has distributed oil revenues to residents through an annual dividend from its Permanent Fund since 1982.

But should we garner the courage and moral will to reject once and for all the fallacy of racial difference for the ideological conceit that it is, what will be the premise of our new national history, our new national story? Where will the frontiers of the new Malaysia be? And what will the new Malaysia look like? None of us can answer these questions for certain, for any national narrative is forever a work in progress. Nations are constructs, based on the collective imagination and imaginary of their citizens. But as a nation in the making and under construction, we should at least have the courage to admit that some of our earlier premises were wrong (if not dangerous) and that the time has come to reinvent ourselves with some degree of hindsight and collective wisdom. One of the first steps that has to be taken is to recognise and accept that much of what we have been told as the first generation of postcolonial Malaysians was false, and that these instrumental fictions were tools to mentally bind us.

We live in a time I did not think I would see in my lifetime, a time when freedom—and in particular freedom of expression, without which the world of books could not exist—is everywhere under attack from reactionary, authoritarian, populist, demagogic, narcissistic, careless voices; when places of education and libraries are subject to hostility and censorship; and when extremist religion and bigoted ideologies have begun to intrude in areas of life in which they do not belong. And there are also progressive voices being raised in favor of a new kind of bien-pensant censorship, one which appears virtuous, and which many people have begun to see as a virtue. So freedom is under pressure from the left as well as the right, the young as well as the old. This is something new, and made more complicated by our new tool of communication, the Internet, on which well-designed pages of malevolent lies sit side by side with the truth, and it is difficult for many people to tell which is which; and our social media, where the idea of freedom is every day abused to permit, very often, a kind of online mob rule, which the billionaire owners of these platforms seem increasingly willing to encourage—and to profit by. What do we do about free speech when it is so widely abused? We should still do, with renewed vigor, what we have always needed to do: to answer bad speech with better speech, to counter false narratives with better narratives, to answer hate with love, and to believe that the truth can still succeed even in an age of lies. We must defend it fiercely and define it as broadly as possible, so, yes, we should of course defend speech that offends us; otherwise we are not defending free expression at all. Let a thousand and one voices speak in a thousand and one different ways. To quote Cavafy, “the barbarians are coming today,” and what I do know is that the answer to philistinism is art, the answer to barbarianism is civilization, and in any war it may be that artists of all sorts—filmmakers, actors, singers, and, yes, those who practice the ancient art of the book—can still, together, turn the barbarians away from the gates.

While most of us go through life feeling that we are the thinker of our thoughts and the experiencer of our experience, from the perspective of science we know that this is a distorted view. There is no discrete self or ego lurking like a minotaur in the labyrinth of the brain. There is no region of cortex or pathway of neural processing that occupies a privileged position with respect to our personhood. There is no unchanging “center of narrative gravity” (to use Daniel Dennett’s phrase). In subjective terms, however, there seems to be one — to most of us, most of the time. Our contemplative traditions (Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, etc.) also suggest, to varying degrees and with greater or lesser precision, that we live in the grip of a cognitive illusion. But the alternative to our captivity is almost always viewed through the lens of religious dogma. A Christian will recite the Lord’s Prayer continuously over a weekend, experience a profound sense of clarity and peace, and judge this mental state to be fully corroborative of the doctrine of Christianity; A Hindu will spend an evening singing devotional songs to Krishna, feel suddenly free of his conventional sense of self, and conclude that his chosen deity has showered him with grace; a Sufi will spend hours whirling in circles, pierce the veil of thought for a time, and believe that he has established a direct connection to Allah. The universality of these phenomena refutes the sectarian claims of any one religion. And, given that contemplatives generally present their experiences of self-transcendence as inseparable from their associated theology, mythology, and metaphysics, it is no surprise that scientists and nonbelievers tend to view their reports as the product of disordered minds, or as exaggerated accounts of far more common mental states — like scientific awe, aesthetic enjoyment, artistic inspiration, etc. Our religions are clearly false, even if certain classically religious experiences are worth having. If we want to actually understand the mind, and overcome some of the most dangerous and enduring sources of conflict in our world, we must begin thinking about the full spectrum of human experience in the context of science. But we must first realize that we are lost in thought.

When one completely denies oneself, there are no words to speak. What can one say? Praise and blame are the same to one; there is nothing to be said. And how is this to be attained? It is to be attained, not only by prayer or by worship or by believing in God. It is to be attained by forgetting oneself in God. The belief in God is the first step. By the belief in God, is attained the losing oneself in God. If one is able to do it, one has attained a power which is beyond human comprehension. The process of attaining this is called Fana by the Sufis. Fana is not necessarily a destruction in God. Fana results in what may be called a resurrection in God, which is symbolized by the picture of Christ. The Christ on the cross is narrative of Fana; it means 'I am not.' And the idea of resurrection explains the next stage, which is Baqa, which means 'Thou art.' and this means rising towards All-might. The divine spirit is to be recognized in that rising towards All-might. Fana is not attained by torturing oneself, by tormenting oneself, by giving oneself a great many troubles, as many ascetics do. For even after torturing themselves, they will not come to that realization if they were not meant to. It is by denying one's little self, the false self, which covers one's real self, in which the essence of divine Being is to be found.

We are engaged in a world war of stories—a war between incompatible versions of reality—and we need to learn how to fight it. A tyrant has arisen in Russia and brutality engulfs Ukraine, whose people, led by a satirist turned hero, offer heroic resistance, and are already creating a legend of freedom. The tyrant creates false narratives to justify his assault—the Ukrainians are Nazis, and Russia is menaced by Western conspiracies. He seeks to brainwash his own citizens with such lying stories. Meanwhile, America is sliding back towards the Middle Ages, as white supremacy exerts itself not only over Black bodies, but over women’s bodies too. False narratives rooted in antiquated religiosity and bigoted ideas from hundreds of years ago are used to justify this, and find willing audiences and believers. In India, religious sectarianism and political authoritarianism go hand in hand, and violence grows as democracy dies. Once again, false narratives of Indian history are in play, narratives that privilege the majority and oppress minorities; and these narratives, let it be said, are popular, just as the Russian tyrant’s lies are believed. This, now, is the ugly dailiness of the world. How should we respond? It has been said, I have said it myself, that the powerful may own the present, but writers own the future, for it is through our work, or the best of it at least, the work which endures into that future, that the present misdeeds of the powerful will be judged. But how can we think of the future when the present screams for our attention, and what, if we turn away from posterity and pay attention to this dreadful moment, can we usefully or effectively do? A poem will not stop a bullet. A novel cannot defuse a bomb. Not all our satirists are heroes. But we are not helpless. Even after Orpheus was torn to pieces, his severed head, floating down the river Hebrus, went on singing, reminding us that the song is stronger than death. We can sing the truth and name the liars, we can join in solidarity with our fellows on the front lines and magnify their voices by adding our own to them. Above all, we must understand that stories are at the heart of what’s happening, and the dishonest narratives of oppressors have proved attractive to many. So we must work to overturn the false narratives of tyrants, populists, and fools by telling better stories than they do, stories within which people want to live. The battleground is not only on the battlefield. The stories we live in are contested territories too. Perhaps we can seek to emulate Joyce’s Dedalus, who sought to forge, in the smithy of his soul, the uncreated conscience of his race. We can emulate Orpheus and sing on in the face of horror, and not stop singing until the tide turns, and a better day begins.

Robert Rosenthal found a way. He approached a California public elementary school and offered to test the school’s students with a newly developed intelligence-identification tool, called the Harvard Test of Inflected Acquisition, which could accurately predict which children would excel academically in the coming year. The school naturally agreed, and the test was administered to the entire student body. A few weeks later, teachers were provided with the names of the children (about 20 percent of the student body) who had tested as high-potentials. These particular children, the teachers were informed, were special. Though they might not have performed well in the past, the test indicated that they possessed “unusual potential for intellectual growth.” (The students were not informed of the test results.) The following year Rosenthal returned to measure how the high-potential students had performed. Exactly as the test had predicted, the first- and second-grade high-potentials had succeeded to a remarkable degree: The first-graders gained 27 IQ points (versus 12 points for the rest of the class); and the second-graders gained 17 points (versus 7 points). In addition, the high-potentials thrived in ways that went beyond measurement. They were described by their teachers as being more curious, happier, better adjusted, and more likely to experience success as adults. What’s more, the teachers reported that they had enjoyed teaching that year more than any year in the past. Here’s the twist: the Harvard Test of Inflected Acquisition was complete baloney. In fact, the “high-potentials” had been selected at random. The real subject of the test was not the students but the narratives that drive the relationship between the teachers and the students. What happened, Rosenthal discovered, was replacing one story—These are average kids—with a new one—These are special kids, destined to succeed—served as a locator beacon that reoriented the teachers, creating a cascade of behaviors that guided the student toward that future. It didn’t matter that the story was false, or that the children were, in fact, randomly selected. The simple, glowing idea—This child has unusual potential for intellectual growth—aligned motivations, awareness, and behaviors.

Recently, brain scans of schizophrenics taken while they were having auditory hallucinations have helped explain this ancient disorder. For example, when we silently talk to ourselves, certain parts of the brain light up on an MRI scan, especially in the temporal lobe (such as in Wernicke’s area). When a schizophrenic hears voices, the very same areas of the brain light up. The brain works hard to construct a consistent narrative, so schizophrenics try to make sense of these unauthorized voices, believing they originate from strange sources, such as Martians secretly beaming thoughts into their brains. Dr. Michael Sweeney of Ohio State writes, “Neurons wired for the sensation of sound fire on their own, like gas-soaked rags igniting spontaneously in a hot, dark garage. In the absence of sights and sounds in the surrounding environment, the schizophrenic’s brain creates a powerful illusion of reality.” Notably, these voices seem to be coming from a third party, who often gives the subject commands, which are mostly mundane but sometimes violent. Meanwhile, the simulation centers in the prefrontal cortex seem to be on automatic pilot, so in a way it’s as though the consciousness of a schizophrenic is running the same sort of simulations we all do, except they’re done without his permission. The person is literally talking to himself without his knowledge. HALLUCINATIONS The mind constantly generates hallucinations of its own, but for the most part they are easily controlled. We see images that don’t exist or hear spurious sounds, for example, so the anterior cingulate cortex is vital to distinguish the real from the manufactured. This part of the brain helps us distinguish between stimuli that are external and those that are internally generated by the mind itself. However, in schizophrenics, it is believed that this system is damaged, so that the person cannot distinguish real from imaginary voices. (The anterior cingulate cortex is vital because it lies in a strategic place, between the prefrontal cortex and the limbic system. The link between these two areas is one of the most important in the brain, since one area governs rational thinking, and the other emotions.) Hallucinations, to some extent, can be created on demand. Hallucinations occur naturally if you place someone in a pitch-black room, an isolation chamber, or a creepy environment with strange noises. These are examples of “our eyes playing tricks on us.” Actually, the brain is tricking itself, internally creating false images, trying to make sense of the world and identify threats. This effect is called “pareidolia.” Every time we look at clouds in the sky, we see images of animals, people, or our favorite cartoon characters. We have no choice. It is hardwired into our brains. In a sense, all images we see, both real and virtual, are hallucinations, because the brain is constantly creating false images to “fill in the gaps.” As we’ve seen, even real images are partly manufactured. But in the mentally ill, regions of the brain such as the anterior cingulate cortex are perhaps damaged, so the brain confuses reality and fantasy.

The method by which the architects of fake hate crimes elect to raise awareness is functionally indistinguishable from that of the show trial. As dictators of all stripes justify their behavior on the grounds that the message is more important than are the facts of the case — or, for that matter, than is the sacred innocence of the falsely accused — so the perpetrators of 'hate crime' hoaxes have their own elevated ideologies, into whose service real lives must be pressed. Objective truth is just a casualty of the plan — an inconvenience that must be ruthlessly subjugated to the narrative. It would presumably come as an unpleasant surprise to these miscreants that their behavior carries the very whiff of totalitarian mania that they believe themselves to be denouncing. But it does.

Aside from France, I was baffled by the puzzle of Sweden and other Nordic states, which are often offered as paragons of the large state “that works”—the government represents a large portion of the total economy. How could we have the happiest nation in the world, Denmark (assuming happiness is both measurable and desirable), and a monstrously large state? Is it that these countries are all smaller than the New York metropolitan area? Until my coauthor, the political scientist Mark Blyth, showed me that there, too, was a false narrative: it was almost the same story as in Switzerland (but with a worse climate and no good ski resorts). The state exists as a tax collector, but the money is spent in the communes themselves, directed by the communes—for, say, skills training locally determined as deemed necessary by the community themselves, to respond to private demand for workers. The economic elites have more freedom than in most other democracies—this is far from the statism one can assume from the outside.

Foremost of all must be reckoned The Willows, in which the nameless presences on a desolate Danube island are horribly felt and recognised by a pair of idle voyagers. Here art and restraint in narrative reach their very highest development, and an impression of lasting poignancy is produced without a, single strained passage or a single false note.

A deep sorrow came over Mary for all the child sacrifices she presided over at the base of this monstrosity. The deaths of the innocent gave Gaia life and sustenance, and enslaved women to the illusion of empowerment. The goddess feasted on the flesh and blood of the offering of their wombs. They believed that somehow they were helping their community and saving Mother Earth in giving up their offspring. And every human offered up was absorbed into the tree. When she was up close to it, Mary could see in the grain of the wood the twisted agonized forms of the sacrificial victims melded into the bark so as to become one with it. She had formerly believed that this tree of death was the Tree of Life. But this was not the only false narrative that had held her in its grip of deceit for so many years.

Green and Brock, the study’s authors, called this “Pinocchio circling”: did any elements of the story signal falsehood akin to Pinocchio’s nose? The more engrossed a reader was in the story, the fewer false notes she noticed. The sweep of the narrative trumped the facts of logic.

In my travels from Mauritania to Saudi Arabia, Pakistan to Indonesia, extremist Muslims have shared with me their own deeply held false narratives of America as an oppressive state controlled by Zionists and determined to crush Islam. That’s an absurd caricature, and we should be wary ourselves of caricaturing a religion as diverse as Islam. So let’s avoid religious profiling. The average Christian had nothing to apologize for when Christian fanatics in the former Yugoslavia engaged in genocide against Muslims. Critics of Islam are not to blame because an anti-Muslim fanatic murdered 77 people in Norway in 2011.

The official position on the 1948 Nakba was that Palestinians willingly left the country following orders broadcast over the radio by Arab and Palestinian leaders, calling for people to move to safer places in anticipation of the triumphant Arab armies. Supposedly others fled due to their baseless fears of the Jewish army. The misleading official Israeli position led to the widely accepted conclusion that refugees should be settled in the Arab states, given that they (the Arabs) started the war and created the problem in the first place; thus, they should pay for the consequences. Since the late 1950s, the Israeli narrative has been refuted by historians like Walid Khalidi and Erskine Childers.18 These historians disproved the Israeli contention that official and unofficial bodies in the Arab world, including Palestinian groups, called upon Palestinians to stay in their homes, and even threatened to punish those who left.19

Long before the New Historians and critical sociologists, the Black Panthers challenged the central narratives of Zionism, including the “ingathering of the exiles” and the “melting pot” ideology. They did not stop at simply criticizing discriminatory policies; they also attacked the Zionist movement, which had seduced Mizrahim to immigrate to Israel with misleading promises.

A traditional journalist can see what is in front of her nose and hear what she is told; a social media journalism curator can see hundreds of feeds that show an event from many points of view. Traditional journalism tries to solve a problem of scarcity: lack of cameras at an event. Social media curatorial journalism tries to solve a problem of abundance: telling false or fake reports from real ones and composing a narrative from a seemingly chaotic splash-drip-splash supply of news.

Because our minds need to reduce information, we are more likely to try to squeeze a phenomenon into the Procrustean bed of a crisp and known category (amputating the unknown), rather than suspend categorization, and make it tangible. Thanks to our detections of false patterns, along with real ones, what is random will appear less random and more certain—our overactive brains are more likely to impose the wrong, simplistic narrative than no narrative at all.*1 The mind can be a wonderful tool for self-delusion—it was not designed to deal with complexity and nonlinear uncertainties.*2 Counter to the common discourse, more information means more delusions: our detection of false patterns is growing faster and faster as a side effect of modernity and the information age: there is this mismatch between the messy randomness of the information-rich current world, with its complex interactions, and our intuitions of events, derived in a simpler ancestral habitat. Our mental architecture is at an increased mismatch with the world in which we live.

It’s not that I’m unaware of your nonsense; you’re not the first bad relationship choice I’ve made. Do you think you invented spreading gossip and false narratives? This is the most common behavior of the bitter and small minded.

The mind is a concept, our thoughts create a false narrative. We follow the story until the end, to only be released from our bondage.

Are the ingredients of your story coming from an all natural narrative? Or is the majority of your story packed with artificial fillers of false hype, excessive claims, other peoples authority and copycat marketing? Consider giving your audience and potential audience something authentic and natural to digest.

We create our own narrative: every typo, every misquoted phrase and poorly thought out abbreviation dictating the arrhythmic flow of each meaningless sentence of our lives.

Every culture tells itself a bunch of false historical narratives, it is one of the ways we build a tribal identity for ourselves that we can embrace as great and unique.

More recent Critical Theory holds that any given society’s ills (poverty, racism, sexism, etc.) are caused by the oppressive hierarchical power dynamics inherent in that society. That unique society’s morals, history, knowledge, cultural assumptions, laws, superstitions and even its common courtesies and grammar exist in a social framework of dominance and submission. This framework is maintained in overt ways (court decisions, educational

Memories are, by their nature, false, in as much as they construct pictures and narratives of the person who once was, with those cells which once were, but are no more. Those cells have mutated and turned into something else. Everything that is always has been and always will be. The dust in the light shaft beaming through the windows carries the dead cells off dinosaurs and the ashes of grandpa.

Hayden White ... has argued that the narratives historians develop and use are constructed fictions; they do not reflect any reality of the past because 'real events do not offer themselves as stories'. The dominance of the narrative form among historians ... reflects a larger problem: our desire to make the past tidy and contained in a way that does not, and cannot, represent reality. By framing our historical interpretations as narrative ... historians endow the past with a false sense of coherence

Once we go through the S.O.U.L. practice, we start to understand the narratives and false beliefs we have in our heads from our childhoods that no longer serve us. We’re then able to see the world through a new framework: We move from Victim to Manifester. We put a leash on our dominant Imposter and let it serve us, instead of being subservient to it.