Face without a name
Pull us down, try to forget
History repeats
On the same Theme
Though they have tried to forget youPulling down your image in spiteThe reprieve they get to forgetMust only last a night;Indeed, they call you a bitter nameAnd it rises on their sour breathAnother curse, all the worseAnd suffered after death;Yet it is the living who must payIt is they who bear the debtIf indeed, they seem to needYour memory to forget;God remembers all, his lessonsA forgetful one still meetsAs none is free from memoryHistory repeats.
Don't Believe Internet Just-So Stories
Just so stories are well known by some, they are the stories that supposedly demonstrate some behavior or fact but are not themselves factual; they are 'just so'. Now, Kipling wrote some of these, but they are clearly myths, and so don't really count. Men understand the world through stories, and the role of myth so-called is produce a story-structured concept for things for which there may be no story.
Just-so stories fit well into the modern 'photographic' and 'realistic' and indeed 'hyperfactual' mindset because there can be no category for the mythical (except skepticism about supposed superstitions) or traditional; there is only 'what has happened in history'. I'm not a fool; to demonstrate something in history is a hundred times more powerful than producing a myth or remembering a half-lost narrative about it. If this were not so, what need would there have been for God to enter History as the Christ?
Just-so stories are in fact myths, but they are myths for the 'educated'. The ignorant often beleive myths as though they are fact, mostly because the ignorant don't have a strong grasp of the hard difference between a fable and an account. For this reason, we might emphasize, hyperstition works well on them.
Just so stories allow cunning people to treat the educated again as ignorant; and if you think you're free from this, perhaps you believe that at one time man existed as a series of unaffiliated individuals, 'nature red in tooth and claw', or perhaps the not totally disimilar ideas of Locke's. Chesterton, being a good storyteller, understood completely the difference between what we know, and what we presume based on what we know. About 'cave-men', he said:
"This secret chamber of rock, when illuminated after its long night of unnumbered ages, revealed on its walls large and sprawling outlines diversified with coloured earths; and when they followed the lines of them they recognised, across that vast and void of ages, the movement and the gesture of a man's hand. They were drawings or paintings of animals; and they were drawn or painted not only by a man but by an artist [...] Now it is needless to note, except in passing, that there is nothing whatever in the atmosphere of that cave to suggest the bleak and pessimistic atmosphere of that journalistic cave of the winds, that blows and bellows about us with countless echoes concerning the cave-man. So far as any human character can be hinted at by such traces of the past, that human character is quite human and even humane. It is certainly not the ideal of an inhuman character, like the abstraction invoked in popular science. When novelists and educationists and psychologists of all sorts talk about the cave-man, they never conceive him in connection with anything that is really in the cave."
Many people have read what are called 'greentext' stories on the internet from the imageboards; there are subreddits devoted to people 'asking' for advice which follows upon an alleged account, and there are the more famous claims of people that their eight-year old child had a political awakening.
Believe none of it. You may say, "it is proof that things are much worse than people believe! It's a clown world!" It is doubtless that these accounts are at least based on real events, but people tend to forget that spreading false stories on the internet for various reasons (because you are anonymous) is a grand tradition, and more than this, besides the sordid profession of fan-fiction, there is pornography.
The internet seems to be full of all kinds of pornography, and Reddit, since Tumblr was shut down because of course if you allow any pornography, you allow those who truck in and those seek for a certain kind of truly awful and illegal sort, it all ends up on Reddit. Reddit, for those reading later, was a site that replaced another site called "Digg", which was more or less used to share just-so stories on the internet (as well as memes.) Like all such sites it eventually got taken over by the most rabid people who proceeded to outlaw pranks and jokes from people they didn't like, and ensure that not a single one of their just-so stories ever got published. Needless to say, this is no way to run a non-niche website.
The question one should seriously ask about any of these stories (and greentext stories are more tongue-in-cheek) is, "is this really a kind of pornographic fiction?" Having said this, one also cannot dismiss the possibility that, in the grand tradition of copypasta (stories copied verbatim usually to induce terror) these stories are simply lifted and slightly altered to gain attention. Perhaps they are part of a prank; everyone has pranked 'noobs' (new players) by telling them something like, "yes, Alt-F4 will solve your speed issues while playing" and find that other experienced players repeat the story, 'verifying' it to the detriment of the new player, who of course quickly discovers the prank. At least it was funny.
In a sense, when a story is presented 'as though fact' our ability to analyze it as a narrative, and pay attention to the motives of the author are greatly diminished. In some cases, they seem to vanish entirely, as they often do when a person views a staged photograph.
We of course pat ourselves on the back because we don't believe a liberal's child had a political awakening at eight years old. No one believes that but liberals. Yet, when we see a just-so story that confirms what we already believe, we don't question it.
Why not question it? Certainly, publicly, if it's politically advantageous, people won't speak against a questionable narrative, because indeed this is the Nash equillibrium; neither side goes out of its way to check the factuality of narratives that benefit it. Yet even privately, we must admit we believe these 'just so' stories more often than not.
I'm not suggesting that people on 'our' side should be 'publicly vigorous about factuality of reported accounts' - this cannot happen in a democracy! The least you can do is understand that almost every one of these stories is false, and at best are based off of something sort of like that which the writer may have overheard.
See! Now you know, for I have told it to you.