How facts become narratives and narratives become revenue
Whether something is real or actually happened is, to me, largely irrelevant. That may sound a bit defiant, since the search for truth has become a popular form of entertainment.
My experience is that almost everything is partly true and partly untrue. Journalism may have shaped that view. The most successful and best-paid colleagues were usually the ones who knew how to bend the truth toward what people wanted to hear, and who had a sharp instinct for what people preferred not to hear.
Journalistic truth is a business model. In a healthy democracy with strict control over monopolies, you see opposing interpretations of the same facts. That does not mean one side presents the real facts and the other does not, or vice versa. It means both sides make money from the same facts.
Language adjusts accordingly. When an unfriendly power invades a country, it is called a war of aggression. When a friendly power does the same, it becomes a peace mission.
As limited as we are when it comes to factual truth, we are remarkably skilled at using hypocrisy as seasoning in our language.
Anyone who has watched monkeys attack each other in a zoo might conclude that, when it comes to violence, humanity has not risen above the level of primates.
But we have, in a way, surpassed them. Primates fight for direct self-interest. When the second female of an alpha chimpanzee becomes pregnant, she would do well to watch her back, because the first female is likely to try to kill her and her child. The group sees this as an unnecessary disturbance, and before long the entire group is fighting, rather like a bar brawl that has spiraled out of control.
More concisely: primates fight their own wars and risk their own bodies.
We have evolved further. Personal interests barely seem to matter anymore. Increasingly, we fight for what we believe to be the one and only truth. Our imagined freedoms, or the defense of the one true god among thousands. Our civilization shows itself in the fact that we do not risk our own bodies for these causes. We leave that to others.
There are plenty of hopeless young unemployed people to fight those wars, sometimes accompanied by a few more promising men and women who are carefully kept away from the front lines. If they survive, perhaps missing one or two limbs, we call them heroes of the nation for a while, until their PTSD begins to require too much care. Then they quietly return to the large group of people considered a burden on society.
In the end, those wars are merely the final product of what large groups in society have decided is true and untrue. In that context, journalism often acts as the most important catalyst.
My advice: assume that everything is partly true and partly untrue, and you free yourself from humanity’s greatest flaw, the urge to judge.
“It is judgment that defeats us, Willard,” is the line spoken by Marlon Brando as the unhinged Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. I have never seen the sense and the nonsense of international conflict expressed more precisely than that.