I saw Ta-Nehisi speak and Ryan Coogler asked him why he decided to try to write fiction and he said because he realized that facts and history have short arms and can’t compete with the reach of mythologies.
That moment struck me and that take, although I absolutely understand it, freaks me the fuck out.
Myths are false. That’s the definition. They have no weight to me. Yet they’re powerful enough to start some reasoning for some people and make them believe something. More than reality.
Knowing that we need to stick to the realms of reality because the reality is that we’re fucking up our planet at an unprecedented rate, mythology being “hip” is I think, not a good thing.
As societies evolved, we’ve made progress despite myths, not thanks to them. Considering the future, feeding myths to a young crowd that has to deal with adults lying, pictures and videos being fake, deep fake, photoshop’d, people pretending being someone they aren’t on social media 24/7 while watching crossovers of actual, real history (Black Wall Street) laced with fiction (Watchmen), is some crazy ass shit. Seriously.
Those kids will not believe anything ever happened for real. I wouldn’t be surprised, with the level of BS floating online (and the impossible task of deciphering it) if kids born in 2019 don’t believe that WWII happened and was horrifying. They’ll downplay it and think it was like the movie Starship Troopers or the game Call of Duty. Brutal, but kind of fun.
I don’t like fiction like that. It’s just dangerous and kind of unconscious to make it super serious.
If facts and history have short arms, let’s not give myths longer ones. It’s not going to help at all.