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It's actually a major thesis of the book Sapiens that the use of fictive language is what allowed Homo Sapiens to become the dominant species. Shared stories helped solidify social groups and allowed disparate tribes to recognize each other. The most important stories and myths are obviously religious ones. And I think to your point, ancient peoples debating those stories with far more fervor than any flame war on a Star Wars forum.

I say this pretty comfortably as an atheist but even if you're a believer than at least everyone else's religious myths are fiction.

You may think that we believers are all that way, but we aren’t. As a Discordian, I believe that everyone else’s religious myths are true. Even the false bits are true in a dialectic sense. Such is life here in Plato’s Cave.

Stories are also deep magick for Discordians. They are perhaps the only tool we can use to get someone to change their mind about something important. It is only when, at long last, the fiction weaves its spell to transplant your sense of identity elsewhom that you feel true sympathy.

Are you... serious? I am really not sure how to ask this question without it sounding offensive. I am not sure, and wikipedia suggests that Discordianism is a parody of a religion.

I think you're over simplifying the wiki article:

> According to self-proclaimed "crackpot historian" Adam Gorightly, Discordianism was founded as a parody religion. Many outside observers still regard Discordianism as a parody religion, although some of its adherents use it as a legitimate religion or as a metaphor for a governing philosophy.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discordianism

Although I doubt many people consider it a religion, it's certainly an interesting philosophical view and makes as much (or as little) sense as many other schools of philosophy or theology.

I have heard Discordianism described as "a religion for people who think ALL religions are parodies" and that seems largely accurate. The internal contradictions are an essential part of it.

Scientology was a work of fiction until it wasn't. Same way every parody subreddit devolves into deep sincerity with every new subscriber.

I think the most likely situation is that everyone's religious myths are false. But the second most likely is that everyone's religious myths are true, and the least likely is that one is true and the rest are false. I've never actually seen anyone advocate for the second position before.

Certainly, more people have advocated for the first position than I have.

You’ve heard the allegory of blind men in a dark room trying to describe an elephant to each other, right? Each one holds a different part of the animal. The person holding a leg thinks it’s a tree, the one holding the tail thinks it’s furry, and so on. They can all be right while calling each other wrong.

What definition of "right" are you using? Words have meaning. It sounds cool to say everything can be true but it's rubbish. The man who thinks the elephant leg is a tree is wrong. Is this so difficult to understand?

"Right" in this case means that the evidence each man has gathered is all correct, even if it appears to contradict the stories that others are telling. The conclusions are wrong, but their mode of interacting with the elephant is consistent.

The whole idea of divinity is that it is beyond us. Many cultures say they have knowledge of the divine, but each culture interacts with it differently. And if the thing they are interacting is really some 11-dimensional being, why not both?

So you can conclude that it's a bunch of shared delusions, because it appears to be uncorrelated. But what if it's not? Sometimes, it does seem correlated. Here is where the leap of faith is. (It's always hidden in there somewhere.) What if, instead, they're describing different aspects of the same font of divinity?

Sorry but this is just an example of word mush. It's not complicated. The men are blind. They are not reliable witnesses. The probability of them being correct about any observation they make is very low.

It just sounds cool. Blind men, elephants etc. Mystical woo.

What is important about any model is it's ability to predict the future. The blind men are evidently unable to do this and thus are independently worthless as oracles.

Of course the men could pool their experiences and admit they were wrong about individual predictions and using prior knowledge about objects known in the world would be able to come to the conclusion about the elephant.

However as an allegory about the divine this fails because there is no prior evidence to conclude that there are any such divine objects exist. We don't know what a divine object is.

You then will end up falling back to some variation of Pascal's wager where an infinite value multiplied by zero evidence somehow produces something you sell shares in.

Good luck with that on WSB.

Fair enough. I'm going to be over here hodling my mysticism and $GME.

> But the second most likely is that everyone's religious myths are true... I've never actually seen anyone advocate for the second position before.

You have to expand your understanding of "truth" when it comes to religious myths to make that work, because of course some contradict on their face.

But yeah, I have seen it advocated in several ways. From the sort of liberal platitude "all religions are just different paths to the same underlying diety", to a certain kind of neo-pagan constructivist "We make religions true by believing in them." I lean toward the latter.

Hang on. Everything is true even contradictory things "in a dalectic sense" but then you embrace tools to get somebody to change their mind. So you get people to change their mind from one true thing to another true thing. This is just word mush.

Let's just call everything a strawberry.

The thing about religion is that calling everything a strawberry could be one.

> It is not obvious to me we invest far more than our ancestors, I doubt it.

Of course it is obvious. People waste their lives away consuming fiction in the way of books, netflix, video games, politics. The luxury of doing that en masse simply was not possible if we go ways back. Hell, just in my lifetime this has changed. 25 years ago I heard of no one watching ten episodes of a series in one sitting.

I believe most people now spend far more time with and engaged in fictions than reality. People even think that the fictions media create are real. Most news are editorialized and fictionalized. What is presented is not reality. What people spend most of their time on a phone on, social media, are to a high degree fiction. That is not reality you are engaging with.

Reality is closer to the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid than the top.

25 years ago, so 1996? Yeah people did that with VHS tapes. Console games, both solo and parties, were things that carried on into the night. Civilization on the PC was infamous for "one more turn" in to the wee hours of the morning.

That was a niche group. Now it is most people. I should have wrote «Very few» instead of «no one.»

[Citation needed] really.

Handwringing over "time wasting" activities is as old as time, whether it's video games, TV, newspapers/radio or gambling, drinking and dicing.

No handwringing, I do not give a fuck what people spend their time on, it is their life. Just saying I think people are wholly absorbed in fictions these days in ways rivals anything in the past. Today fictions permeates everything, and most seem unable to separate it from reality. Half the US population even believes outlandish conspiracy theories.

OK, people didn't watch the same program 10 times in a row, but they did watch 6 hours a night of brainrot TV (2 hours of which were commercials), from returning from their job to going to bed.

The TV dinner was popular over 50 years ago -- people didn't have time to actually eat without consuming fiction

In 1996 the average household watched about 5.5 hours of TV per day.

The peak of TV watching was actually around 2010, it's gone down since then (although still above 1996 levels!) -- replaced of course with internet use of various kinds, including kinds that could be considered "fiction consumption" as well as not (social media I would only consider fiction consumption as a joke!).

Another thing that has gone down since 1996 is leisure reading time (again they don't usually count social media as leisure reading though).

I don't have numbers on how much time a medievel European peasant spent listening to stories, plays, or narrative music.

People may have on average more leisure time than they had 500+ years ago! As you say, "The luxury of doing that en masse simply was not possible." But now we're talking about a different thing, the OP's claim was that "we invest so much time and energy into fiction, far more than did any of our ancestors" because of a crisis of moral shared meaning, not simply because of an increase of leisure time.

The leisure time of people in different social positions in different times and places is another (interesting) question, but I think people have always chosen to use much of their leisure time (time not required for material survival) and energy on fiction.

If we go “ways back” then we don’t have much hard data on how people spent their time. It doesn’t seem at all obvious to me that people consume more fiction now than they used to, though they certainly do it in different ways.

Through all of history, history was proverbially "written by the victors". However, the permanence of a pervasive digital memory might be playing the spoiler to that would-be whitewashed history. And in some perverse sense, it may be blocking us from developing any history.

Wrong. History's written by whoever happen to write anything and then interpreted by future generations, whether that's historians or not.

The confederate are losers, and yet folks after the confederates were able to erect statues commemorating their losses.

It also help create a false notion that only history written by winners create the narrative that everyone accepted.

A side issue, but I think it may be just cause to wonder who the victors of that conflict actually were in the end... turns out, it may have been 'white people' generally on 'both sides', after a brief period of "reconstruction" that could have ended differently but didn't. All those statues were erected after that period -- indeed they do look kind of like victory statues, curious isn't it? Who won what before erecting those statues, hmm?

The proverb of course isn't literally always true, it isn't only "the victors" who write history. But the powerful do have a disproportionate (but not exclusive) influence on what gets remembered how (what gets remembered how is a factor of both what historical record is left and who can advance their interpretation of it). The victors tend to be more powerful than the vanquished, if they don't appear to be then there might be some confusion over who won what exactly.

I haven't heard that interpetation of history. It sounds dubious to me... after all, slavery was abolished, and the Fourteenth Amendment was passed. And the South was set way back, economically, compared to the North.

yeah but the South was already on its way to being set way back, because it was agrarian and the North industrialized.

Yes slavery was abolished and blacks became very politically active and successful in period after war.

And after that came succesfull crackdown on their rights. They lost rights, not all the way up to slavery but still very significantly.

And after that came civil rights period.

Have you read much about Reconstruction?

It is a period of history absolutely essential for understanding how we got to where we are, which is often not taught at all to schoolchildren.

It began with Black elected legislators and city council members and increased Black economic activity and equality and integration. It ended with the return of de facto Black serfdom and disenfranchisement in the South. And that's when they started putting up the statues. (Who is "they"? It wasn't Black people putting up the statues, was it? So who won and who lost?)

Heather Cox Richardson (who has gained recognition lately with her daily posts on politics) is actually a historian, her book is titled "How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America"

Here's a New Yorker article by Adam Gopnick with the same title, which is actually a review of a different book by Henry Louis Gates. It gives you an overview of how Reconstruction went.

> One mistake the North made was to allow the Confederate leadership to escape essentially unscathed. Lincoln’s plea for charity and against malice was admirable, but it left out the third term of the liberal equation: charity for all, malice to none, and political reform for the persecutors. The premise of postwar de-Nazification, in Germany, was a sound one: you had to root out the evil and make it clear that it was one, and only then would minds change. The gingerly treatment of the secessionists gave the impression—more, it created the reality—that treason in defense of slavery was a forgivable, even “honorable,” difference of opinion. Despite various halfhearted and soon rescinded congressional measures to prevent ex-Confederate leaders from returning to power, many of them didn’t just skip out but skipped right back into Congress.

These are the people who had the resources and power to put up those statues...

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/how-the-south-...

Thank you for the explanation, I see what you mean.

I wouldn't describe it as the South "winning", but the North clearly didn't solidify the win quickly enough. I wonder whether that was a bad idea, or whether it came from some real fragility of the North's win, or the fact that it was a civil rather than a foreign win?

I tend to take position that history is made by the present “victors” or “powerful”.

Right now, Hitler was evil, Jesus was good, Ghandi is good, Rome was important, Greek philosophy matters, etc

But in some future time or different place, history is different. Columbus used to be a hero, now he’s a far more controverisal figure. Maybe some fascistic future would see Hitler cast as a hero much like George Washington. History will have changed.

The past happened how it happened, but how that past is filtered and turned into the narrative we call history happens in the present

One of the most insightful Internet comments I’ve read. Science Fiction can illuminate questions of moral reasoning by abstracting away all of the pesky complications that make the answer to most real moral dilemmas “it’s complicated.”

I appreciate the compliment, but your analysis makes me worry! The pesky complications that make things complicated is part of moral reasoning, abstracting them away to simplicity can be a dangerous recipe for immoral and instrumentalizing reasoning!

I think of it instead like SF can give us an "alien anthropologist's" view of ourselves, seeing ourselves from a different perspective for a momentary forgetting of assumptions that may not be serving us or... maybe we were over-simplfying abstracting away the complexities when we shouldn't have been! Then like in a planet of the apes moment, "But it's our planet after all!" SF can be complexifying as much as simplifying!

>It is not obvious to me we invest far more than our ancestors, I doubt it.

I think it likely that more is invested from about the time of widespread access to fiction than before, but not sure if it far more.