This reminds me of this article currently on the front page:

https://quillette.com/2021/11/29/the-universal-structure-of-...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29408567

People think about and perceive reality in "stories" (processed heuristically), because that is how we communicate about it - in journalism, in conversations, on social media, almost everywhere (there are exceptions: software, hard sciences, etc [1]) - from the day we are born to the day we die. We don't really know any other form in daily practice, so we do not realize it - it is the fabric of reality. A (simplistic) alternative would be speaking to each other like ~autistic, emotionless, hyper-pedantic, object-oriented, robotic AI agents...which human beings tend to dislike, strongly.

In this example, I've made an allegation (and made reference to one example of a story that (allegedly) involved propaganda):

>> It's like propaganda (Our most sacred institution) has killed people's imagination and hardened their hearts.

Now, I am countered ("debunked" in modern day increasingly popular subjective parlance, as opposed to "disproven" in objective parlance), by a ~story (which based on my experience, would "rank highly" among observers, perhaps due to its consistency with other stories: "records", "fact"-based journalism):

> The twentieth century and its experiments in alternative resource allocation and community building are not propaganda, it happened.

> It wasn’t live tweeted, but we do, actually, have records. Some people were even there!

In no way did I objectively/physically assert that the entirety of "The twentieth century and its experiments in alternative resource allocation and community building" are propaganda or that they did not happen.

In no way did I say that "the" (a rather cognitively magical word) events (the specifics of which we do not know (and do not realize we do not know), even completely leaving aside the infinitely complex underlying causality) of January 6 did not happen.

However, to various agents/observers within this system that we live, I did say these things. It did not actually happen, but due to the nature of reality [2], if they are perceived as happening (which can occur in many ways), they then become Real (as opposed to True), and are then cognitively processed, stored, recovered (on demand), and perceived as reality itself. And if many agents agree upon a story, it then becomes "Truth" (and perceived as Truth), and then documented as Objective History.

tl;dr: Plato's Allegory of the Cave may have some truth to it.

[1] Interestingly, these domains tend to be massively more accomplished than the rest of reality. Whether the unusual way they deal in perception (extremely simplified: objectively rather than subjectively) has anything to do with that, I will leave as an exercise to the reader.

[2] Reality is a very interesting word. In Scientific Materialistic oriented cultures, it is typically perceived (recursively, as "reality") as consisting of physical objects, and events involving physical objects. Reality does indeed consist of these things, but that is but a slice of the entirety of it. However, ideas such this can be easily debunked, because they "are" (another cognitively magical word) "woo woo" - and thus the local minima of Maya is maintained indefinitely.

Ironically, this too is a story. Which story is more true, is also left as an exercise to the reader.