Mermaids

I’m going to go with… mermaids! Prove me wrong.

Before journalism, before science, and before we pretended that "the establishment" tells us the truth, storytelling was the truth. Not in the literal sense of, "Here is a mermaid, therefore mermaids exist," but rather: "I’m going to talk about mermaids. You like it, it’s a good story, therefore we are keeping it." 

Have you scanned all the oceans? Can you definitively prove that not a single one contains a mermaid? I guess not. Therefore, mermaids exist. He said it, she said it, I say it—it must be true. I can see a mermaid in my brain just as clearly as I see a tree or a car, so what’s the difference?

Storytelling was never about the absolute truth. It was always about what worked—for the king, for the priest, for the masses. 

Journalism pretends to tell the objective truth, but now we know it is often nothing more than storytelling. Even science, some will argue, is just storytelling backed by money and interests. 

A madman is simply a man telling a story that no one believes but him. 

A community is a group of people believing the same story. 

Politics is two stories competing in an impossible, unwinnable race.

And so, the stories of Jew-hatred are old, juicy, and—most importantly—they work. It is the ultimate narrative: the ultimate evil versus the ultimate powerless victim. It doesn’t actually matter what happened; it only matters whose story wins. 

The other side took the Jewish story of a small, indigenous people and weaponized it against us. They made up a people, they made up a country, they made up their role in the war—and yet, because the story works, the story wins. 

Natan Sharansky famously coined the 3D Test of Antisemitism: Double Standards, Delegitimization, and Dehumanization. 

As it turns out, those are also the exact components of a very successful story.