Page 352 - ILIAS ATHANASIADIS AKA RO1

Blurring the line between fiction and reality can be done for many purposes,
starting with “having fun” and going all the way to “survival”.

You cannot play games or read novels unless you suspend disbelief at least for a

little while. To really enjoy football, you have to accept the rules of the game, and
forget for at least 90 minutes that they are merely human inventions.

If you don’t, you will think it utterly ridiculous for 22 people to go running after

a ball. Football may begin with just having fun, but it can then become far more
serious stuff, as any English hooligan or Argentinian nationalist will attest.

Football can help formulate personal identities, it can cement large-scale

communities, and it can even provide reasons for violence. Nations and religions
are football clubs on steroids.

Truth and power can travel together only so far. Sooner or later they go their

separate ways.

If you want power, at some point you will have to spread fictions. If you want to

know the truth about the world, at some point you will have to renounce power.

You will have to admit things – for example about the sources of your own
power – that will anger allies, dishearten followers or undermine social harmony.

Scholars throughout history faced this dilemma: do they serve power or truth?

Should they aim to unite people by making sure everyone believes in the same
story, or should they let people know the truth even at the price of disunity?

The most powerful scholarly establishments – whether of Christian priests,

Confucian mandarins or communist ideologues – placed unity above truth. That’s
why they were so powerful.

As a species, humans prefer power to truth. We spend far more time and effort on

trying to control the world than on trying to understand it

– and even when we try to understand it, we usually do so in the hope that
understanding the world will make it easier to control it.