Fire, flints and fiction

About half a million years ago, the homo species began to develop a larger brain and a means of communication. There is a vigorous but very polite argument whether language developed as a freak mutation or whether the increase in size was driven by the absolute need for language. A single human was slow and weak. Prey, not a predator. But a coordinated group of a hundred humans was the most powerful animal the Earth had ever seen.

Communication would initially have been used for hunting, safety and food acquisition. Lengthy discussions, accurate assessments, correct recall of past events, realistic projections into the future became necessary. Language was all about truth and reality.

Logically, music and representative art then began to appear along with story-telling. Thoughts about the environment would have been introduced – the movement of the sun, reason for wind and rain, where did the animals go at certain times of the year, etc.

It would have become apparent that there were many things about existence which were unknown. The philosophers of the time would have developed ideas concerning birth, living a hunter/gatherer existence and death; hence came an idea of gods or supernatural guiding entities. So we have the development of communication to share facts into a concept of (a possible logical) fiction.

Once fiction entered the lexicon, stories could be told as explanatory concepts while at the same time being accepted as non factual – Thor with his hammer creating thunder, Vulcan with his furnaces, Neptune creating storms and sinking ships, even Pandora and her insatiable curiosity; all created to explain the facts of life – the evolution of myth and legend.

Today, we have artificial intelligence which can answer most of our queries. However, even that seems prone to hallucination. As Hal, the computer in 2001, A Space Odyssey said, “It must be due to human error.” Maybe it is. We seem to need stories in our lives not only to explain the mysteries of existence but to enhance the fact of existence.

Many of the stories we read or which appear in the media involve police dramas where one person solves the mystery, usually who done it and why. The ‘why’ revolving around the psychology of the perpetrator. This fascination with crime has, unfortunately developed into a political business where governments are using social media to create a hatred of differing ethnicities or religious groups – the cleansing of society by force.

Truth, especially in politics is a secondary consideration to the extent that we now tend to assume our leaders use it sparingly. We accept that advertising agents are equally irresponsible. However, with the rise of the super rich and multinational corporations it is difficult to know what truth is. That is not to say that those entities lie, but that their statements are often designed to mislead. It is little wonder that today’s youth is beginning to turn against authority.