I keep thinking about something the historian Yuval Noah Harari said recently, matter-of-factly, but with the weight of history behind it:
In the contest between fiction and truth, fiction usually wins because “…the competition between fiction and truth, fiction least politically, usually wins because the truth is just too painful and too complicated.”
Not because it’s better. Not because it’s right. But because truth is hard, complicated, uncomfortable, and often painful. Fiction is easier to carry.
It gives us a story we can live with.
That thought has stayed with me as I read a recent column by Maureen Dowd, who described a moment that, in its own way, feels like a parable.
On one side, a pope, soft-spoken and measured, speaking the language of humility and peace.
On the other hand, President Donald Trump and those around him invoking force, vengeance, and even God to frame the conflict.
Dowd captured the contrast vividly. But what lingered wasn’t the politics. It was the tone, the moral posture.
What we’re seeing more and more in public life is not simply disagreement. It is storytelling.
Narratives constructed to clarify, simplify, and mobilize.
And sometimes, to overwhelm.
The historian’s point helps explain why.
“We live not only in the physical world, the trees, the oceans, the fragile systems that sustain us, but also in a second layer we have built ourselves: Nations, currencies, ideologies, identities. These are shared fictions, agreed upon and reinforced,” said Harari.
Most of the time, they help us function.
But sometimes, they take over.
“In the competition between fiction and truth,” Harari notes, “fiction usually wins… because the truth is both too painful and too complicated.”
You see it everywhere now.
A slogan travels faster than a report.
A meme carries more weight than a fact.
A moral frame—good versus evil—outpaces the slower, harder work of understanding what’s actually happening.
Once that frame takes hold, it’s very difficult to dislodge.
What struck me most about Dowd’s column was not just her writing but what readers heard beneath it.
One reader wrote that what was really at play was the difference between force and power:
Force threatens. It performs. It dominates.
Real power steadies. It speaks to the conscience. It reminds us there is a better way.
That’s not a political observation. It’s a human observation.
Another reader reflected on the difference between politics wrapped in religion and principles that quietly guide behavior. One is projection; the other is conviction.
We know the difference when we see it.
The problem is, we don’t always act on it. Because fiction has advantages.
It is clean.
It is certain.
It tells us who to root for.
Truth doesn’t do that.
Truth asks more of us. It asks us to sit with ambiguity, to acknowledge what we don’t know, and to resist the comfort of easy answers.
And in a culture built on speed, reaction, and amplification, those are hard asks.
So we drift.
Not all at once. Not dramatically.
But gradually, almost imperceptibly, toward the story that feels right rather than the truth that is right.
There is a cost to that drift.
When fiction consistently outpaces truth, trust begins to erode, first in institutions, then in one another.
Accountability weakens.
Reality gets negotiated.
Eventually, consequences arrive, as they always do, indifferent to whatever story we preferred.
Harari points out something quietly devastating: We often fail to act when real systems are at risk, yet we react instantly when symbols are threatened.
We are moved by narrative.
We hesitate before evidence.
That imbalance is more than ironic.
It’s dangerous.
This is where journalism still matters. Not as performance. Not as a counter-narrative.
But as discipline.
The discipline to verify. To slow things down. To say: This is what we know, this is what we don’t know, and this is how we know it.
Truth doesn’t have to shout, but it does have to be made clear. If it isn’t, something else will take its place. And so, we come back to the beginning.
Fiction often wins.
That’s the reality of human nature, of history, of politics.
But it is not inevitable.
We still have a choice, quiet, individual, repeated daily:
To look beyond the story.
To ask for evidence.
To resist what merely feels true in favor of what can be shown to be true.
It’s not dramatic work. It doesn’t trend.
But it is the work that holds everything together.
In the end, force may command attention.
But real power. The kind that lasts. Does something else entirely.
It steadies.
And when it matters most, it tells the truth.
