Stories matter. Does it matter if they are true?

I saw an episode of The Simpsons in which the heroic founder of Springfield, Jedediah Springfield, was discovered by Lisa to be actually a pirate and a villain. Homer gets to be the town crier for a while.

But when Lisa makes her discovery and is about to announce to the whole town that their hero is a fraud, she sees the Jedediah Springfield parade and all the inspired people, and she can't do it. Instead, she swallows the truth and uses her moment at a microphone to say that he was a great founding father. Everyone stays happy.

Our stories define us - as a family or a school or a nation or tribe. They tell us who we are. It's an interesting question in itself why this is the case - why stories of our ancestors have such power over us. But do the stories need to be true in order to give us meaning?

Another example is the movie Smoke Signals - a story about Native Americans wrestling with the same question and deciding that No, it doesn't matter. The important thing is that they are OUR stories.

This is yet another quagmire of modernity. We do not want to be afraid of the truth as modern, enlightened, scientific people. Look bravely into the abyss. And there may be a modern bravado in admitting our cherished stories are actually false. But then, still clinging to them makes them quaint and robs them of their defining power, though postmodern prigs insist they don't. And the joy, meaning, and personal definition they gave us before are gone, even though postmodern prigs say it isn’t gone. (Damn all prigs.)

Conclusion:  the modern project works to destroy a strange, marvelous phenomenon in our mental framework called identity by telling us our stories are not true. In an anthropological sense, identity - this deepest of mental constructs - is a product of mere evolution. Strange then that this psychological construct could evolve from fictional stories, from unreality. Strange that identity is born from imagination. A little too strange to accept.