Thin lines of truth

Centered

Everybody lies, with or without intention.

It starts with harmless exaggeration, perhaps to entertain the audience. After all, we all have soft spots for fireworks. Embellish the story, enrich the experience.

Next, our incomplete memory begs creative reconstruction. None of the details need to be correct or even make perfect sense. It just needs to fool the listener.

The vicious cycle repeats with the audience, but in a somewhat the reversed order (or maybe none at all): reconstruct the story when it needs to be retold, often so that the story "feels" accurate, then quickly embellish as is appropriate. Perhaps this is why old recipes are constantly "re-invented". Or so that the word "re-invented" may be meaningful.

If only all stories needed to make a minimum amount of "sense", for error-checking. It could be as easy as making logic annotations to the story or honest self-doubting remarks. How about making statements falsifiable? Leaving little "mental exercises" for the listener to complete could start the reconstruction process earlier.

But what I seek is utopian. The world finds on interest in verfiability; it merely wants to dangle morsels of fact on the thin lines of truth, against the backdrop of lies colored to dazzle.