#power #order #story #truth [[Nexus -- A Brief History of Information Networks From the Stone Age to AI]] In history, power stems only partially from knowing the truth. It also stems from the ability to maintain social order among a large number of people. While power depends on both truth and order, it is usually the people who know how to build ideologies and maintain order who give instructions to the people who merely know how to build bombs or hunt mammoths. When it comes to uniting people, fiction enjoys two inherent advantages over the truth. First, fiction can be made as simple as we like, whereas the truth tends to be complicated, because the reality it is supposed to represent is complicated. Second, the truth is often painful and disturbing, and if we try to make it more comforting and flattering, it will no longer be the truth. In contrast, fiction is highly malleable.