Blurred lines between fact and fiction – Aleks Farrugia
Humankind has a propensity towards fiction over fact. The first forms of human narrative we have evidence of are all fictional: fables, legends, myths; all of which had the function of legitimating the standing of the tribe in the world and sanction its political setup. One could argue that it is a form of behaviour that has remained constant throughout human history, till this very day. Perhaps the cause of legitimation has changed (since the American revolution, we substituted God with “the people”) and, rather than tribes, we speak of nations but the mythological-fictional nature of the discourse about legitimation remains. And very much like those early humans we blur the lines between the fictional and the factual to the extent that we often ‘forget’ the distinction between the two. This propensity towards fiction is so ingrained in the human that history as a science was only invented in the 19th century and, since then, it has persistently struggled against itself to ascertain the extent to which the historian can authoritatively speak of ‘clean’ facts in clear distinction from fiction perniciously disguised as fact. Some historians even maintain that sifting ‘pure’ fact,...