Ongoing Narratives Need to be Viewed Critically

Many years ago I came across a paperback book titled: The Bermuda Triangle Mystery--Solved, by Larry Kusche...published in 1972.  Being a young adolescent geek of a kid back then...long before the word "geek" came into general use...I had been interested in all sorts of weird topics at the time, chief among them ancient astronauts, maps of ancient seafarers...and this topic of the Bermuda Triangle, a general region in the western North Atlantic Ocean in which many mysterious unexplained disappearances of boats and planes are alleged to have occurred over the years.  I heard the narrative of the believers in this phenomenon which took each incident and explained it in a way that pointed to a nefarious force inhabiting the region.  When I got hold of Kusche's book, I was anxious to arm myself with the facts about this intriguing subject...

The Bermuda Triangle Mystery--Solved is basically an item-by-item presentation of the chief disappearances that have been assembled over time to create this narrative of a sinister area where the laws of nature seem to drastically change.  And Kusche was in a good position to accomplish this, since he was by profession a research librarian who knew how to comb through old newspapers and government archives to obtain his information on the events in question.  But first, the author wrote out the Bermuda Triangle narrative as it has been usually presented, from the viewpoint of the true believer.  After the narrative presented several seemingly impossible-to-refute examples of strange disappearances, it went on to postulate why they may have occurred.  Is there an undersea civilization out there doing all this, or maybe there is some special physical weather phenomenon responsible.  The important thing about the narrative's conclusions, though, is that the reader (or listener)  is expected to have already accepted the initial facts given within the narrative about the disappearances...

As Kusche went on in his book, he took each Triangle incident and clearly demonstrated what was really known to have happened... and in every instance the truth varied greatly from the "narrative".  After finishing this book, I no longer believed in any such thing as the Bermuda Triangle...not that this story hasn't continued to stay alive and strong in some quarters to this very day...

The point I want to make about the Bermuda Triangle and the resulting popular narrative is that such narratives are pervasive in human society.  As a matter of fact, if you ever follow the news, then the opinions expressed about various issues and events, as well as how they are presented, are almost always designed to fit a particular narrative or another that a group of people hold dear to themselves.  Take the issue of police killings of blacks, for example.  When such a tragic event occurs anywhere in the country, almost instantaneously now it is examined as to whether or not it fits the narrative that the police are discriminately persecuting blacks.  The entirety of the facts about an incident, even though still under official investigation, may go unrevealed while various politicians and media figures, as well as community activists and, ultimately, masses of protesters are already staging demonstrations and condemning law enforcement.  If there are conflicting accounts of the event, then the one that fits the narrative being followed will be accepted and the others rejected.  To show I'm not just picking on one side of this divisive issue, I also recognize that there is a "the police are always right" narrative that filters events and their accounts to fit that point of view...

As a matter of fact, as long as people coalesce into groups, there will be a collective narrative about the things that bind them together.  They will filter out things that contradict a cherished narrative while often uncritically accepting that which reinforces it. It's often much easier to allow oneself to be sucked into a narrative than to take each new piece of news and look at it dispassionately and on its own terms...which might go a long way toward explaining some of the nonsense I've been seeing on TV lately...