Ancient religions have not been the only ones that used fiction to cement cooperation. In more recent times, each nation has created its own national mythology, while movements such as communism, fascism and liberalism fashioned elaborate self-reinforcing credos. Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda maestro and perhaps the most accomplished media-wizard of the modern age, allegedly explained his method succinctly by stating that ‘A lie told once remains a lie, but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth.’7 In Mein Kampf Hitler wrote that ‘The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly – it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.’8 Can any present-day fake-news peddler improve on that?
The Soviet propaganda machine was equally agile with the truth, rewriting the history of everything from entire wars to individual photographs. On 29 June 1936 the official newspaper Pravda (the name means ‘truth’) carried on its front page a photo of a smiling Joseph Stalin embracing Gelya Markizova, a seven-year-old girl. The image became a Stalinist icon, enshrining Stalin as the Father of the Nation and idealising the ‘Happy Soviet Childhood’. Printing presses and factories all over the country began churning out millions of posters, sculptures and mosaics of the scene, which were displayed in public institutions from one end of the Soviet Union to the other. Just as no Russian Orthodox church was complete without an icon of the Virgin Mary holding baby Jesus, so no Soviet school could do without an icon of Papa Stalin holding little Gelya.
Alas, in Stalin’s empire fame was often an invitation to disaster. Within a year, Gelya’s father was arrested on the bogus charges that he was a Japanese spy and a Trotskyite terrorist. In 1938 he was executed, one of millions of victims of the Stalinist terror. Gelya and her mother were exiled to Kazakhstan, where the mother soon died under mysterious circumstances. What to do now with the countless icons depicting the Father of the Nation with a daughter of a convicted ‘enemy of the people’? No problem. From that moment onwards, Gelya Markizova vanished, and the ‘Happy Soviet Child’ in the ubiquitous image was identified as Mamlakat Nakhangova – a thirteen-year-old Tajik girl who earned the Order of Lenin by diligently picking lots of cotton in the fields (if anyone thought that the girl in the picture didn’t look like a thirteen-year-old, they knew better than to voice such counter-revolutionary heresy).9
The Soviet propaganda machine was so efficient, that it managed to hide monstrous atrocities at home while projecting a utopian vision abroad. Today Ukrainians complain that Putin has successfully deceived many Western media outlets about Russia’s actions in Crimea and Donbas. Yet in the art of deception he can hardly hold a candle to Stalin. In the early 1930s left-wing Western journalists and intellectuals were praising the USSR as an ideal society at a time when Ukrainians and other Soviet citizens were dying in their millions from the man-made famine that Stalin orchestrated. Whereas in the age of Facebook and Twitter it is sometimes hard to decide which version of events to believe, at least it is no longer possible for a regime to kill millions without the world knowing about it.
Besides religions and ideologies, commercial firms too rely on fiction and fake news. Branding often involves retelling the same fictional story again and again, until people become convinced it is the truth. What images come to mind when you think about Coca-Cola? Do you think about young healthy people engaging in sports and having fun together? Or do you think about overweight diabetes patients lying in a hospital bed? Drinking lots of Coca-Cola will not make you young, will not make you healthy, and will not make you athletic – rather, it increases your chances of suffering from obesity and diabetes. Yet for decades Coca-Cola has invested billions of dollars in linking itself to youth, health and sports – and billions of humans subconsciously believe in this linkage.
The truth is that truth was never high on the agenda of Homo sapiens. Many people assume that if a particular religion or ideology misrepresents reality, its adherents are bound to discover it sooner or later, because they will not be able to compete with more clear-sighted rivals. Well, that’s just another comforting myth. In practice, the power of human cooperation depends on a delicate balance between truth and fiction.
If you distort reality too much, it will indeed weaken you by making you act in unrealistic ways. For example, in 1905 an East African medium called Kinjikitile Ngwale claimed to be possessed by the snake spirit Hongo. The new prophet had a revolutionary message to the people of the German colony of East Africa: unite and drive out the Germans. To make the message more appealing, Ngwale provided his followers with magic medicine that would allegedly turn German bullets into water (maji in Swahili). Thus began the Maji Maji Rebellion. It failed. For on the battlefield, German bullets didn’t turn into water. Rather, they tore mercilessly into the bodies of the ill-armed rebels.10 Two thousand years earlier, the Jewish Great Revolt against the Romans was similarly inspired by an ardent belief that God will fight for the Jews and help them defeat the seemingly invincible Roman Empire. It too failed, leading to the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of the Jews.