On a different thread, there was a link to a Terry Pratchett quote that I found out is quite popular. It is about the “lies” we use to deal with the strangeness of our existence. If you only see the ending line, you miss the subtlety of it.
“You need to believe in things that aren’t true. How else can they become?”
Or the even more trite hippie phrase, “I’ll see that when I believe it”, presuming that belief precedes the ability to have vision. Anyway, in the longer conversation, which is between the character “Death”, who takes a long view of humanity, and a young woman living in Prachett’s Discworld, Death says “the sun would not have risen”, but he is not referring to the motion of bodies in spaces, he is saying that humans constructed the concept of the sun rising because that’s what we observe.
Before any human understood that the earth is rotating as well as orbiting the sun, they saw that warm yellow ball rising, relative to where they were. If humans weren’t there, death says, “a mere ball of gas would have illuminated the world.” Then the young woman speaks, and often the longer versions of the quote start with her, “…humans need fantasies to make life bearable.” Death corrects her, “Humans need fantasy to be human.”
A more technical word might be “conceptualized” but technical isn’t good in fiction. What Pratchett is differentiating is reality from the human view of reality. Death, who has existed for as long as there has been life, knows much more of reality than a human who lives 100 years or so. A human on this earth (not a fiction book), knows more of reality than one of their ancestors did. And we know that we know more, and we know that “sunrise” was a word created before Galileo, so we know it’s a lie, a fantasy. Or, technically, it’s a word with an etymology.
We also know what is really happening. Death talks about learning the little lies first, like the tooth fairy, and that helps to later understand more complex concepts like justice and mercy. It was easier, in recent centuries, to take that step when that was encapsulated in a system of lies, like Christianity or whatever tribal culture you were born into. A young Ojibwe would figure out that a crow was just a bird, really, but would spend much of their life trying to understand what the Great Spirit is.
Now that picking and choosing from many belief systems is about the same as shopping on Amazon, it is harder to act as if Justice and Mercy are inherent in nature. As Death says, it’s not in an atom”, that is, it is not a physical law. I like the way this LinkedIn post puts it,
“Bad things happen to good people, because they do. The universe itself doesn’t really change to stop them, nor does it balance things out for us. That isn’t to say Justice can’t be found, but it isn’t the natural order of the world, it doesn’t simply happen on it’s own. Mercy can be found but not in the natural laws of physics or as chemicals we can find. It can be found in how we as humans behave and for that to happen we have to believe that those ideas exist.”
Unfortunately, for some, realizing this is painful. Early humans named it sunrise and even worshipped it out of a psychological need. Modern humans have that same need and must deal with a lot more knowledge about the size of the universe, and we came from minerals, and that our best minds aren’t 100% certain of anything. Some can still hold on to one belief system but they are constantly meeting all of the others. If you don’t hold on to one, you must find new ways to understand that word “belief”. That’s what Prachett is trying to help us with.
If you question that Justice is not a natural state, read your history and understand your current events. If we stop working for Justice someone is right there to replace it with a different belief, one that makes life miserable for a lot of people. If you can get into LinkedIn, which is free, there is more political commentary, from 2019. I will only say, Democrats are more guilty of forgetting that we created Justice. They act like once one evil empire is defeated or one dictator dies, then the natural order is restored and we can rest again.
The world, Discworld, our Earth, the laws of the universe, doesn’t enforce a Just natural order, because it doesn’t exist in nature. Only in the broadest sense of our thoughts existing in nature can you say that’s true. We can see it in other large-brained creatures like whales or apes, but we can see all the unjust behavior too. And the further down the food chain you go, the worse it gets. We made up justice and it’s up to us to keep it alive.