When reading Cory Doctorow’s recent essay “The tedious power of stroytelling”, I had a breakthrough in my understanding of folklore:
A huge part of folklore is imbuing the environment with intent where there is none.
As a species, we humans want to believe that we live in an ordered (and perhaps just) universe, where things happen for a reason. That someone intended for things to happen as they did. As a trained physicist, I know that this very often not the case - but this assumption is hard to shake. Thus, we come across folkloric narratives like these:
- “My cattle have fallen ill. A witch must have cursed them!”
- “This rock formation is spectacular. It must be a petrified giant!”
- “I suffer from sleep paralysis. A night hag is tormenting me!”
- “My infant child has a disability. It’s actually a changeling which has been switched for my real child!”
And before we dismiss such notions as the superstitious relics of bygone ages, we should remember that we haven’t really changed - the folklore just takes on new and different forms. For what else are modern “conspiracy fantasies” than a particularly toxic subset of folklore? That “vaccines cause autism” is just another modern take on the changeling myth. We cannot accept that things often happen that are outside of conscious human control, and then we come up with new stories that add human intent.
What are your thoughts on this?