Having said that, it is always informative to look carefully at who benefits from the attitudes - and policies - that emerge from these false stories.
Gareth Hardin of "The Tragedy Of The Commons" fame, for example, was a hardcore white nationalist, nativist and eugenicist. Stockholm Syndrome was invented out of whole cloth to cover up police brutality and incompetence.
The list of empirically false but fun-to-retell stories that are also powerful as authoritarian propaganda is pretty long.
It's a very hard pill to swallow, especially given the panoptic, reflexive cruelty of this grudgefuck of a zeitgeist we're all presently stewing in and how easy it is to hit that boost or reply button, but one of the awful facts about high-semiotic-density memetic culture is that you might very easily be amplifying - and legitimizing - ideological positions you _don't even realize exist_ through the wonders of near-zero-friction and pushback-free participation.
If you have a fediverse account, you can quote this note from your own instance. Search https://cosocial.ca/users/mhoye/statuses/116251100682783909 on your instance and quote it. (Note that quoting is not supported in Mastodon.)
