Invention of narrative is how people claim responsibility for unintended history

Evidence

Legendary explanations of history always served as belated corrections of facts and real events, which were needed precisely because history itself would hold man responsible for deeds he had not done and for consequences he had never foreseen. The truth of the ancient legends—what gives them their fascinating actuality many centuries after the cities and empires and peoples they served have crumbled to dust—was nothing but the form in which past events were made to fit the human condition in general and political aspirations in particular. Only in the frankly invented tale about events did man consent to assume his responsibility for them, and to consider past events his past. Legends made him master of what he had not done, and capable of dealing with what he could not undo. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 537

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The paradox that only frank fictionalization lets humans own their un-willed past is dense and paradigm-relevant for how communities narrate collective responsibility.
• XREF: Connects to Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities and to Homi Bhabha on nation-as-narration, both staples of postcolonial and Islamophobia theory. — connects to: Deception and fabrication inhered in myth from its origin; Engels explained history as unintended outcomes of conflicting individual wills. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 497; Speculation involves transforming fictions into facts through personal responsibility — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 600 (+1 more)