Visions are evaluated by the worlds they bring into being

Evidence

In 1971, Hannah Arendt published an essay titled “Lying in Politics,” which has been much anthologized since. The essay is about a lot of things, but at its heart is an observation about the complex relationship between visionary politics and tell-it-like-it-is truth. After all, among the things we need to live well is a sense of something better, something out ahead—toward which we can move, together, in hope and aspiration. Such visions (of promise and possibility) aren’t really issues of truth or falsehood, exactly. They are, rather, the work of imagination. They are dreams. By these lights, “stone soup” isn’t really a “lie”—it’s more like one of those very special stories that the literary theorists call a “hyperstition”: a tale that has the power to make itself true. Some of these are bad, and some of these are good. But one doesn’t evaluate them on the basis of the conformity with the world-as-it-is. One evaluates them on the basis of the worlds they bring into being. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 434

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘hyperstition’ as a tale with the power to make itself true, critiqued by the worlds it creates, not by present accuracy.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in how stories and organizational narratives construct reality — parallel to Stone Soup as a catalyst for collective action, and to theories of performative language.