FB always asks me "What's on your mind, Bob" as I create a post. Today, I’m thinking about two messages that I saw on the same day with the same quotation purporting to be from two different people. It was possible that one person originally made the statement and then the second one was quoting the first – and somewhere the original attribution got lost. After all, one of the possible sources lived hundreds of years after the other, so that seemed the most likely explanation.
But being an academic, I tend not to be satisfied with half of an explanation. I wanted to know who said it. So I went to Google as a first pass. The first item on the list of responses gave me an answer, and other sources affirmed and corroborated that answer. It turns out that neither of the two people who were quoted made the statement. The statement was written by a greeting card writer who borrowed the ideas for it from a mid-20th century Irish philosopher. The greeting card writer takes full credit for the statement and explains its origins on that writer’s web site. She could be lying, but a number of reputable sources who extensively research the statements of the two purported originators affirmed the greeting card writer’s claim.
Why do I care, and why should anyone care? After all, if I believe something to be profound, does the source really matter? Well, aside from a search for accuracy, there’s a problem: Are truth and mendacity so fungible that we shouldn’t care what the source is? If that’s the case, that sort of relative truth making suggests that whatever I believe is what makes something true. That’s problematic. After all, claims of “alternative truth” aside, truth isn’t relative. We can make up our own reality, but that doesn’t make our reality true. There’s a lot of that kind of enchanted thinking happening these days, and we don’t need to look too far into the daily news to see how false statements impact the world.
Apart from the demands to know what’s true, there’s also the question of how we create false histories from our beliefs about famous people. Our knowledge of famous people is often based on what they say. Those images get distorted whenever their words are changed, taken out of context, or when words are created for them. Whether it’s Martin Luther King, Jr. or Mohandas Gandhi, the false attributions generate blurry images of the person who gets attached to the words. So people are shocked to learn that Dr. King kept a firearm for self-protection or that Gandhi’s views as a young man (which he later modified) were clearly racist. It’s hard enough to tell the realistic view of the famous without also distributing misinformation into the mix.
It does matter whether that great idea came from someone who founded one of the world’s major religions, or from a modern movement leader, or from a greeting-card writer. The difference in authors means a difference in intent. If the idea is intended as spiritual guidance, that’s very different than it being intended to advocate for justice and change. Context matters so we can really understand the speaker’s intent.
So maybe the next time you want to believe and pass along a wonderful quotation you saw someone post, copy the quotation and paste it into the Google search box. You may find that the person really said it. Or you may find that the origins are somewhere else. And the difference matters.
You may wonder which quotation prompted this note. My omission is intentional because I’d prefer that you wonder about the authenticity of every quotation you see posted somewhere. Rather than saying, “Yeah, that one didn’t sound like something that person would say,” I’m hoping that you take time to question every quotation you see attributed online. And you can even go check the last quotation you passed along to see if it’s the one I checked.
