We are the living that has become conscious of itself, and this consciousness does not leave us in peace. It drives us to seek order in what would otherwise seem chaotic. We connect the scattered points of our experiences, we build chains of causes and effects, we draw mental maps that tell us where we are and why we are here. This need for coherence, we sometimes call truth. But more often than not, what we call by that name is already a narrative: a selection of facts, assembled, organized, interpreted, until they produce a story that feels self-evident.
Fictions are integral to this process. Some present themselves openly as such: a novel, a legend, a founding myth. They do not claim to describe reality exactly, but transform it into images, into symbols, to make it more palpable or more meaningful. They can bind a community, transmit a memory, provide a language for the unspeakable.
Other fictions, however, present themselves as truth. They dress in the garb of fact, cloak themselves in the authority of numbers, of legal texts, of official discourses. They impose themselves upon us not as hypotheses, but as indisputable certainties. Nations, for instance, are collective fictions: there is no such thing in nature as “France” or “Japan”; there are only lands, rivers, cities, populations. What makes a territory into a “nation” is the shared adherence to a common narrative—a narrative inscribed in constitutions, taught in schools, celebrated on national holidays.
Laws themselves are operative fictions. Nothing in the fabric of things dictates that a piece of paper signed by an assembly should have power over our lives. It is our shared belief in the legal system, and our acceptance of the sanctions it prescribes, that makes this power real. The same is true of money: a banknote has no intrinsic value. It is nothing but a printed piece of paper. Its worth rests entirely on collective trust in the institution that guarantees it.
Religions, economic systems, borders, social hierarchies: all are collective narratives that present themselves as unquestionable truths. Their effects are tangible—the laws are applied, the borders defended, the money exchanged, the rituals performed—but their foundation is narrative. Without the agreement of minds and bodies that believe in them, these structures would collapse.
Human history is replete with examples of killing, oppressing, destroying in the name of a fiction held as truth. Men and women were burned because they did not pay homage to the kingdom’s official god. Entire peoples were deported because they were not considered “nationals” in the story of a state. Massacres were committed because people believed in the existence of pure and superior races, as if human biology obeyed the fantasies of ideologues. Wars were waged over lines drawn on a map, as if the map were the territory.
These violences—from the medieval pyre to the camps of the twentieth century, from colonial conquest to contemporary ethnic cleansing—are all born of the same mechanism: transforming a story into a sacred truth, untouchable, and then acting in its name. The blood spilled becomes the logical consequence of the narrative, a necessary episode of its fulfillment. And the fiction, turned dogma, feeds itself on the destruction it provokes.
One must see the power and ambivalence of these constructions. They can unite and protect, just as they can divide and enslave. They can be the ferment of planetary solidarity, or the pretext for massacre. Everything depends on how they present themselves and how we treat them. The problem is not that we create fictions: it is that we forget they are fictions, and cease to question them.
Truth, in this landscape, is not a story meant to replace all others. It is a posture: one that accepts contradiction, that subjects its claims to the test of facts, that remains open to revision. It does not promise immediate inner peace, for it confronts us with uncertainty, but it offers the chance not to mistake the enemy, not to fight against a shadow.
Useful fictions have their place. They nourish the imagination, give form to our values, make it possible to live together around a common horizon. But they must be recognized for what they are, and not substitute for the patient work of truth. The maturity of a society can be measured by its capacity to live with both: truth as compass, fictions as language. One without the other leads either to withering or to manipulation; together, they allow us both to understand and to project ourselves.
Our responsibility, individual and collective, is to know at what moment we are manipulating a fiction, and to what end. This lucidity, demanding and sometimes uncomfortable, is the only thing that allows us to walk through the fog without becoming the unconscious actors of a play written by others. It is a form of courage, perhaps the rarest: to look a story in the face and say, calmly, “this is a tale we have invented.”
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