Life & Wisdom Quote by Michael Shermer

Shermer’s line lands like a cold splash on our reflex to ask, first, “But did it really happen?” He’s reframing myth as a technology of meaning rather than a botched version of history. In a culture trained to treat “true” as the only compliment that matters, he argues that myths operate on a different axis: they’re scripts for behavior, containers for values, and motivational engines. Their success isn’t measured by factual accuracy but by psychological stickiness and social utility.

The subtext is a quiet provocation aimed at both fundamentalists and smug debunkers. To the literalist, he’s saying: your insistence on historicity misses the point of why these stories endure. To the atheist killjoy who thinks disproving a miracle ends the conversation, he’s saying: you’ve only dismantled the surface. People don’t cling to narratives because they passed peer review; they cling because the narratives organize fear, desire, obligation, and belonging.

Context matters: Shermer writes from the skeptic tradition, but here he sounds less like a prosecutor and more like an anthropologist of belief. “Irrelevant” is the deliberately abrasive word. He’s not endorsing lying; he’s separating epistemic truth from cultural function. That separation helps explain why misinformation can thrive and why art can feel “truer than true.” The line nudges us toward a more adult question than “Is it real?”: “What is this story doing to us, and who benefits from the meaning it produces?”