When gossip rules the world, and snakes eat their own tales
The other day I talked to a man who believes the Earth is flat. So, while most people imagine Antarctica as a white patch on the underside of a globe, he explained that it was not a continent, but instead formed a boundary around the edges of a saucer-shaped world, rising up in high walls of ice that keep the oceans from overflowing. A woman seated a bit further down the table, overhearing the conversation, called out to say she did not believe the Earth was flat, but she did believe the 1969 moon landing was faked. A second man at the same table also did not believe the Earth was flat, but mirthfully confessed he had looked into the theory and found it fascinating.
Later that day, my wife Ruth Gaskovski and I hosted a supper in our home with our teenage children and a few of their teen friends. In the course of the conversation, which touched on contentious topics, one of the teens lowered his head and muttered with resignation, “I don’t know what to believe anymore”.
I don’t know what to believe anymore. How many times have I heard that? I think I’m losing count. I know I’ve said it myself. I don’t mean that I don’t know what to believe when it comes to the things that really matter to me, like my core values and view of the world. I’m pretty sure about those things. I’m even pretty sure that the Earth is a sphere, the moon landing was not faked, and Elvis is deader than Scrooge.
People grow beliefs the way June lawns grow dandelions. It can’t be helped. And every civilization is plagued with these cognitive dandelions, which send out spores that float away, land, proliferate into new dandelions. This is the way of the world. My mother grew up in a poor Balkan village where, during its heyday from around 500 A.D. (when the Slavic migrations arrived) to around 1960 A.D. (when everybody started immigrating to the West), people lived small intertwined lives, in mud-brick homes scattered around a nameless river that was just called “the river”, and everybody knew everybody. Which made it easy to depend on others for eggs, milk, wool, firewood, and everything else needed for survival. But it also meant that gossip was rife. If you did something behind the barn with so-and-so’s cousin, and the neighbor suspected it, then it’s likely a good part of the village would be furtively watching you across the candlelit church the next Sunday morning while the chanters sung the Kyrie Eleison’s.
There’s a theory, I vaguely recall, that cities and big anonymous civilizations arose because people wanted to escape the gossip. I suppose they did for a while, but now that high-resolution cameras are attached to almost every human hand, people can upload everything they see and hear to social media, which is a huge gossip machine and confabulator, a global digital village where people whisper between windows.
Loudmouths, liars, schemers, and connivers tell the best stories, or at least get the most attention, so the truth—which is somewhere out there—is easily lost. Camera angles rule the world. No, scratch that, a billion opinions about a hundred camera angles rule the world. Scratch that too, because people are going to believe whatever they believe, because they already believe it. If they happen to be looking at contrary evidence, it is sometimes only so they can get all worked up and reinforce their original convictions. Our logic for figuring out truth suffers from a kind of circularity, like a snake eating its own tail, or rather, a snake eating its own tale.
One of the reasons we’ve begun hosting suppers with our teens and their friends is to encourage them—and ourselves—to discuss the deep things of life, like marriage, faith, and society, in a sane and balanced way. There is no alcohol, but lots of lasagna. The music is old jazz or, more recently, Frank Sinatra. At one of these gatherings, a young woman who we have known for years declared an opinion that astonished us. I won’t repeat it here. It was slightly offensive. Our mouths gaped when she shared it. “And how do you know this is true?” I inquired.
The young woman explained she had a friend who had shared a “hot take”.
“But that is just one person’s opinion,” I gently protested.
Yes, but it was a good hot take, she assured us, a very good hot take. Several of our young guests seemed to agree that “hot takes” are acceptable sources of proof, and the term came up so many times that it became a tongue-twister in my head: How many takes can a hot take take before a hot take turns out fake?
Despite our astonishment at her opinion and excessive hot-takery, we didn’t stand up in self-righteous outrage and throw our young guest out of the house. We, the hosts, always expect to encounter some unusual perspectives during our supper salons. We have no intention of dismissing people and ruining relationships just because of a deviant opinion or two. The food and music also help. Outrage just doesn’t happen in the presence of beef lasagna and Frank Sinatra Live at Madison Square Garden.
I’m less concerned about what happens at our supper salons, than with what is happening in the world. Much of the internet has devolved into a gossip and confabulation machine, and AI only amplifies the half-truths and general loudmouthery in the public discourse, making it harder to see truth. Not that seeing truth was ever easy, of course.
Villages have their priests, or maybe a wise old babushka, who can tell it to you straight. All societies need authority. At the level of civilization, authority used to belong to the Church, and later belonged to the State, and is now split between the State and a handful of vape-smoking twenty-something-year-old billionaires with a knack for coding. The UK recently started blocking websites which contain words deemed socially unacceptable, and some people find this outrageous. But in a society filled with gossip machines, there is simply no other way for Civilizational Authority to function. I am not defending the UK’s actions. I find them deeply troubling. But if we’re going to have a technological world, then whoever is in power is tasked with the difficult problem of keeping society coherent. Society cannot remain coherent without a common narrative.
If you’re lucky, you’ll end up with a government whose narrative maps onto yours. If not, then you may end up frustrated, gaslighted, alienated, uncertain. I don’t know what to believe anymore. Would knowing what to believe be easier in a mud-brick village, like the place my mother grew up in? Probably. But people will always whisper between the windows. We’ll never quite escape the gossip and snake tales.
In the meantime our supper salons will continue, with real people, younger and older, discerning truth over lasagna and a good jazz LP. You’re all welcome to join us, as soon as we can find a big enough table.
Peco is the author of the sci-fi dystopian novel Exogenesis. Exogenesis was selected as Book of the Year for 2025 by Matthew Long, was on the 2023 Public Discourse book list, and has received acclaim in Mere Orthodoxy, Catholic World Report, Miller’s Book Review , The Imaginative Conservative, Catholic Insight, and Catholic Mom.