Same Name, New Story

It’s a common phenomenon: a symbol or brand or name stands for one story, then over time, it shifts to the opposite story.

A light-hearted example: the word peruse. It meant “to read carefully,” and now most people use it to mean “to glance through.”

Or take American Christianity: all its money and power and self-help happy talk would be unrecognizable to Jesus. Or Jonathan Edwards. It’s often the opposite of what those guys stood for.

I see this phenomenon all over—in feminism and civil rights and the Baby Boomers and newspapers and celebrities and the Republicans and the Democrats and and and…

Why is it so hard to stick to the original story? I’m not sure exactly, but I know power has a lot to do with it. George Orwell’s Animal Farm illustrates this phenomenon so precisely that I don’t need to explain anything. Just go (re)read the book.

Social media (the need for clicks) has made this phenomenon move ten times faster. We see the same brands, the same names, as fifty years ago, but they are masks with a new story underneath.