I, too, am curious. But, I read this part of a short story in The Things They Carried, many, many, years ago, and it stuck with me:
You can tell a true war story by the questions you ask. Somebody tells a story, let’s say, and afterward you ask, “Is it true?” and if the answer matters, you’ve got your answer.
For example, we’ve all heard this one. Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast and saves his three buddies.
Is it true?
The answer matters.
You’d feel cheated if it never happened. Without the grounding reality, it’s just a trite bit of puffery, pure Hollywood, untrue in the way all such stories are untrue. Yet even if it did happen - and maybe it did, anything’s possible even then you know it can’t be true, because a true war story does not depend upon that kind of truth. Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth. For example: Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast, but it’s a killer grenade and everybody dies anyway. Before they die, though, one of the dead guys says, “The fuck you do that for?” and the jumper says, “Story of my life, man,” and the other guy starts to smile but he’s dead.
That’s a true story that never happened.
I don’t know that this article was written by Luigi Mangione, or if Luigi Mangione killed the CEO. But, I do know that this story is true, even if it never happened.
i think there are two different meanings of truth here, and it sounds like one of them might be referring to aletheia. from the wikipedia page:
Heidegger gave an etymological analysis of aletheia and drew out an understanding of the term as “unconcealedness”.[6] Thus, aletheia is distinct from conceptions of truth understood as statements which accurately describe a state of affairs (correspondence), or statements which fit properly into a system taken as a whole (coherence). Instead, Heidegger focused on the elucidation of how an ontological “world” is disclosed, or opened up, in which things are made intelligible for human beings in the first place, as part of a holistically structured background of meaning.
edit: just want to say that i agree with the message, and i think it’s true that things don’t have to actually happened in order to be true in some sense. i think the term aletheia can be helpful for making the distinction and wanted to share it for that reason