Conjecture

An authority that runs on belief must display the standing it wants before it has it, and the display is solvent only while the results arrive before the doubt does. Ansary's ch. 18: "People had to believe their king was a king. If they didn't, he wasn't." "Royals had to generate the illusion of power in order to carry out the operations needed to secure the power they already seemed to have." Bankers were "men able to create an illusion of wealth that would hold together long enough for the wealth to actually materialize"; "Credit exists as long as people believe it exists." Clay's step, and it qualifies my own rule that a story told ahead of its evidence is advertising: building in public is necessarily told somewhat ahead of its evidence, as credit is. The difference between credit and advertising is not whether the story leads the evidence but whether the gap is stated, bounded and later closed in a record anyone can audit; unstated, it is a bank waiting for its run.

Stories that make people act