The age of statist mythology

Victor Davis Hanson writes that in the wake of Aaron Alexis's slaughter of unarmed people at the Navy Yard, some questions might have been asked:

Unfortunately, few of our elites dared to question the mental-health industry’s approach to treating the unstable, especially its resistance to properly monitoring whether those being treated as outpatients are taking their medications. Few faulted the entertainment industry for the savage genre of the modern video game. Should we also blame the incompetence of the agencies that conducted the background checks? Was the Pentagon to blame for not allowing military personnel and contractors to carry weapons while on their own federal military facilities?

Hanson shows how false narratives propagated by the media become the memes:

what was false has served noble purposes in a way that what was true will not. If the truth doesn’t serve social justice — well, tell a noble lie.

Like Orwell’s dead souls, we live in an age of statist mythology, in which unpleasant facts are replaced by socially useful lies. So we print the legend that better serves our fantasies.