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False Memories and Social Media

False Memories and Social Media

Last updated on: June 13, 2026 at 9:56 pm by Dan Peterson

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False Memories and Social Media 2026-06-13T21:56:56-06:00 Dan Peterson

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Happily, this newly installed statue at Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Florida, will remain. (Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph)

I’m distraught that the name of Donald J. Trump has been removed from The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Arts. (In response, I’m thinking of gilding the rain gutters on my house and of altogether naming my house after him. But somehow that just doesn’t seem adequate to the cause.) It now strikes me as even more imperative that his signature be on the paper currency of the United States, that his name be on Trump-class battleships and the Donald J. Trump U.S. Institute of Peace and the Trump gold-card immigration visa and Trump savings accounts for children and Trump IRAs and TrumpRX.gov prescription drug accounts; and that his image be on American coinage and American passports and Trump national park passes as well as on an enormous portrait banner hanging over the entrance to the Department of Justice. These are basic American values.

The first-century Roman emperor Nero commissioned a hundred-foot-tall statue of himself as the sun god. (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

In other news: I never watch Ultimate Fighting Championship events. I certainly won’t be watching Sunday’s UFC event on the South Lawn of the White House, even if the courts permit it to go forward. To me, holding the event on the grounds of the White House in connection with the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence is gross, classless, and undignified, and having such a celebration at the White House for a president’s — any president’s — birthday is more appropriate to the decadence of imperial Rome than to the American republic of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison. But then, I’m probably a Marxist, right? I probably yearn for the glorious days of Joe Biden.

Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904), Ave Caesar Morituri te Salutant (“Hail Caesar! We Who Are about to Die Salute You”) (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

Further news bulletin: I’m also not offended by the fact that Elon Musk has apparently just become the world’s first trillionaire. So long as wealth is generated out of the free exchange of legitimate goods and services, I see no intrinsic secular problem with it. Quite the contrary, in fact. (Of course, illegitimate plutocratic influence on politics and the coercive power of the state is quite a different matter, as is deriving one’s wealth from government connections.) I am, to put it mildly, no particular fan of Mr. Musk, and I think that SpaceX is very likely greatly overvalued, but the sheer existence of billionaires (and now, it seems, of trillionaires) fills me with neither indignation nor rage nor envy.

Looking toward the Universität Zürich and the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich, or ETH, Switzerland’s equivalent of Caltech or MIT. Thus far, its faculty and/or graduates — among them Albert Einstein — have claimed twenty-one Nobel Prizes in physics, chemistry, and medicine. (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

A basic principle of sound historical scholarship is that, on the whole, all other things being equal (which they often aren’t), sources closer in space and time to a given historical event are to be preferred over accounts that are more distantly removed from it, that primary sources are preferable to secondary sources, that eyewitness reports are superior to second-hand accounts, and so forth. But the evaluatory process is never automatic or machine-like. A historian’s judgment is still required. And early, eyewitness, first-hand accounts are just as subject to a narrator’s biases and misunderstandings as later retellings are.

Moreover, as we’ve become more and more aware, human memory is a malleable thing, affected by the “rememberer’s” current mental, emotional, psychological, social, and ideological state. Such things need to be taken into account.

A recent comment about, well, me will illustrate the point. It comes from someone with whom I was once somewhat acquainted. We would encounter each other at annual FAIR conferences, which he attended from out of state, and, although we weren’t close, our interactions were friendly. Since then, his circumstances have changed considerably. He has, for example, left the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, perhaps (or so it seems to me) with some anger and bitterness — I think, too, that there have been some other personal challenges, of which I know very little — and, among other things, he has become a moderately active participant on what I call the Peterson Obsession Board.

Looking downstream on the Limmat River in central Zürich, Switzerland
(Wikimedia Commons public domain photo)

Permit me now to back up for just a moment to supply some context for the remainder of what I’ll say here:

During the last six months or so of my mission in German-speaking Switzerland, which is to say sometime around the first half of 1974 — I’m really, really old! — I had an unpleasant experience with what, in my day at least, we called “Bible bashing.” I’ve told the story multiple times over the past fifty-two years, including here on this blog, because it taught me a great deal. Here is my most recent recounting of it, from June 2024:

I’m still surprised from time to time at how much the image that has been painstakingly constructed for me over at the Peterson Obsession Board during the past fifteen or twenty years [it’s actually closer to a quarter of a century now] relies on shameless misrepresentation. . . .

My Malevolent Stalker recently told his gullible audience there that, according to my own frequent statement, the highlight of my mission was “bashing” with and “humiliating” a Protestant pastor. The Stalker isn’t stupid, so I can only assume that he’s lying. . . .

[It] concerns a story that I’ve related here at least once, about having been summoned from the Mission Home in Zürich at the last minute to help out a pair of elders who had arranged for a debate with a member of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Just hours before the event, they called and begged me to come as the Latter-day Saint side of the argument, because one of the Witnesses’ big guns had decided to come. I went as they had asked and, frankly, I think I mopped the floor with him. Not because I was such a genius but because he really wasn’t very good. But I hated it. It was painful. I told them never to set up such a debate again, and certainly never to invite me to participate in such a thing. I told them that I wouldn’t come, and I vowed to avoid such confrontations in the future. [Which I have.]

Does that sound like a “highlight” of my mission? Hardly. Nor, I think, would an official of the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society think of himself as a “Protestant pastor.”

Before I sat down to write this blog entry, I asked my wife whether she remembered my having told the story. She did. I asked whether, in telling it, I had ever boasted of my brilliant triumph over the hapless Jehovah’s Witness official. For what it’s worth, she could not remember my having done so. Had I not, rather, always used it as a regrettable cautionary tale? That, she says, is how she’s always heard me tell it. It’s how I remember telling it, as well. It’s how I’ve always thought about it.

Well. The story has come up yet again. Not from me. My Malevolent Stalker regularly launches threads over at the Peterson Obsession Board about my callous cruelty, my rage-fueled viciousness, and my contempt for those who don’t share my views. He launched another one a few days ago, declaring fake and dishonest the sentiments that I had expressed in “Why Some Leave The Church And How We Should Respond.” Nothing new there, of course. But I was saddened to see the person whom I described above show up to, as it were, bear his own personal witness of my mean-spirited inhumanity. Here is what he wrote, unedited except for the bracketed insertion for clarity’s sake:

It got to the point that I didn’t even want to talk to the apologists, let alone listen to them. Their version of missionary Gospel teaching is whacking the hell out of you intellectually with the scriptures – remember the pure GLEE [Peterson] spoke of when having his Bible bash on his mission?! So, sure let the leaders try to get the members to be charitable, but we all know they are only going to fake it for appearance sake. They don’t want apostates among them for anything. The parable fits Mormons to a T. The Mormon will go out of his/her way to go past the apostate walking on the other side of the road in a hurry instead of being a Good Samaritan and helping out, whether physically, spiritually, or psychologically. We all already know that, and so I think Peterson is being disingenuous in his remarks.

A view toward Lake Zurich from the ETH Polyterrace

I’m not angry at the fellow. Just sad. He’s gone through a lot, and he may, by now, actually believe what he’s saying. (Although, knowing him somewhat, I wonder whether he would say such things if we were speaking face to face. I don’t think he’s a bad person.) As I say, memory is malleable — and, if there are powerful social inducements to reformulate it, it will sometimes be, umm, transformed. His story is not accurate, though, and, by way of evidence for the attitude that he once had toward me and toward my “Mopologetic” associates, I share the unsolicited email that he sent to me on 20 June 2012, shortly after the uncomfortably public and very unpleasant events that severed my connection with BYU’s Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship (and that led, within just a few weeks, to the founding of the Interpreter Foundation). It’s the last email that I ever received from him, and it’s likely that I’ve neither seen him nor had any interaction with him of any kind since that date:

I just wanted to say hi, and I have read all the blather concerning what has happened. I love you like a brother…..brother…… I have read everything you have written that I can get my hands on, and have used extensive materials for my You Tube videos, and writings, etc. I am deeply sorry for the way the issue was handled, based on what little I understand. If there is anything I can do, I am here for you Dan. In my own opinion, you and the original group of FARMS Boys (I say that respectfully, not in any way disparaging) out to start another group and this time remain independent. I had a chat with you years ago when you informed us at one of the FAIR conferences and told you then to remain independent, and you said it was desired, but impossible. Perhaps this is a huge hidden blessing in disguise for you to do just that?

Anyway, thoughts and prayers are with you…..head up, because….. seriously……… what the critics say is irrelevant, and you need not heed them……..

Best to you and the family,
NNN

Aerial view of Zürich and its suburbs (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

It’s amazing to me how memories can change. For instance, I’ve heard people emerging from unpleasant divorces who now assure everyone around them that “I never really loved her/him” although I’m confident that, in most cases, that simply isn’t true. (It’s a good reason for keeping journals, to remind ourselves of what we once thought and how we once felt.) I think that this is simply another instance of the transmogrification of memory. And, to me personally, it’s disheartening.

It’s also a regrettable case of how such things can be posted anonymously or pseudonymously online about specific named people and, thus, become an effectively permanent part (however significant or insignificant and however false they may be) of the “public record.” Several dozen times at least, I’ve seen people whose names I don’t recognize (or who don’t even give their names) tell of encounters with me, in person or online, in which I’ve supposedly said or done things that I’m absolutely confident I never said or did, expressing thoughts that I’ve never thought, attitudes that I’ve never held, acting in ways that I would never act. (I wonder how many times such invented anecdotes have been shared online that I haven’t seen.)

One example, and then I’ll have done: Many years ago, a person who briefly figured on the margins of Latter-day Saint historical scholarship posted an account of a supposed conversation that he and I had once had while we were supposedly together for our respective two-month stints in the old Language Training Mission adjacent to Brigham Young University. In that conversation, he supposedly asked me why I was willing to apply rigorous scholarly standards to the Bible and other ancient documents but not to the Book of Mormon. I allegedly replied that it was because the Book of Mormon couldn’t possibly withstand such scrutiny.

Very revealing, right? And very damning.

But some problems immediately suggested themselves: For one thing, I couldn’t remember having ever met him or heard his name until at least two years after my mission. I also remembered no such conversation, whether with him or with anybody else. For another, I’ve never held such views. (If I held them, I wouldn’t be a believing or active Latter-day Saint.) And why would he have been talking to me as if I were already a publicly-known “apologist”? By that point in my life — I was just nineteen! — I had published precisely nothing on the Book of Mormon or any other Latter-day Saint topic.

I denied having ever said or thought any such thing. When, I asked, had he been in the Language Training Mission? He named a period that fell nearly a year after my departure from the LTM, at a point when I was solidly into my service in Switzerland. I told him that the conversation was impossible and had never occurred. He then accused me of lying about the dates of my mission. To which I replied that we were done.

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