Director's Notes – Episode 130 (Patreon)

Joseph and I have talked a lot about the notions of faith and veracity. For millennia, humanity has devised gods to explain what it couldn't comprehend. Long before existentialism existed as a literary/philosophical movement, it existed as simple star-gazing. Those stars are gods. Their placement dictates our health and futures.

Long before diseases were understood as microbial, they were divine punishments. And still to this day, unexplained phenomena, whether it's a strange craft in Roswell, NM or the sudden assassination of a mostly-beloved president, humanity devises elaborate conspiracies to explain what it cannot comprehend. Conspiracy theories, in this way, are no different than religious texts.

It's more comforting to feel like the incomprehensible is also impenetrable, that it's ultimately out of our control. And to some extent the assassination of JFK or the secrecy of the US military in the desert are out of our control, but only because of other humans. It's unpleasant to think one guy with a rifle or a "Top Secret" stamp can control so much of our national feelings of safety and security, because we know that any one of us is capable of terrible things. No one wants wants to confront themself.

I don't mean to suggest there's no extra-terrestrial life, nor that there are no mega-powerful secret societies. But those notions keep us on our couches. A faceless, bodiless, intangible force (a god, if you will) cannot be confronted, fought with, or defeated, because its reality is beyond our limited understanding.

Building these narratives can be healing and uniting, because that's what stories can do. Stories of course can also harm and hinder. [INSERT EXAMPLE OF A TIME WHEN RELIGION OR CONSPIRACY THEORY CAUSED HARM].

The people of Night Vale live underneath conspiracy theories daily. They're not even theories really, because they're all true (as we state often in our one-sentence reply to "what the hell is a nightville?"). And in "A Story About Us" we wanted to see what they would do when they actually confronted one, when they finally looked closely at it and said "this is fucked up."

And so they do, and like all societies that rally against injustice or wrong-doing or just want transparency, they hit a wall. I think it's easy (and perfectly normal) to become dejected when obvious change does not happen at once, when not everyone can see how truly awful a situation is. But change, no matter how clear and necessary, is slow. We can only chip away at it.

As citizens of 2018, we think we're so much smarter than the people who thought health was dictated by the four humours, but I remind you of just how barbaric chemotherapy really is. But chemotherapy is a step up from amputations by doctors with unwashed hands.

We'll never understand everything. The pie chart of what we know versus what we don't know is still largely dominated by the latter. All we can really do (the people of Night Vale included) is push against injustice for as long as we're alive, and be comfortable with future generations taking over the fight when we're gone.

- Jeffrey Cranor
June 15, 2018

PS: It's Welcome to Night Vale's 6th birthday today, and I just wanted to thank each and every one of you for making our lives so much fun. We've always said that we'd still be writing it, even if we didn't have listeners, because we like writing the show. But honestly, knowing that you're there, hearing from you, seeing your beautiful faces, makes us so proud to have the best fan base anyone could ever want. That's not a platitude. I read other creators' fan-replies on twitter, and seriously, y'all are the damned best.