Why This Skeptic Dislikes Snopes.com

Posted on April 4, 2004 in Compassion Myths & Mysticism

It almost never fails: someone forwards an inspirational story to a mailing list that I am on and someone else steps forward to announce that snopes.com has debunked it. Sometimes the debunking isn’t all that impressive, but snopes.com has attained mythic status among those who buy into the myth that all myth is bad.

There are some rumors that should be debunked: stories of cures that kill or just won’t work; political character assassinations; racist slurs; anecdotes which strive to make excuses for hateful vices of the past such as slavery or genocide or concentration camps; and the infinitely creative Darwin Awards which, nearly to the last period, are pure fabrications of some hateful nerd’s mind. But no one debunks the myth that myth is universally and uniformly bad.

When you make this argument to the hard core piss-on-everyone’s-happiness fans of snopes.com, they grumble and turn away. They want a life without story, without mystery, without human inventiness. Can’t we just say, sometimes, that the poodle in the microwave is just a twistedly amusing folktale? Must the result of debunking always be the suggestion how stupid people are rather than how creative?

Who is checking snopes.com? Who is policing the debunkers and checking their attitudes, their facts, their spins?

I am persona non grata in “folklore” circles. Like any study infested by nerds, the focus has turned from appreciation to pathologization of the people who tell the tales. There is an elitism which doesn’t want to share, which strives to attack. A few years ago, on afu (all.fucked.up if you will), I stood up for a college student who asked a question about how to conduct folklore research. They don’t like questions that they can’t look up in the newspaper or in a library. I called them on it and they attacked me. From time to time, I still get crank email from some member of that inelegant cabal. I walked away but they can’t forget me? This is clinical behavior. Unfortunately, the patients are in control.