From Sue Ellen's banner to Puigdemont's trunk

Yesterday I was explaining on a Media page how TV3 stole the rights to Dallas from TVE and there were those who recalled the mythical phrase “Sue Ellen, you're a slacker" which was never said. In reality, what was said was: “Your husband is dying and you're being a slacker, who knows where!", only that popular imagination has fixed this shortened form in the collective memory. This is called the Mandela effect, because a study determined that many people remembered the death in prison of the anti-Apartheid South African fighter even though he died many years after being released. Another classic case is “Luke, I am your father”, even though Constantino Romero said “No, I am your father”. In Spain there is a famous case involving Ricky Martin, a greedy dog, the program Sorpresa sorpresa and a girl with a jar of jam about which I will give no further details without the presence of my lawyers. Or the 23-F: many people remember having seen that night the shocking images of Tejero and his gang shooting in Congress, even though only the radio broadcast it live. Since it has been broadcast a thousand times since then, this false shared memory has ended up being created.

My intuition is that Mandela effects will enter into crisis. Or, more specifically, that there is such a great dissolution of the notion of truth accepted by a sufficient majority that we are living in a universe of small, more or less disjointed, private beliefs. Puigdemont fleeing in a car trunk, for example, is not a Mandela effect, but a very conscious communicative operation to repeat a lie often enough until it becomes true. There is a clear intention, unlike the previous cases. We are in the era of the construction of invented memories. Like that of the (non-existent) monocle of the Monopoly character, but with evident and pernicious effects on democracy.