I believe in eternal truth. There exist in the universe principles that are simply true because they are. They never change and they apply in all situations (I also understand that life is almost always gray and not black and white. There are always caveats, but that's a topic for another day).
I also believe that, if people share messages that are based on these eternal truths, they typically do not need to have sources that back them up. If shared correctly, the truths that a message centers on are a sufficient enough spine to prop up an entire argument.
I also believe that this is not a very popular belief, however. We live in an age that relies on relative truth (what's true for you isn't necessarily true for me). This has given way to a prevailing belief that anyone trying to establish something as universally true must include their citations and provide more than ample evidence for such a claim. This is part of why religion is falling out of favor: knowledge has become so extensive and so commodified that believing in something that doesn't have empirical proof to back it up is considered idiotic (which is also a topic for another day). It can be incredibly frustrating to share anything you consider a fact nowadays because people will strike it down immediately and can even cite someone with some kind of credential that has said something at some point.
Now, I'd like to clarify that I am indeed an academic. I typically require sources almost as stingily as the people I just finished describing. But boy howdy can it get tiring to try to make any claim at any time. Even opinion pieces (including this one) will get torn to bits by some and appreciated by next to none. It can get so exhausting to try to contribute anything at any point without doing years of research and editing - and even that will probably get thrown in the trash immediately by the majority of people that peruse the abstract!
There is only one sphere, however, that cuts immediately through this impossible red tape. Its power is actually something I've touched on in the past already:
FICTION
I had this epiphany while reading Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archives series. If you haven't read that series, you need to read it. The plot of the book is unimportant for this piece, but Sanderson peppers his writings with quotations from other works. Here's the catch though: all of these citations are from fake works. They don't exist. They are real works in the universe of the book, but they have never been written (or if they have, Brandon Sanderson has kept that too himself).
The characters in The Stormlight Archives give these quotes lots of weight, especially since the quotes themselves typically touch on deep philosophical ideals that are counter to the cultural norm of the characters' society. They are powerful ideas, many of which I think are based on eternal truth. And that's when it hit me - Sanderson was sharing powerful, in-depth ideas that have this weight assigned to them by the characters of the book. But the ideas themselves are 100% fabricated!
Why?
You may have already deduced where I'm going with this, but the reason these completely contrived ideas transform into soul-piercing ideas is because they are elements of a fictitious work. When starting a movie or book or TV show, people immediately suspend their disbelief. They know that the media they are consuming is fake, so they take their real-world experiences and ideologies and beliefs and set them aside. And this isn't a bad thing: it's a requirement to comprehend a fictitious work. Gravity might not work in this fictitious world, so you can't rely on what you know.
All Aboard
The natural result of suspending disbelief is an increased reliance and trust in the author of a fictitious work. It's like boarding a boat. No matter how much you know about the body of water you're on, or how much you know about boats, or even how well you can predict your route, you are at the mercy of the boat conductor to decide exactly where you go. The readers' (or viewers, or whoever, but for simplicity's sake, I'll just say "readers") very presence on the author's boat naturally causes them to put more weight into all the exposition, character arcs, and plot twists.
This trust and reliance makes readers more susceptible to the messages and morals of an author's work. These ideas are self-evident, but what is most compelling about this idea is that the author has done nothing to deserve all this credit. I'm not discrediting authors, of course: books and compositions take a high level of talent, thought, and work. But the majority of authors don't have a "works cited" page or a doctorate or peer reviews (not including editors) or anything that is absolutely imperative to prove anything in today's world.
CONCLUSION
This is the power of fiction. Fiction simply requires convincing truth and a powerful narrative to penetrate people's hearts in a world where people outright demand sources and credentials that they may just ignore anyways. The implications of this are utterly fascinating. If you want to convince someone of truth, don't offer them proof. Offer them a story.
