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Would it make sense for an organization that has existed for centuries not remember its own origins Question
Backstory:
In my story there's this organization that is kind like of movie version of Men in Black combined with the Kingsmen where they hide in the shadows and maintain order in the world. Now they don't really "rule" the per say like illuminate or anything like that, but rather "guide it" so as to make sure things don't get out of hand; they curb certain technological advances if they feel that people aren't ready for it, keep secret things they don't feel people would be able to handle such as aliens and anomalous entities and mosters.
Technical Information:
Now I wanted to put it where the main organization you see is mainly just a branch of a higher level organization that deals with more universal level issues both of which being founded by this entity who's powers are on a universal scale, and that it was around for so long, predating even the medieval ages, they don't quite remember their origins, with the way the organization got started being left to speculation and theory. My initial idea was that it's like real life where a good portion of human history is lost and unknown, with a good chunk of history being guess work and filling in blanks, setting up this big reveal that this entity with universal level power who founded the organization was real. But the thing is that this organization has knowledge about a lot of stuff that people don't have and technology no one has access to so I was wondering if that even made sense.
I did consider setting it up where the founder intentionally set it up where no one would remember the origins of the organization and the fact that people started speculating and theorizing made this a trillion times easier. The problem is I got stumped on what his reasons and motivation for this could possibly be. So I was wondering if I should keep that idea or nix it altogether.
Question:
How can I make sense of an organization that has existed for centuries not knowing its own origins.
1 answer
It probably depends a lot on what you mean for an "organization" to not remember its origins.
For example, can I believe that most (pardon the dismissive term) employees don't know how they came about? Definitely. I've worked at companies where only a small minority realized that the name came from some important aspect of the founding, because it rarely occurs to people to question these things. Likewise, I'd bet that only a tiny minority of police officers could tell you when their department was founded, by whom, and why, because it has little to do with how they see their participation. Like the industrial employees, they "just work here."
On another scale, most of us probably don't remember the details of how our older friend-groups formed.
However, the more important the work is to the people doing it, the more likely they care about the background. And there's almost always somebody keeping track of these things, because the myth-making contributes to that feeling of importance. You probably see this most prominently with countries, where patriotism often revolves around founding stories.
Of course, the founding could also be a pack of lies, too. They think that the founder developed the idea in year X based on the following theories, but it was actually much older and started on a dare...but that story proved unsatisfying.
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