The authorities had told us Mark was dead, and we had accepted it, and the moment we accepted it, we stopped examining it, because that is what acceptance does: it ends inquiry.

And I have come to understand that this same mechanism operates everywhere, all the time, in ways far less dramatic than a wake but no less consequential.

We accept narratives, from experts, from authorities, from documents, from consensus, and having accepted them, we stop looking, and the things that do not fit the accepted narrative become, quite literally, invisible to us, not because we cannot see them but because we have stopped looking for them.

How many true things go unseen, in every domain of life, simply because someone official has already declared the question closed?