We use stories to make sense of the world. What that means is that when events occur that don’t fit neatly into a narrative, we can’t make sense of them. As a consequence, these sorts of events are less salient, which means they’re less real.
In The Invisible Victims of American Anti-Semitism, Yair Rosenberg wrote in the Atlantic about the kinds of attacks that target Jews which don’t get much attention in the larger media. His claim is that this happens when these attacks don’t fit into existing narratives about anti-Semitism (emphasis mine):
What you’ll also notice is that all of the very real instances of anti-Semitism discussed above don’t fall into either of these baskets. Well-off neighborhoods passing bespoke ordinances to keep out Jews is neither white supremacy nor anti-Israel advocacy gone awry. Nor can Jews being shot and beaten up in the streets of their Brooklyn or Los Angeles neighborhoods by largely nonwhite assailants be blamed on the usual partisan bogeymen.
That’s why you might not have heard about these anti-Semitic acts. It’s not that politicians or journalists haven’t addressed them; in some cases, they have. It’s that these anti-Jewish incidents don’t fit into the usual stories we tell about anti-Semitism, so they don’t register, and are quickly forgotten if they are acknowledged at all.
In The 1918 Flu Faded in Our Collective Memory: We Might ‘Forget’ the Coronavirus, Too, Scott Hershberger speculated in Scientific American along similar lines about why historians paid little attention the Spanish Flu epidemic, even though it killed more people than World War I (emphasis mine):
For the countries engaged in World War I, the global conflict provided a clear narrative arc, replete with heroes and villains, victories and defeats. From this standpoint, an invisible enemy such as the 1918 flu made little narrative sense. It had no clear origin, killed otherwise healthy people in multiple waves and slinked away without being understood. Scientists at the time did not even know that a virus, not a bacterium, caused the flu. “The doctors had shame,” Beiner says. “It was a huge failure of modern medicine.” Without a narrative schema to anchor it, the pandemic all but vanished from public discourse soon after it ended.
I’m a big believer in the role of interactions, partial information, uncertainty, workarounds, tradeoffs, and goal conflicts as contributors to systems failures. I think the way to convince other people to treat these entities as first-class is to weave them into the stories we tell about how incidents happen. If we want people to see these things as real, we have to integrate them into narrative descriptions of incidents.
Because, If we can’t tell a story about something, it’s as if it didn’t happen.
Surfing Complexity 
“Well-off neighborhoods passing bespoke ordinances to keep out Jews is neither white supremacy nor anti-Israel advocacy gone awry.”
Can you explain how this could be construed as anything other than plain old white supremacy? (Is it because many Jewish people today identify as “white”, in parts of the world?) Because it sounds exactly like white supremacy to me.
This isn’t merely a technicality. White people passing rules to keep other people down is textbook white supremacy.
> I’m a big believer in the role of interactions, partial information, uncertainty, workarounds, tradeoffs, and goal conflicts as contributors to systems failures.
Do we tell the stories of characters that encounter these plot elements and work through them? (The hero’s journey of ED nurse that faces X and is changed by the struggle?) Or are you imagining personifying these as humanized demons/forces, characters themselves? (like a god of uncertainty, sprinkling doubt throughout society. or a political enforcer who forces others to make tradeoffs within acceptable constraints.)
I’m a fan of the former, where we tell stories of individuals who work through these issues. See this earlier post I wrote about sociological storytelling: