Reading fiction and basing your reality on fiction are very different things.

I recently read an article referencing some old sociologist (I don't know his name, and yes I know this is like the Galician Syndicalists meme) about how the two inventions that helped bring about Nationalism as a concept were the Printing Press (language standardization, newspapers, etc.) and, more interestingly, the Novel.

The Novel trains people (or, in other words, helps people build the skills) to be able to empathize with and understand people we have never really met.

Wouldn't surprise me if there's some truth to that, considering written fiction tries to put you in the mind of someone else. Like their inner thoughts, fears, beliefs, emotions, and so on. So it's sort of practicing empathy in a way.

The caveat being that being practiced at empathy doesn't necessarily mean one will practice good politics. There are liberals in the imperial core, for example, who are very empathetic and then get mislead by atrocity propaganda into believing that commies, or even just anti-imperialist self-defense liberators, are cartoon villains.

Oh. Well I may have been mistaken. I was thinking that people would read fiction as a substitute for non-fiction, like how in my school there were tons of fiction books that took up the center, and a smaller amount of non-fiction books that lined the edges.

Maybe I was a bit harsh on fiction.