A mondegreen (/ˈmɒndɪˌɡriːn/) is a mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase in a way that gives it a new meaning. Mondegreens are most often created by a person listening to a poem or a song; the listener, being unable to hear a lyric clearly, substitutes words that sound similar and make some kind of sense. The American writer Sylvia Wright coined the term in 1954, recalling a childhood memory of her mother reading the Scottish ballad "The Bonnie Earl o' Moray", and mishearing the words "laid him on the green" as "Lady Mondegreen".

If you go to people and you tell them a complicated and painful story, many of them don’t want to listen. The advantage of fiction is that it can be made as simple and as painless or attractive as you want it to be because it’s fiction, and then what you see is that politicians like Hitler, they create a very simple story. We are the heroes. We always do good things. Everybody is against us. Everybody is trying to trample us, and this is very attractive.

Instead of using the stories for our purposes, we allow the stories to use us for their purposes. Then you start entire wars because of a story. You inflict suffering on millions of people just for the sake of a story. That’s the tragedy of human history.

People hear of fascism is this monster, and then when you hear the actual fascist story, what fascists tell you is always very beautiful and attractive. Fascists are people who come and tell you, “You are wonderful. You belong to the most wonderful group of people in the world. You’re beautiful. You are ethical. Everything you do is good. You have never done anything wrong. There are all these evil monsters out there that are out to get you, and they’re causing all the problems in the world.”

When people hear that, it’s like looking in the mirror and seeing something very beautiful. [...] When you look in the fascist mirror, you never see a monster. You see the most beautiful thing in the world, and that’s the danger, [...] that you see something is very beautiful, you don’t understand the monster underneath.

Money is the most successful story ever told, much more successful than any religious mythology. Not everybody believes in God, or in the same God, but almost everybody believes in money, even though it’s just a figment of our imagination.