Tell Me A Story
Humans are not very logical creatures. The beliefs that we hold usually don’t come from spreadsheets and peer-reviewed science journals, but from the stories we tell each other. This has always been the case. Most successful communicators in human history have been storytellers: presidents and monarchs, captains of industry and conquering generals, prophets and shamans, troubadours and pamphleteers, parents trying to get kids to go to sleep. Each religion, each ideology has its own stories and is itself a story. Socrates and Jesus had their allegories and parables, as well as their own life stories, which formed the bases for their philosophy and religion, respectively. Buddha and Muhammad’s life stories became the bases for the religions they founded too. Marx and Engels told of a specter haunting Europe, and Ayn Rand asked, “Who is John Galt?” If you’ve ever canvassed for a political cause, given a speech, headed an office meeting, organized a social event, or tried to sell someone something, you know that your best bet is to start with a story. Stories are how our brains work.
And this isn’t an entirely bad thing. Some of the most sublime works in all of human creation are stories. They entertain us; they inform us; they divert us from our worries; they orient us; they shape our identities; they transmit our values; they engender empathy; they awaken us to beauty; they kindle within us a sense of transcendent awe at the universe and our dumb luck at being able to experience it right now with each other. The substance of our lives is composed of plot, character, metaphor, symbolism, irony, and pathos. People view themselves as protagonists in their own movies.
Most stories are not true, or at least not completely true. That’s ok. The value of a story doesn’t necessarily depend on its factual truth, as long as the falsities in it are recognized. “Suspending disbelief” is the name of the game there. Some people seem to disagree and say that untrue stories can still be emotionally true. I don’t see the point in that phrasing.
People usually decide on a story’s veracity based on whether they trust the teller. There’s too much information out there that we need to learn, too many stories that we need to hear, for us to “do our own research” in order to confirm each one. In today’s complex, highly specialized world, one person simply doesn’t have the time or the expertise to independently certify each story encountered on a daily basis. Instead, a person will typically (hopefully) confirm the story with multiple trusted sources, of varying types, including friends, family, colleagues, experts, and media before relying on its truth.
The problem is that our need to process information in the form of a story can hinder our understanding of the world. There are a few ways that this can happen. One is when a story is meant to mislead. We see a lot of this today from so-called right-wing media, as well as from right-wing politicians – stories that are untrue or misleadingly presented, whose tellers know they are untrue or misleading, but tell them anyway. A person could do the due diligence and confirm the veracity of a story with multiple trusted sources, but if every source in the network is relaying the same bad information, then there’s no remedy. Obviously, this situation has wreaked havoc on our country, with tens of millions of people now disconnected from reality, unable to acknowledge basic facts about a global pandemic, anthropogenic climate change, a presidential election, and one country’s brazen and brutal invasion of another country.
In a more subtle, but still harmful way, most news sources have an incentive to formulate and propagate stories (the industry term is “narrative”) that are either overly simplistic or don’t accurately represent reality. If you’re a news producer, your job often depends on ratings, and the easiest way to get ratings is to offer facile sensationalism. “If it bleeds, it leads” is the evergreen mantra, because it works. So viewers who tune in to the news on a given night will probably see a story on the latest grisly murder (bonus points for the producer if the victim is white, and the suspect is black or brown). The narrative is “the bad guys are coming – be afraid.” That shot of fear and clarity straight to the amygdala is like a drug; come tomorrow evening, the same viewers will be itching for a fix. But the murder story shown every night doesn’t say much about what is actually going on. In a population of 330 million, murders happen every day, especially in this country, with access to guns only increasing. The important questions are: what are the odds that this could happen to a random person, and are those odds going up? In other words, what is the current murder rate in historical context? The newscasters probably won’t get to that part. Is the story they present untrue? No, but it conveys a distorted picture of reality, especially for those who see this type of story every night.
Another way that stories can hinder our understanding of the world is when they are misinterpreted. This is not necessarily anyone’s fault. Someone might have a particular purpose, or none at all, in telling a story, but the story is understood differently by its audience. Martin Scorsese may not have set out to glamorize violence, but it happened anyway for many viewers.
Some stories start out as explanations, then evolve into metaphors. This happens with myths, a common one of which is the origin story. Every entity has an origin story – every religion, every business, every relationship, every nation, every mythical figure or superhero. An origin story can serve to tell the world what the entity’s first principles are. If your parents are a princess and Zeus in the form of a swan, then you will be beautiful. If you were born a billionaire, and as a child you witnessed your parents’ murder at the hands of the most notorious criminal in your city, then you’ll become an eccentric costumed vigilante sworn to bring that criminal to justice. If you were created from a man’s rib, then you’re subordinate to him. If you were born in a crossfire hurricane, then you’re Jumpin’ Jack Flash (or Keith Richards). If your city was founded either by Trojan War refugees, or by two wolf-nursed brothers, one of whom kills the other, then your city’s history will be martial and chaotic.
America has a history, and it has a set of myths, including a mythical origin story. History is usually told as a story, and it can be very entertaining, but history is different from mythology, because its purpose is to discern the truth of what happened in the past. Mythology, on the other hand, isn’t concerned with factual truth, although it may have originated as an attempt at an explanation of natural phenomena. For instance, according to Klamath mythology, Crater Lake is the result of a cataclysmic battle between Llao, the god of the underworld, and Skell, the sky god. Since history is concerned with truth, and since we learn new things all the time about the past, we are constantly adjusting our understanding of history to accord with the new information we learn. Thus, all history is revisionist. In fact, all knowledge is revisionist. It must be if new information means anything. Until the late 19th century, everyone knew that diseases were caused by bad air emanating from rotting organic matter. Today we know that that’s not true, that diseases instead are caused by pathogens.
Myths do not need to change, because they’re not true. They might illuminate our understanding of how the people who created them thought, or they might serve any number of the purposes of stories that I mentioned above. But they aren’t an accurate representation of reality.
Everyone has their own needs that they seek to fulfill, whether consciously or not, when they listen to stories. Some want to be entertained, some enlightened, some proven correct. Some are comforted by myths, some by their dispelling. For my part, learning that Ben Franklin had xenophobic views and that Paul McCartney has petty ones made me feel better. Maybe that says something bad about me, but I like to think that it means I have an egalitarian spirit. I’m sure that for other people, this knowledge would make them feel worse. Maybe they have a certain idea of Ben Franklin or Paul McCartney – maybe it’s long-held, maybe it’s deeply-held if loved ones gave them the idea. When that idea gets confronted with new, contradictory information, it must change to comport with reality. This is the process of knowledge. We’re always learning new things, and accordingly, we’re always tweaking our story of the world.
It’s much easier to have a fixed view of things. Humans are pattern-seeking beings, because patterns save energy and time. That’s why we can’t resist stereotypes and myths. It takes much more energy and time to have to figure a new situation out, instead of already having it figured out. To a person for whom the stereotype or myth is cherished, new contradictory information might feel like an assault on them, on their identity, or on the loved ones who told them the stereotype or myth. And this isn’t just a conservative political tendency. Anyone who has ever been disappointed by a loved one has felt this. Learning that someone who you knew only to be good can also behave badly can cause you to question everything. Your fixed picture of the world, which oriented you and gave you comfort, has been shattered. It’s the age-old dilemma, most vividly presented in that epoch-defining philosophical work, The Matrix: would you rather know the truth, or would you rather be happy?
Along the same lines, there’s a type of person who needs the past to be better than the present, who therefore needs people in the past to be better than those now. Maybe it’s a matter of pride, pride in oneself, pride in where one is from (especially if the current versions of self and home have suffered a decline). On another level, it’s a matter of power. If a person or group was better off in the past, then it’s easy for them to romanticize the way things were and yearn for a restoration of that privileged position. This might be another reason why learning that Ben Franklin had xenophobic views would be upsetting for some people, especially if they identify with Ben Franklin somehow.
The basically benign form of this predilection is nostalgia or sentimentality. If taken farther though, it can become the most dangerous force on earth. After all, the mythologization of the past is what caused the Nazis to coin the term “Third Reich” and to invade Poland (reich means “empire” – the story went that there had already been two glorious empires in Germany). It’s why Putin has invaded Ukraine. t’s also why Reagan, then Trump, wanted to “Make America Great Again,” and why Republican politicians across the country are currently banning books and American history in schools.
I love stories – that’s why I was an English major. But different stories have different uses, and some are even harmful, as we’ve seen. Much useful information isn’t in story form. And the world is messy; it’s complicated; it’s unsatisfying; it’s gray, rather than black and white. This is hard work, being an adult in a messy, complicated, unsatisfying, gray world. It’s hard work determining what’s true and what isn’t without falling back on patterns or stereotypes. But we have a duty to do that hard work. If we are to live in peace together and leave a habitable world to our descendants, we have no choice but to engage with reality. Not comforting myths. Not hyperbolic narratives.
And maybe it’s just me, but I find it more amazing, and more heartening, to think that great yet imperfect people founded our great yet imperfect country. Do we really need America’s conception to be immaculate in order for us to honor it, and in so doing, to honor ourselves and our own first principles? Can’t we appreciate the positive aspects of America’s founding without deifying the founders? Maybe that’s the rub – if the founders are on the same plane as us, then we have the same power and the same responsibility that they did – the power to create our own myths, the responsibility to forge our own history.