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Telling Stories

Writer's picture: Doug WeissDoug Weiss

Whether other creatures have evolved language is a much-debated thesis but there is no question that story telling is a defining characteristic shared by every human being. I’ve read a number of scholarly texts on the subject of storytelling, and the closely associated act of dreaming. That hardly makes me an expert on the subject but I have read and thought about it sufficiently to suggest that story telling is so essential to human existence that were we without the ability we would lack most if not all knowledge, skills or arts.


Most species learn –at least how to live and survive, by imitation. One step beyond gestural imitation—the kind of learning we can observe in very young infants, is acquired knowledge. Acquired knowledge comes through two primary mechanisms—experience and some form of communication. However, learning by experience alone would be species limiting. Lacking a means to convey the experience of one creature to another would consign us to the most primitive kind of life. After all, even the cells in our bodies have a means to signal to one another—for example to congregate to fight disease or to animate our physical presence. Sorry if this seems a bit pedantic but I want to clarify the distinction between communication and storytelling, because we often confuse the two.


Like dreams, stories are vivid, imaginative, and emotional. A story is a visceral experience, even very simple stories, and it seems we are wired at a very deep level to respond. Stories need not always be vocalized—music even without lyrics tells a story, as does art in all its forms from painting to dance and every other medium, and the addition of one to another can often increase the power of the story exponentially.


We encounter great story tellers everywhere-not just as authors, playwrights, filmmakers or poets, but in classrooms, pulpits, legislatures, boardrooms, online and in person and anywhere people gather to enlighten or persuade. I say that because story telling is not about facts but feelings; not about conveying information as much as it is about creating a narrative. Great story tellers know either through intuition or experience that what we respond to has as much to do with our limbic brain as our neo- cortex, perhaps more.


We might shake our heads over those who act in a self-limiting or cognitively dissonant manner, or we might dismiss their illogic or lack of critical examination and we’d be making a fundamental mistake in our own appreciation of the power of stories. Stories, if you will forgive the pun, almost always trump facts. In part this is because facts—or what we sometime call truths, even in science and math can sometimes be squishy. There is a great deal that is unknown, and what we think we know to be true one day can change as new evidence is revealed. But that alone only opens the door to the power of a story just a crack. The real wedge is that we are prompted by that lizard brain of ours to link together observation and information that we acquire experientially and otherwise in a very rapid fashion finding patterns or linkages that may or may not be real. We do this because we had to in order to survive.


That flash of a moment action based on the synthesis of what may be seemingly random bits and pieces of data is what preserved us in a hostile environment and even today operates at a subconscious level in human life. And here’s the thing, when we are stressed—even a little, much less a lot by economic, political, social and health concerns we tend to rely even more on that reactive lizard processor to make sense of what is coming at us. Along comes a story-teller who calls him or her self Q spinning a yarn about how a lot of things aren’t what they seem to be and telling us our fears are well founded and for some people that is all it takes to kick into fight or flight mode. The same applies for any number of stories making their way around our world at millisecond speed via the net. We are locked and loaded, ready to buy in.


I chose an extreme example to illustrate the point, but in a less dramatic fashion story telling is behind most of our beliefs though not all —and much of it is more benign. I don’t want to bang the gavel on this topic however without suggesting what we might do to counter those stories that are intended to incite. In those early heady days when the study of psychology was gathering energy and our country was at war in Europe and Japan, the military began efforts to understand and wield what they hoped would be a powerful weapon. If this were a 1950 science fiction novel, I might describe this tool as mind control, but in a more contemporary context let’s just describe it as controlling the narrative.


There are many ways to do this but the two most effective are these: tell a better story; or change the direction of a story already being told. That is what countries and political actors do to distract, dis-inform, and destabilize in order to gain advantage . It costs little, requires few resources and leverages tools, platforms and trends that already exist. It is a nearly perfect weapon—though it isn’t mind control and does not work on everyone or all the time. Consider that in our most recent election, a story—not one told particularly well but told with persistence and by a lot of people who had and have a lot at stake has maintained traction against a mountain of real evidence to the contrary. We cannot combat this story with evidence and facts—we must instead steer it in a new direction.

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