Storytime

We're instinctive animals. We act in accordance to what we feel: anger, happiness, compassion, pain. Your body is an evolution-optimized "soft machine" whose actions can be traced and explained by specific emotions. 

You are cold? You get a blanket. The pain your nerves communicate to your brain prompts you to act and look for warmth. You're angry because somebody flipped you off on your commute to work? Your return the gesture, or even escalate by cutting him/her off at the first chance.  

Emotion begets actions. We are slaves to the whims of our feelings. Entire religions and eastern traditions are built around the concept of achieving control over what we feel and emote. Nobel prizes are given to those who invent new branches of knowledge which merge psychology and economics (“behavioral economics”), based on the idea that our emotions makes us act stupidly. 

This is evidently a huge blind spot in all of us. A vulnerability that's been exploited for centuries. Maybe even millennia. It makes us go crazy. Go into wars. Kill innocent people. Bankrupt banks in financial panics. Feed market bubbles. But also, fall in love. And help each other. And form allegiances --even with former enemies. And build nations.

The way that blind spot is exploited is the story (known these days as the narrative) --key to unlock, elicit, create, and manipulate human emotion. And consequently, human action. Behind every act prompted by a human feeling is a series of data points, facts, and events that we take in, process, and shape into a story to make sense of those points, facts and events. 

Stories guide and lead our lives. 

We can form those stories in our heads. Put "one plus one" together ourselves, craft a narrative and act in accordance to it. Like when you read and read and read info online trying to understand the true effect of wearing a mask to protect you from COVID until you form a cogent story that prompts you to act a certain way. And then you mask (or you don't). We all watch a video of a turtle with a straw stuck in its nostril and our hearts melt ("that poor little thing! we're polluting soo much!") and suddenly half the planet is avoiding plastic straws even though the "movement" came from 9 year old's bogus statistic, and it doesn't move the needle one bit to remove plastic from our oceans. We crave the satisfying causation of the story so much, we have to know the why behind the latest mass shooting. And we won’t let go until there’s a cogent narrative explaining the atrocious act (He was into white nationalism and felt threatened by immigrants! He was just fired and was bullied by his coworkers! He was radicalized online into jihad!).

But these stories --and this is the scariest thing in all of this-- can be crafted by someone else with the intention of highjacking influencing your actions. To get your money --or your vote. This wouldn't happen if we weren't such suckers for cogent, easy-to-grasp stories. The quintessential snake-oil salesman comes to mind. As long as there is something to be gained by planting a narrative into your head, somebody will construct one for you to consume, adopt, assimilate, make yours, and emotionally react. Hence the narrative's power. There's a reason the political right is sh*tting its proverbial pants over the 1619 project. It threatens to reconstruct and redefine the very origin story of the United States.

Storytelling is everywhere. In salesmanship. In book writing. In this very blog post. Marketing products/services is a storytelling act ("wear this Breitling to be a winner like Charlize Theron!"). As is investing ("electric transportation is the future! you're a fool not to bet the ranch on it!"). Economic booms (and busts) are also storytelling acts (which occur when assimilated and adopted by enough people). Central Banking is storytelling, too ("Don't worry, this inflation is just transitory!"). Stories get you hired. And married! ("marry me and you'll be happy because [blank]"). Countries themselves are built on national identities woven with stories churned out by "official" historians --stories so powerful, they literally raise armies. 

Good stories compel. Great ones impel. 

We are so vulnerable to stories, Hollywood made an entire industry out of it. Netflix and  Disney, too. But at least they're honest about it. The fakeness of their storytelling is front and center (the people on your screens are called actors, after all). And we will gladly part with our hard-earned cash in exchange for the opportunity to escape our narrative-ridden reality. It's a consensual act. You pay up to consume a story in exchange for the freedom to not feel compelled (nor impelled) to act in any certain way. 

Do you see the irony, too? We're so sick of getting bombarded 24/7 with narratives trying to subvert our will and influence our actions that we'll happily pay to be transported into an alternative reality built on fake storytelling to save ourselves from the storytelling lurking outside our bedrooms. You could even argue it was our vulnerability to be hypnotized by stories what saved us this pandemic. 

A well crafted story is no different than propaganda. And these days, it's everywhere. We're living an era of propaganda wars. When crafted by people with bad/selfish intentions, and adopted by enough of us, it can get catastrophic. Social Media followers is the new currency. The attention economy has warped financial incentives and caused politicians, celebrities, media companies, consumer companies (and everyone who wants to get ahead in life, really) to churn out narratives trying hook us up. The overload is deafening. Too much damn noise. And I think all of this is what's behind our constant feeling of dread. Figuring out the signal in the middle of this tug-of-war for your attention is next to impossible. And that's overwhelming. Unfortunately, no one is coming to the rescue (definitely not the government). It's only you and your common sense in this fight against misinformation, narratives and propaganda. 

And this, is the story I'm here to tell you.