What To Do When the Disease Is the Cure
Solving competing realities in ‘The Story Paradox: How Our Love of Storytelling Builds Societies and Tears Them Down’
Solving competing realities in ‘The Story Paradox: How Our Love of Storytelling Builds Societies and Tears Them Down’
Facts are increasingly useless in bridging communication gaps. And empathy appears to be sliding from interpersonal engagement. So many of us look to the power of stories to make better connections.
In stories, we find hope and redemption. The notion that better stories can do the work of facts when it comes to convincing difficult people is not only tempting, but it feels right. After all, stories connect with us in a more personal way than, say, the Periodic Table. Stories make us more empathetic. They are emotionally redemptive.
Or so we’d like to believe.
The Story Paradox opens with the author, Jonathan Gottschall enjoying a tall bourbon at a bar, observing the patrons and making notes when he is struck by the truth of his story.
Not the thesis, which by that time must have been well established and the research near completed, but the truth that he had happened upon during that work. It came like a flash, the way all solutions to riddles do, not so much the final answer, but the way forward that will unlock the puzzle.
Faced with the truth of The Story Paradox, a lesser person might have decided to keep drinking. Instead, Gottschall wrote the word, “Sway” on the napkin he’d been using for notes and went on to produce as insightful a work on our culture as we have any right to expect.
The nonfiction book clips along like a thriller, drawing the reader in even as they know they very well may be the villain rather than the protagonist. This makes the book’s point all the more compelling if deeply disturbing.
“Some will rob you with a six-gun and some with a fountain pen”
“You will never see an outlaw drive a family from their home.” — ‘Pretty Boy Floyd’ by Woody Guthrie
The premise is simple, we are storytelling beings compelled more by narrative than almost any other stimulus. When we communicate we want people to accept us, to be swayed closer to our worldview than to somebody else’s.
In subtle ways we’re trying to build alliances among and between our small social circles and nothing penetrates better than a story people connect with.
The first of my own stories the book called to mind was the time I realized the Woody Guthrie song “Pretty Boy Floyd” was based on a bald-faced lie. The song portrays the brutish gangster as a Robinhood figure, driven to crime by a brutal lawman who insulted his wife.
It is a complete fabrication, but in its telling Woody gets to sing the iconic lines: “Some will rob you with a six-gun and some with a fountain pen” and “You will never see an outlaw drive a family from their home.”
An Insight Into The Story
The point of the story wasn’t to whitewash a murderer so much as to indict the real enemies, the East Coast bankers and the greed they engender. The unfortunate plot device was to establish an alternative origin story for a notorious killer.
To say Floyd was motivated by the same craven instincts as the bankers would undermine the narrative, so Guthrie chose to lie. Of course, you can’t really “lie” in a story. The story is the story, and that is where things can get a little tricky.
Even though it made sense then as it does now to wonder whether the bigger crimes are the legal ones, it was one of the first times I understood Plato’s motivation to argue that poetry should be abolished.
If doing away with poetry isn’t the most shocking aspect of his plan for a totalitarian utopia in The Republic, it is right up there with eugenics and holding women and children in common.
They are shocking claims from a person we want to say was enlightened, but now as we face another long winter and possibly a new culture of disease, the notion of shutting up liars seems much more appealing than it did in, say, 2015.
Plato understood the power stories held, which is why his own work was in story rather than in treatise form. But he also understood that stories can degrade as well as enhance human perspective.
As with the notion of “Sway” it is a problem Gottschall returns to regularly, biting off a piece and chewing over it with care before advancing the main idea. More importantly, it was how he swayed me as a reader.
The promise of The Republic, this notion that only people committed to advancing the ideal state should be allowed to run it, is so enticing until you consider the dark side.
The Reader’s Take
What bothers Plato, and Gottschall (and me) is that narrative bypasses reason. As belief becomes the hammer under which reality shatters, it seems clearer that we don’t need one more fact. I’ve come to think of facts as pool noodles that people bonk one another with. What we require is empathy, or that was my glib perception before.
Gottschall asks a simple question ostensibly about literature that does some real damage to the notion that boosting empathy is some sort of magic bullet:
How do we cultivate empathy in fictional characters?
In almost every case, we spark empathy with a character when we see their narrative conflict as our own. The protagonist and the anti-hero alike need a villain against whom to strive. It is their striving against the “them” that stirs our empathy. Villains are flat characters by definition. They don’t require our empathy, only our righteous schadenfreude at their inevitable comeuppance.
While Gottschall feints toward the discussion of whether or not free will is real before (wisely) abandoning it as secondary as well as a little too divisive, he uses the mention to make a larger point villain.
While it is pleasant to think that we, being morally superior, would have resisted being Nazis if we were born German in the 1930s, the hard truth is almost all of us would have not only gone along but done it with the moral certainty with which we condemn them today.
In other words, “There but for the grace of God go I” is something we might not take seriously enough.
The thing is, the storyteller decides who the villains are, and the better they are at it, the more compelling their story. From there, it isn’t too great a leap to realize that we want to be on the storyteller’s side.
We want to believe as they do, and when they fail to come through we take it as a personal affront. Either way, we’re invested in every story and to that end allow our emotions (and through them, our worldview) to be manipulated.
“We’d like to think persuasion could be reliably accomplished simply by producing better and truer information. But persuasion isn’t the same as instruction — as taking a blank slate and filling it up,” Gottschall writes.
Throughout the work, Gottschall recounts stories and tears them apart from multiple perspectives to bring us along. The stories are from almost every political and ethical perspective.
In turning them inside out he doesn’t undo them so much as hold them up to the cold light of their own reason, which is way worse, or at least more revealing.
When he recounts the January 6 insurrection from the perspective of the people who genuinely believed they were saving their country from an unfair and illegal election, there is no snark or hyperbole.
The hardest thing to accept is that people really believe. It is so much easier to dismiss them as kooks or idiots than to imagine they truly accept a story counter to our own.
“Our own” is another problem from which Gottschall refuses to retreat. This isn’t a great time to be a conservative in academics. He provides numbers to back up the intuitive fact that college professors skew far more liberal than can provide for a rounded worldview.
Worse, liberal centrists may also be a dying breed as the kind of radical questions a person can investigate on-campus — questions about race and gender — drift toward taboo while moral certainty grips the left in a way liberals like to pretend can only happen on the religious right.
“The more consensus reality dissolves, the more we’re living in a de facto storyland,” Gottschall writes.
Final Thoughts
What makes The Story Paradox so compelling is that, rather than provide you facts upon which to skewer your intellectual opposites, it is a challenge for us all to review our own stories and the way we tell them.
It’s a challenge that has nothing to do with political bent so much as with the reader’s belief in the power of stories, and whoever approaches it honestly may be sadder and wiser, but hopefully not too much so.
The problem isn’t intractable, but it’s not a simple fix. Mass cultural change rarely is. Historically speaking totalitarianism tends to win out. It is the most effective, adopted form of government in the history of our species.
The challenge is to figure out how much we’re willing to change our own beliefs and approaches to narrative and through it, interpersonal relationships.
The Story Paradox: How Our Love of Storytelling Builds Societies and Tears them Down from Basic Books Press is available for pre-order now and will go on sale in November.
Tony Russo is a journalist and author of “Dragged Into the Light: Truthers, Reptilians, Super Soldiers, and Death Inside an Online Cult.” Subscribe to his Bagel Manifesto here.
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