Danger Ahead: When Stories Trumps Fact

Danger Ahead: When Stories Trumps Fact
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I have always maintained that there are three things you have to know if you want to understand the world: Musicals, Shakespeare and Dickens. These three illuminate human behavior in all its best and worst ways, and those who don’t study them are, to paraphrase the popular trope about history, doomed to live them. The insidious tool employed in doing this is the most powerful means of manipulation and mind control ever invented: story.

Yes, you read that correctly. Story. From advertising to political campaigns to the culture at large, story is always more potent than fact in swaying belief and action. In my 2015 book, Funny Business, Harnessing the Power of Play to Give Your Business a Competitive Advantage, I looked at the many ways story has been used in advertising and brand marketing and how it can effectively obliterate objective truth in people’s minds. Even more, once a narrative is established and accepted as “truth,” it can be almost impossible to dislodge. Baby Boomers may recall the now-infamous sneaker advertising that asserted that PF Flyers made you “run faster and jump higher.” How many pairs of shoes were sold and how many hearts broken before this type of advertising was outlawed?

For children, narrative-based play is wholesome and necessary. Through the creation of stories, they try on new roles, project themselves into the future and, literally and figuratively, make themselves up. This play occurs within the context of a child’s home and culture, and narratives they create help children locate themselves as individuals within that culture.

For adults, story has didactic powers, providing insight into human behavior or in the case of myths, explaining seemingly inexplicable phenomena in accessible terms. I always use the example of the god Helios who was said to drive the sun across the sky behind a chariot every day. To a world without even rudimentary astronomy, such a story had a placative affect to people who might otherwise have been terrified of this occurrence. Similarly, the myth of Persephone sought to explain why the earth did not produce crops three months of the year. (She had to return to the underworld to be with Hades and so the earth would not produce when she was not there.) Every culture has these myths, and in the millennia before modern science they became the foundation of many belief systems.

Musicals, Shakespeare and Dickens are comparatively recent in the history of storytelling, and each has things to teach us. Like any literature, though, the imperative is to take away the lessons of fiction, to look beneath the narrative, find the deeper truths and apply them to life.

Let me give you just three quick examples. Dickens might have been writing about Donald J. Trump when he wrote Hard Times. Trump is Josiah Bounderby of Coketown, the self-made man whose legends of his own prowess, genius and success, created and promulgated by him, are impressive to be sure. His stories netted him wealth and status and gave him a platform from which he felt empowered to direct how others should live their lives. His central narrative was that he was thrown out of his house, lived in ditches and by dint of hard work and determination became the man he was. In reality, he was loved and coddled by parents who gave him every advantage. Yet his stories of overcoming hardship were widely embraced by those who believed that following his pronouncements, they, too, could rise above their lowly states. The false hopes Bounderby creates, the so-called lottery mentality is, as we learn from Beauty and the Beast a “tale as old as time.” One might think that Bounderby’s story is a cautionary tale about story and credulousness, as Dickens intended, and as the misery his calumnies creates may ruin some lives, but can’t be fully destroyed. They are undone by a stronger narrative, one expressed in the musical 1776. As the character John Dickinson says, “Don’t forget that most men with nothing would rather protect the possibility of becoming rich than face the reality of being poor.”

Is Hillary Clinton Lady Macbeth? Troll around the Internet, and you’ll find that particular theory. She is portrayed as the power hungry woman who will stop at nothing to achieve her political ends. Or, is she Henry V? Henry was a canny politician who knows a thing or two about image and how to use story to drive belief, just as Henry invoked the obscure Saint Crispin to rally his men to fight, at least in Shakespeare’s telling. Your beliefs—and actions—are controlled by whichever version of this story you accept as “truth.”

Musicals give us all sorts of lessons in “love, life, anguish, angst,” to cite Nine. Perhaps the most relevant and telling line from musical comedy that underscores the power of story, however, comes from Chicago. Lawyer Billy Flynn concocts a story for an admitted murderess Roxie Hart. (“I fired three warning shots. Into his head.”) Flynn, though is convinced that by the time he’s done spinning his tale, the jury will exonerate Roxie. Of his story, he says, “They’ll fall for it hook, line and sinker. Because it’s what they want.”

And therein lies the power of story to manipulate. Successful stories work because they play to the biases of the listener. Or, as Kermit puts it in The Muppet Movie, “Somebody thought of it, and someone believed it.” Storytelling requires both the teller and an audience that is willing to believe in the story.

In today’s world there is no shortage of storytellers, and there’s no shortage of people who want to believe, who are willing to seize onto the emotional value of a story and bend, or completely ignore, facts to fit the narrative. There are whole media organizations on the left and the right built on this premise, however much they may demur and claim to be balanced. (This is nothing new. Much of the media through history has been highly partisan. Nor did Shakespeare cast history in a way that might upset Queen Elizabeth.)

Perhaps story is an ancient survival mechanism. In an uncertain and unpredictable world, the certainty of story provides a level of security, illusory though it may be. Perhaps we as humans need that in order to get up every day and go about our business. That may be the reason that once stories take hold in our imaginations and realities, they are so hard to release—even when not supported by objective data, or proven false. Could we really live if we acknowledge the daily threat of a giant being about to crush us at the next fork in the path as in Into the Woods? Probably not. Yet, as the witch says in the same show, “Careful the tale you tell. That is the spell.”

If we are to thrive as a culture, if we are to have rational discourse, we must be willing to let go of stories that gratify our egos and be willing to deal with the world as we find it, not as we wish it were. That may mean coming up with a new definition of what “greatness” is—and a whole new set of narratives around that.

If we don’t do this, we risk waking up one day and saying like the Baker’s Wife in Into the Woods. “This is ridiculous. What am I doing here? I’m in the wrong story.”

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