The Stories Hypothesis, Part V.
Stories, Like Armies, Also Fight For Our Hearts And Minds
Think of stories as dinosaurs, squared off against each other. The one that kills the other is told in perpetuity.
If you have a competing story, you can either tell a better, simpler story, or you can attack the storyteller. Start with attacking the storyteller. Since most people vest themselves in one big story about their own identity, who they are, and what they feel is right and wrong, you can always defeat a competing story by simply putting into question the basic story about the storyteller. A competing story questions the motives, character, and beliefs of the storyteller. A competing story will implicate the storyteller’s integrity in previous stories they have told. Also using a simple principle like simple stories trump complex stories, it is easy to create mistrust of the storyteller.
A Harvard Foreign Policy expert says the United States brought on Arab anger over Israel and that led to 9/11. One would think a Harvard graduate would be smart and one with actual foreign policy expertise would know the truth.
But that’s not the story we want to hear.
So a competing story was told to undermine the authority of the professor.
The conservative created a new story; a smear and they call this story the East Coast Ivy- Leaguer.
The “East Coast Ivy-Leaguer” is a character in popular conservative stories. The story goes something like this: The East Coast Ivy-Leaguers are people who think about complex issues like Evolution and the age of the Universe. Because what they think about is hard to grasp, they may not be right. In fact, the whole scientific approach to the world often calls itself into question with new theories. So who knows what’s right? Most political decisions are much easier negotiated with simpler propositions, or stories easier to swallow. So a really smart person might be able to convince you that we come from monkeys or that the world is so old it’s actually billions of years old, or the US is somehow responsible for what happened to us on 9/11. That’s only if you are willing to listen to their own twisted logic that comes from effete universities. Translation: their stories are so complex it is almost impossible to prove them in the context of a regular conversation. So a simpler story, a sound-byte story will rule.
Take for example the difficulty John Kerry had fighting for the US in Vietnam only to feel betrayed because his own government lied to him. This is an easy to understand story. Many Vietnam veterans felt betrayed when they learned there was no Gulf of Tonkin incident. Many felt betrayed when they had to fight to get their medical benefits, or have the US recognize its role in injuring them with Agent Orange. They felt, and rightfully so, they were killing people who’s only crime was that they believed on different political theories. They felt they were killing people who were caught in the crossfire of war only politicians wanted.
So the story about John Kerry is this: He served in the United States Navy and is a decorated veteran. He grew disaffected by the machinations of politicians that ended up with the lives and health of millions. Similarly, he felt he was misled into voting for the Iraq war. Now that he knows more he has changed his mind. All of this is perfectly reasonable.
However, it violates one of the foundations for storytelling.
Keep it simple.
Conservatives retell it this way: “John Kerry is a flip-flopper. He committed treason. He wasn’t actually wounded.”
See? It’s simple. About the only part of the story they couldn’t smear him for was that he served at all. That said, they called into question whether or not he was wounded. But every single thing else about him you can attack with a story.
Then there is a smaller story that becomes one of the interlocking stories Conservatives use to muddle the stories of their enemies. This story is about East coast Ivy-Leaguers that think too much until they get confused. “They believe in global warming, they believe Saddam never had WMDs. They question Jesus, God as well, morality, and the legality of invading Iraq. Their stories are tortuous routes of thinking that avoid simple straightforward stories. They think it’s OK for Gays to marry, and anyone with eyes can see that this is obviously impossible. Audiences tune into cable news outlets because they make all of this so much easier to understand without so much critical thinking.” Cable news stations as a matter of record, question the integrity of the people who tell stories the stations are wont to disbelieve. One can see how this is a much easier story to comprehend than the inner conflicts of a man. Telling it restores the belief in its audience’s other stories. “Good people are patriotic and God fearing and listen to common sense. Good red -blooded Americans never question the reasons for war. It’s America right or wrong.”
If you don’t vest yourself in one of the stories, you may vest yourself in the other.
Bill Clinton had an affair. However, Newt Gingrich had an affair while he was pursuing Bill Clinton. Did that matter? No, because Clinton’s enemies were doing all the right things in the science of storytelling. They were telling their own stories, repeating them, and supporting them with smaller stories. They were telling stories that supported the stories they already believed. Facts, like the hypocrisy of an adulterer going after an adulterer were not really a part of the mainstream narrative. They were denigrating Bill Clinton with stories about him that were largely of their own making. They were smearing the chief storyteller and this is how they turned the tide on a President who was not in any way a Liberal and hardly a Democrat at that.
Dan Rather is a great journalist and defined the era of responsible journalism that now barely exists. Conservatives fed him a false lead on a story he was pursuing. The story he was pursuing would have taken down their biggest storyteller. Then when Rather was caught reporting the false lead, conservatives simply repeated the story about Dan Rather telling a false story. The pressure of the story against him was enough to unseat him.
It made little difference whether he had pursued this flawed lead or not. Eventually the conservative movement would have moved him off his mark simply by maintaining that he had a liberal bias. The liberal bias story had a halo effect that brought into question all of the programming of that channel. The liberal bias so many claim exists in the news media is an ephemeral lie. Yes MSNBC purports to be s liberal counterbalance to Fox News. But overall the news is neither liberal nor conservative. Overall it is simply vacuous, devoid of the depth of real stories.
Recently we learned that the Governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, the darling of the conservative movement, used his influence to block traffic out of a political rival’s neighborhoods. This was purportedly retribution for an unfaithful supporter. Just reading from Salon, we can see the truth is not the issue, it is the story itself. Read what Michael Steele, who was chairman of the Republican National Committee said: “It plays itself out in a variety of ways, sometimes aided by the main target, sometimes by subordinates or opposition camps. There’s a tendency to reach that turning point so that the knives come out and the new narrative begins.”
He is talking not about whether Christie did this or not, but the robustness of the story about it. The facts are frangible. The story is like a vampire, it might actually be dead, but it rises and strikes nonetheless.
“Since this past November, you have seen the slow and steady drumbeat of degradation,” Steele says. “It’s the media’s and the Democrats’ effort to take down that which they summarily have built up and to begin to carve into bite-size chunks a narrative that will unfold itself over the next year in preparation for the 2016 cycle.”
The Wikileaks documents expose a level of perfidy in diplomacy around the world and in particular, double dealing on the part of the United States. Before a single domino fell in the aftermath, the US government told a story of Americans who lost their lives as a result. Julian Assange, the purveyor, was a traitor, a weird loner, a rapist, a ne’er do well who cared not for anything but drawing attention to himself. More stories sprung up about how hard this was making diplomacy for the US, and how it hurt our power in the world.
Of course, the story itself was not about the content of the documents, simply the fallout. The journalism involved, the stories that US government officials lied and cheated and stole were hardly told. In time, the public had turned against this man who once would have been nominated for an award in journalism.
Right now we are witnessing a monstrous battle of stories, whether Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange and Edward Snowden are heroes or traitors. If your country commits a crime, and you report it, are you a traitor? Well storytellers on the government’s side know that if we vilify these people for simply revealing the truth then the government wins. Their goals are to stop the story at the part where they revealed classified information. In this case, it feels like the Government’s story is starting to sound like an older boring story: they technically committed a crime. The journalists have to keep reminding people, that their own mail and phone calls have been compromised. The pull of the emotion of both stories is strong, but I believe history (from the word ‘story’) will paint these three as heroes long after the story of their treachery.
While stories are impervious to facts, they are not impervious to other stories. Rarely does a single salient contradictory piece of evidence ever kill a story. There are people who have been convicted and executed even though their DNA did not match the forensic DNA used to convict them with. This is because a good prosecutor knows that it is not the facts of the case that matter so much as the story about the plaintiff and the defendant. It doesn’t matter as much who did what as which story resonated with the jury.
This is why courtrooms are such fertile territory for dramas. Building a story about someone is more important than actual evidence.
Science itself is rife with examples of aberrant pieces of evidence that cannot be accounted for; yet the prevailing story, the theory, is accepted nonetheless.
Think about Newton and his laws of motion. This is a story told in equations. The story is true. Newton believed that you could predict where a billiard ball would land depending on where the ball is hit, the angle of deflection, and the force applied and so forth. In a lot of ways this is what Newton thought the world looked like. If you could calculate the initial state of the universe, or the state of the universe as it is in now, you could predict the shape of the universe in the future.
Along comes a bigger story. Not one, but two in fact. Newtonian mechanics wasn’t disproven by Relativity or Quantum Theory. The same tables and calculations used in ballistics that were used in firing artillery in World War I are still used today. So Newtonian mechanics is a correct theory. It is literally consumed by bigger stories.
Relativity reframed Newtonian Mechanics as a special case inside a much bigger story. Newton’s laws really apply at slow speeds. When a billiard ball, or anything for that matter moves, it’s mass increases. The amount is negligible at the slow speeds we move. However if a billiard ball moved across the table fast enough, its mass would increase and it’s volume decrease and so it would not behave like a regular billiard ball at all. Most of the things in the world, particles, travel at immense speeds.
Quantum Theory says you can’t know what a particle is doing or where it is at the same time. So basically you can’t really know the initial state of even a single particle, or a billiard ball in this case.
So Newton’s story was subsumed under bigger stories, stories that competed for minds and still do. The battle between the story of Quantum Theory and the story of Relativity is still being played out. There is a battle between String theory scientists and the M-theory cosmologists. Right now String Theory is losing badly after years in ascendancy. Why? Because String Theory violates the principle that a simpler story trumps a complex one. String theory is so mathematically complicated it stumps many scientists. It is filled with to many operations that have to be talked through to understand. This of course is itself a gross over simplification, but one explained to me by a cosmologist. Occam’s Razor teaches us that the simplest hypothesis is the closest to the correct answer. It’s an odd thing and probably not related at all to scientific facts. However Occam’s Razor is telling us that a hypothesis is correct or not depending on its simplicity. Can we therefore say the arcane equations scribbled across grease boards are in fact the stories? Was Relativity correct and Newtonian Mechanics wrong? No. We still do calculations for Newtonian mechanics. But the deeper you do into the nature of the world, the story that Newton told cannot describe the universe we see like the story told by Einstein
This whole part of the principle can be taught this way. George W. Bush was a pretty good governor of Texas and when he approached the presidency, Democrats began to tell stories about how uneducated he was and how inarticulate he was and how he would obviously be in over his head as president. It didn’t help that he was somewhat inarticulate and he often inadvertently played into this story line himself. By the end of his second term, he was largely considered one of the least educated of the Presidents. His pedigree would indicate otherwise, but it is the story that prevails, not the facts.
You can kill a story by simply telling a better one (contradictory) enough times.
Think about how easy it was to turn John Kerry’s correct thinking into a major personality flaw. Kerry had more information after he voted to approve budgeting for Iraq. He then believed it was a bad idea and he was regretful.
This is a perfectly reasonable thing to do in the face of new information. By simply telling his story in a simple and entertaining way was to call him a flip flopper. “He was for it before he was against it.” They made this story simple and gave it good sound bytes and plenty of repeating. Eventually it trumped the actual facts about a decorated Navy combat veteran.
A man travels across the world into a jungle at the behest of his government and kills people. He is injured in the act of doing this. He is given awards. Today people doubt all of this. Because of course, a better story showed up. One that tied together Kerry’s contradictory past. A simpler one. A more emotionally satisfying one.
In a battle for the truth, the story wins out.
