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teslaSomething that went up on Making Light recently made me think more about how people use stories. A couple of conversations at Fourth Street this weekend brought these thoughts back:
We live in a world in which stories are much more powerful than facts. People’s choices about what to believe are made almost wholly on the basis of which narratives are most compelling and which are most often repeated.
If you would succeed in business you must show a strong aptitude in selling the job you’ve done. If you’re good enough at this, it doesn’t even matter whether you did the job well in the first place. (If you’re not good at this you’d better hope that someone cares enough about your success to do it for you.) And what is a sales pitch but a story? “If you hire me I’ll make you successful.” It works the same in the workplace and in marketing.
It can be fairly said that I hate advertising with a passion. One of the things I hate most is its bizarre relationship with the truth: “More models over 30mpg than Honda or Acura.” Well, okay, but so what? I don’t want to buy six different cars, I want to buy one car*. What do I care about any of the models other than the one I buy? I know that this company wants to be seen as an environmental leader, but let us not forget that it’s a goddamn car company.
Everything you hear on television is a lie designed to make you buy something, a lie designed to make you agree with someone’s point of view, a fiction designed to make a plot plausible, or a nature program. If you don’t believe that, check to make sure that you include “half-truth” in your definition of “lie” and try again.**
And guess what? They’re told as stories: if you buy this you’ll be sexy; this person knows all about medicine so it makes sense that he’s a good hypochondriac; everyone who believes in legal protection for the accused wants the terrorists to win; everyone who doesn’t think we need to reduce fossil fuel use is denying proven science.
The trouble is that the universe doesn’t work that way. Evolution, for example, isn’t a narrative flow; it’s a bunch of chemicals bumbling around in semi-random fashion until something happens. The result is no better or worse or more meaningful than what came before, except perhaps in the strict sense of “fitness for viable reproduction” that natural selection implies.
Even when it would be meaningful to put some kind of narrative around a situation, the narrative would be so massively complex that it would lose the snappiness that confers so much power to our most valued stories: “We have reason to believe that the mean temperature of the earth, as measured in more than half of a random distribution of locations around the globe is, on the whole, increasing more rapidly than previous models that did not account for human-related atmospheric change had predicted…”
Still awake? Good. Not as catchy as, “global warming is happening, doofus,” is it? Not even as catchy as, “global warming is a scare tactic created by commie tree huggers.” How many people who do or don’t “believe in” global warming can actually tell you what they mean by the phrase, and cite the evidence relevant to their conclusion?
We are so constantly bombarded by information that using stories to simplify it makes sense if - and this caveat is gigantic - you trust your sources.
Whom do you trust?
*Actually I don’t.
**And now I’m doing it: I’m sure that there are some things on TV that are true. I’m equally sure that they’re well under the 10% of content predicted by Sturgeon’s law, which probably doesn’t apply here anyway.
We live in a world in which stories are much more powerful than facts. People’s choices about what to believe are made almost wholly on the basis of which narratives are most compelling and which are most often repeated.
If you would succeed in business you must show a strong aptitude in selling the job you’ve done. If you’re good enough at this, it doesn’t even matter whether you did the job well in the first place. (If you’re not good at this you’d better hope that someone cares enough about your success to do it for you.) And what is a sales pitch but a story? “If you hire me I’ll make you successful.” It works the same in the workplace and in marketing.
It can be fairly said that I hate advertising with a passion. One of the things I hate most is its bizarre relationship with the truth: “More models over 30mpg than Honda or Acura.” Well, okay, but so what? I don’t want to buy six different cars, I want to buy one car*. What do I care about any of the models other than the one I buy? I know that this company wants to be seen as an environmental leader, but let us not forget that it’s a goddamn car company.
Everything you hear on television is a lie designed to make you buy something, a lie designed to make you agree with someone’s point of view, a fiction designed to make a plot plausible, or a nature program. If you don’t believe that, check to make sure that you include “half-truth” in your definition of “lie” and try again.**
And guess what? They’re told as stories: if you buy this you’ll be sexy; this person knows all about medicine so it makes sense that he’s a good hypochondriac; everyone who believes in legal protection for the accused wants the terrorists to win; everyone who doesn’t think we need to reduce fossil fuel use is denying proven science.
The trouble is that the universe doesn’t work that way. Evolution, for example, isn’t a narrative flow; it’s a bunch of chemicals bumbling around in semi-random fashion until something happens. The result is no better or worse or more meaningful than what came before, except perhaps in the strict sense of “fitness for viable reproduction” that natural selection implies.
Even when it would be meaningful to put some kind of narrative around a situation, the narrative would be so massively complex that it would lose the snappiness that confers so much power to our most valued stories: “We have reason to believe that the mean temperature of the earth, as measured in more than half of a random distribution of locations around the globe is, on the whole, increasing more rapidly than previous models that did not account for human-related atmospheric change had predicted…”
Still awake? Good. Not as catchy as, “global warming is happening, doofus,” is it? Not even as catchy as, “global warming is a scare tactic created by commie tree huggers.” How many people who do or don’t “believe in” global warming can actually tell you what they mean by the phrase, and cite the evidence relevant to their conclusion?
We are so constantly bombarded by information that using stories to simplify it makes sense if - and this caveat is gigantic - you trust your sources.
Whom do you trust?
*Actually I don’t.
**And now I’m doing it: I’m sure that there are some things on TV that are true. I’m equally sure that they’re well under the 10% of content predicted by Sturgeon’s law, which probably doesn’t apply here anyway.
