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It’s the stories - they’ve gotten out of their cage and they’re running around killing us!
Something 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.
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Check out George Lakoff's latest. (I caught him on book tour a couple of weeks ago. Makes your brain explode, in a good way.)
Stories - Part 1
First of all, it seems reasonable that our preference for story has some basis behind it. One would expect that a simple explanation would be easier to remember than a story, however, the plethora of myths about the changing of the seasons - being far more complex than the concept that it gets hot in the summer and cold in the winter - would seem to counter that. Perhaps stories, with their drama and comedy, with their various characters and lessons learned, are stored in our brains better than simple facts. Perhaps there is something to the mechanics of story, the pacing, the pattern, the metaphor that causes them to bypass our perceptual filters and come through will an increased vivacity. Perhaps, evolutionarily, there was a point in history where people who were good storytellers were able to entertain the tribe during the unproductive night time. If these people were valued and rewarded with higher social status, they would have had more opportunity to spread their genes, effectively coding a preference for story in our genome. (In other words, writers should get laid more often, perhaps there should be a study. ;) This is, of course, utter conjecture.
Another concept that I've been working on since college is that of "fact" and how most people seem to assume that facts are true or false. Since all the scientific method does is to test hypotheses, and it only does that based on how well the experiment is constructed, it seems me that the truth of a fact is somewhat mutable, either within the boundaries of standard deviation or quantum probabilities. Moreover, science has an interesting history of mostly incorrect conclusions (at least, that's how it looks right now).
In many ways, I think of "fact" as I think of "law". There are human laws and natural Laws. Human laws can be ignored if one chooses to do so, but the Laws of Physics, with all their scary capitalization, cannot be circumvented with impunity... mostly. In certain cases, quantum phenomena can be observed that make no classical sense and cannot be reproduced at a larger scale. To me, this means that either the world is a much weirder place than we think, or we're more wrong than we think. In either case, it casts considerable doubt on "facts" and some doubt on "Facts".
[To be continued, due to LJ length limits]
Re: Stories - Part 1
Stories - Part 2
One rule that I use is that anyone or any group that states a fact as an absolute is automatically to be distrusted (mostly). Basically, in my own life, I have had a disturbing tendency to be wrong a fair amount of the time. Since I certainly seem to think more than the average person (I may be biased here), it would make sense that my percentages for accuracy should be somewhat higher than average. This is deeply scary. Thus, statements such as "My god is the one true god" (contradicted in 1st or 2nd commandment by the way (numbers vary by type of Bible/Torah)), "If you eat enough vitamin C, you'll live forever", "Radium is the elixir of life", and "Iraq certainly has weapons of mass destruction" immediately put me on edge. I recognize that it's natural for humans to speak in terms of absolutes, and I certainly have been trying to temper my own tendency to do so. However, when it comes in the form of advertising you cannot directly challenge the speaker, which makes it easy for the one spouting absolutism to be viewed as an authority, and therefore all the more dangerous.
As an example, just the other day, the TV told me that Country Crock Margarine was healthy because they've added Omega 3s. Now, if my memory can be believed, in the recent past Country Crock was healthy because it wasn't butter... until it was discovered to have trans fats in it (which I'm guessing have been removed and replaced with the current "healthy substance"). So, back in the early "butter is evil" world, it was a fact that Country Crock was better. Now, in the "trans fats are evil" world, it is *still* a fact that Country Crock is better... than Country Crock. In situations like this, I get confused and consider other sources. One of these is my body, which says that butter tastes (and processes) better than Country Crock. Another is my brain, which tells me that people have been eating butter for a very long time and apparently haven't gone extinct, so it's probably OK. In other circumstances, I might trust an intelligent friend or associate as a check to my own thinking.
More seriously, I try to implicitly trust individuals unless they exhibit a pattern of behavior that makes me question their veracity. In contrast, I try to distrust groups of people (organizations, research studies, companies, etc), and will only develop trust for them if they exhibit a pattern of apparently NOT lying to me. The logic here, of course, is that it is generally not in a person's interest to lie generally. However, the more people involved in a lie, the more people might benefit and the more removed they are from me, so the probability of lies that are damaging to me increases. This is not perfect, of course, as it puts me in a perfect position to be taken advantage of by individuals, but since the alternative is living in a world where everyone is inherently untrustworthy, I prefer the happy world. In other words, I choose the ignorance to get the bliss, but being somewhat paranoid, it's a watchful ignorance.
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"The narrative" is related to but different from "the story". The former is a way of handling current and new information, where the latter places old information in context. Both are subjective, and neither could be completely objective.
The things that are true on tv are interrupted by the things that aren't.
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As we get bombarded by more and more content, the actual amount
of information--truthful or not--shrinks, until there is nothing
left but gloss.
Everything gets reduced to a meaningless sound bite.
This is more pronounced in marketing as they do research on what
works, and bombard us with carefully selected images and sounds
meant to work on an emotional level rather than a cognitive level.
Case in point, Bullseye Club using one of the worst Beatles songs
ever--constantly--in ads (Hello Goodbye -- Yuck!). But then I never
claimed to be a Beatles fan... Doesn't make me want to shop there,
but I guess it is a jingle meant to get stuck in people's heads
along with the Bulleye logo and red and white images.
What are the ads about? No idea.... It's all about Brand Brand Brand!
Sickening really.