The power of stories
First, I should say this post is unfinished, because every time I tried to finish it another idea insisted on being added or expanded (see, for example, the bullshit asymmetry principle or the two weeks I spent reading the Science of the Discworld 2 to think about narrativium. I’ve now given up on putting together anything with much structure or sense; my thoughts here are scrappy and a bit disjointed, but I hope they start less-scrappy and more-jointed ideas for you.
Now, on with the actual post.
I’m not sure who first said it – I first heard it from Desmond Morris – but it’s been said that what makes humans distinct from other animals is not our use of tools, or our language, but the fact that we tell each other stories. We are the storytelling ape.
Stories are how we pass down knowledge, how we see our place in the world, how we understand the social structures we’re born into.
However, this huge usefulness of stories is partly counterbalanced by some dangers. We’re exposed to stories perhaps more than ever before. And the stories that we persist in telling are – by definition – transmissible, and have an effect on behaviour. They’ve evolved to be super-spreaders.
Here are some ways that perhaps stories can be dangerous:
Everything will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.
I had a friend once (once – hah!) who became obsessed with a woman. She went out with him a few times and then didn’t want to see him any more. He became her stalker and needed to be warned off by the police. But throughout, he couldn’t understand why he couldn’t Get The Girl because it was True Love – he’d been told hundreds and hundreds of stories since he was a tiny child where True Love prevailed despite hardships and trials.
(True Love: another story that’s destroyed lives because people believe it’s real – it’s not. (NB: link NSFW). How is love at first sight feted as the only model of love, rather than celebrating two people in their full faculties joining their lives together with complete awareness of their strengths and weaknesses – knowing what about your partner is going to drive you crazy in ten years and choosing it anyway?)
See also the grand romantic gesture. It’s not uncommon to hear, ‘I don’t want to give them another chance, but they declared their love for me in front of their family / turned up outside my house (after stalking me on Facebook) / bought me some flowers and that’s a BIG DEAL for them’.
In 2016, more than a quarter of young adult and children’s books featured characters of color, compared to just 10 percent in 2013. There’s a catch, though. Most of the authors are white… the job of a sensitivity reader is first and foremost to improve the literary quality of a book by steering the author away from one-dimensional portraits and clichés.
If we understand the world through stories, it would also make sense that we learn to deal with people through those stories. E.g. if all you see of Chinese people is Fu Manchu or kung fu films, then this may set your expectations of how they behave or should be treated. Or if you don’t see stories that centre the inner life of other people around you (e.g. women) then you may not expect these people to have an inner life at all.
(Side note, I’m not yet over the huge difference in how Harley Quinn’s portrayed between Suicide Squad and Birds of Prey. End of side note.)
And this is before we get into the harmful effects of the physical portrayal of good and bad characters.
“Has it ever occurred to you, Wally, that the process that creates this boredom that we see in the world now may very well be a self-perpetuating, unconscious form of brainwashing, created by a world totalitarian government based on money, and that all of this is much more dangerous than one thinks? And it’s not just a question of individual survival Wally, but that somebody who’s bored is asleep, and somebody who’s asleep will not say no.”
My Dinner with Andre
So many films are based on conspiracy theories – and darn it, in films, the consipracy theory is almost always true. (I haven’t actually seen My Dinner with Andre – please feel free to substiute another quote if that one doesn’t work.) In films, the conspiracy theorist is a plucky scientist / a lay-person who’s been studying the area for years, ignored by everyone in power. But then, at the last minute, they’re proved right!
(This trope did give rise to a T-shirt that I really need to buy sometime.)
And of course, conspiracy theories are designed to spread (see previous meme comments).
Things Lucy Maud Montgomery lied to me about: that after an ugly childhood and gawky adolescence, I would blossom into a legendary beauty, the type of which that would awe strangers and be best described as “lissome” and “shining,”
Finally, we measure the success or failure of our lives by how closely they follow one of the basic plots. Our expectations of how our life should be are heavily influenced by a profound belief that I’m sure we all have, that we’re the lead characters in our own story, and therefore we deserve success/redemption.
| Plot | We learn that… | In the real world… |
| Overcoming the monster | You can beat a monster; if you fail, try again… | …but monsters in the real world are unlikely to be beaten no matter how much you try |
| Rags to riches | If you work hard you’ll earn happiness… | …and let’s ignore the huge role personal circumstances play in achieving happiness and wealth |
| The Quest | Don’t give up - you’ll find what you’re looking for… | …but if you don’t, you can achieve happiness in other ways that you never would have thought to seek |
| Voyage and return | Wandering aimlessly around and having adventures will make you wiser… | …hang on a minute, this one might be true. Carry on, nothing to see here. Better not mix this with a rags to riches story, though: that won’t work out well for you at all |
| Comedy | If you’re accused of sleeping with someone the night before your wedding, the only acceptable thing to do is die on the spot | …for goodness sake just explain yourself to people, it’ll save time |
| Tragedy | Bad people will fail | See ‘overcoming the monster’. Nope. And some people fail who don’t deserve it |
| Rebirth | You can be a prat to people, because being reborn will fix everything… | …there’s no obligation to forgive people just because they ask and seem to have changed |
When someone dies, we take all our memories of them – the endless complexities of a whole person and a whole life’s experience – the feel of her hands, the shape of her smile, the way you felt when she was with you – and we distill those memories into the quintessence of that person – into her mythology. In this way, we’ll distill all our memories of my mother into her mythology – into the stories that we’ll tell about her; into the thoughts we’ll turn to when we miss her. And each of us will bring our own memories – no one of us owns her story. We will each create a different facet of her legacy.
Me, at my mother’s funeral
None of this is to say that stories are bad – stories are needed for survival; they’re antibiotics, not cocaine. We still learn from stories, we still identify with other people through stories, we still grieve through stories. But, like antibiotics, stories need to be used with care.