The Tyranny of the Tale

In this week’s Camino a Ítaca a look at how narrative and storytelling can influence the way people think and even make them overlook facts. Click over to read the originally published piece in the HOY or read the English translation below. (PDF en castellano abajo)

If you heard the phrase ‘Having
been said and said and said’ or ‘Beyond seven mountains, beyond seven forests’
or ‘Once in the old days when tigers smoked’ it probably wouldn’t mean anything
to you. In fact, the phrase itself might not even make sense.

But if you change these
set phrases slightly to ‘once upon a time’, suddenly an entire world blossoms.
Our minds open up and instantly get ready for a cortisol (encouraging
attentiveness) and oxytocin (encouraging connection) boost. Upon hearing those
words, our instinctual pattern-seeking minds make themselves ready for a tale.

Story lulls. It pushes us
into the realm of imagination and it encourages the listener to overlook and
even ignore facts. Details are sometimes amplified and at times muted or erased
and apparent irrelevancies can be integrated or thinned.

As the writer Yuval Noah Harari has described it, “Homo
sapiens is a storytelling animal that thinks in stories rather than in
numbers or graphs, and believes that the universe itself works like a story,
replete with heroes and villains, conflicts and resolutions, climaxes and happy
endings.” In essence we are
persuaded more by story than by statistics; we recall facts, even if they are
dubious, longer and are more apt to believe them if they are embedded in
narrative.

The far right have
come to understand this human trait and now weave grotesque fictional tales
across the global political landscape. Truth no longer matters and political messages
are now couched in fables, complete with good and bad guys and epic battles
between biblical good and evil.

Faced with policy
failure or even a complete lack of policy in most cases, the far right have
adopted George Bush Jr’s political strategist’s infamous approach. Karl Rove
called it the Sheherazade strategy. A chimera that goes like this. When you
have nothing to say, and nothing to lose, start telling stories.

But not just any
story.

They create stories
so fabulous, so spellbinding and yet so untrue, that Sheherazade’s sheik, or in
our case, the voting public forgets all about the actual truth and sink into
the tale.

With stories, there
is no longer any need to bother with the truth. A look back to the recent
debate between Trump and a tired Biden highlights this. Trump has long been a
used snake oil salesman, a shyster and a con artist, but during the debate he
didn’t even pretend to bother with the truth. Fact checkers have shown that he
told a lie every ninety seconds during the debate. And as these lies were
camouflaged in story, his followers believe.

It’s a strategy that
has been adopted by the far right here in Spain and has led to their success in
entering regional governments like here in Extremadura and which may even lead
to a democratically elected Vichy 2.0 government in France tomorrow.

It is pointless for
democrats to fight fake facts, or true but cynically twisted facts, with other
facts. The new stories we need to tell are not just the corrections of fake
stories, they need to be new visions. Visions that create hope rather than the
distortions and lies on sale from the ultra right.