The Power and Peril of Stories

Stories are how we relate to the world.

There’s a reason I usually wind up starting my blog posts with stories.  They make things relatable; they set the stage for the point I’m going to (attempt to?  hopefully? You tell me) make by providing a framework that people can latch onto for understanding.

Stories do the whole “show, don’t tell” thing we all learn about in English class.  (Heck, they’re a main reason for English class.)  They’re why we do story problems in math (and are usually the answer to “When am I ever going to use this?”).  They’re how we learn about other people and the world.

Humans are built to understand stories.  They’re a mnemonic, and a framework for understanding concepts, connections, context.  They take something out of our experience and sometimes even ability to understand, and make it so that we can grasp at least the essence of the issue and come away with a better understanding than we had before by relying on the sharing of someone else’s experience.

Consider the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Darmok”.

This episode is a perfect example of what I’m talking about.  It revolves around a culture that can only communicate by referencing shared cultural experiences!  They reference stories to get across the concepts that they’re trying to communicate, because stories can be excellent at that sort of thing.  There’s a reason moral lessons were couched in parables and fables: they take what can be a dry, abstract concept, and give it some life and meaning.

Also, referencing this episode is a perfect example of what I’m talking about.  I can trust that most of you have either seen the episode or have enough exposure to it through pop culture to know what I’m talking about.  Therefore, I can use it as a shared experience to illustrate the dry, abstract concept of “stories as explanation tools” in a way that people can (hopefully) intuitively grasp.

And it’s important to understand that I’m using a fairly broad definition for “stories” here.  Really, I’m talking not only about literally telling someone a story, but also about anything that relies on shared experience: metaphors and similes, references to shared experiences and knowledge, etc.  It’s a “story of your life” sense I’m going for here.

On the whole, this is probably a good thing, and there’s some real power to it when done right.

In the latest book of The Expanse (now a hit television show on Syfy!), Babylon’s Ashes, the main character undertakes an effort to film personal interactions with a certain group of humans to, in essence, humanize them to other groups of humans.  (I think this is a pretty minor spoiler.)  It’s easy to hate a group of people when you don’t know anyone in that group, and don’t really know anything about it.

We see the same thing in the real world, of course: people who change their mind about refugees once they actually interact with them, or people who are for a major deportation effort until it affects people close to home. There are studies suggesting that one of the best ways to change people’s minds about things like LGBTQ issues is simply to spend time with them.  And the same can go for racism: integrated classrooms can lead to more empathy and less racism.

When you get to know someone, it’s harder to hate them and what (you think) they represent.

On a lighter side, look at how invested we get in our fictional worlds, whether literary, televised, or otherwise.  We get emotionally involved with characters because we’ve shared their stories; we know who they are as people and what has shaped them to become who they are.  Fiction, done properly, can make people who don’t exist seem more real than people who exist that we don’t know.

This is the power of stories.

And with great power comes great responsibility.

Unfortunately, there are a couple ways that stories can use this power for ill, rather than for good.  (I’m reluctant to say “evil”, and thankfully I managed to come up with an alternative for “for bad”, which sounds like the writing of a six-year-old.)  One is passive, while the other is active.

The passive version is simply the reverse of what stories can do: we can get so focused on what we do know that we lose sight of what we don’t.  We cling to the fragments of stories that we do know, without recognizing that there might be a larger story we should know.  Or we are simply blind to the fact that we don’t know anything about something, simply because we don’t have any kind of story for it.  As Donald Rumsfeld once termed it, these are the “unknown unknowns”: we don’t even realize what we don’t know.

So what’s the answer?  Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in The Black Swan, coins the term “antilibrary”.  He suggests that what you don’t know is far more valuable than what you do know, and so that therefore your library should be filled with books you haven’t read.  This “antilibrary” can then both be a research tool, and a reminder that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.  (And it's also an excuse to buy a lot of books.)

Obviously, not everyone can, or wants to, have a giant library full of books they’ve never read.  (I don't understand these people.)  Nevertheless, some sort of reminder of just how much we don’t know could be useful in keeping us from jumping to conclusions.

The active version is that stories can (sometimes deliberately) obscure, mislead or deceive, precisely because they can be so persuasive.

Political campaigns, for example, both elective and legislative, thrive on this.  Find a person to be the poster child for the position you’re taking, and use their story as a demonstration.  Or make up a story.  This works even (better) if the story is in no way representative of the actual issue.

This, to me, is the true danger in our reliance on stories.  Life is complicated, and messy, and complex.  Stories can make things easier to understand, yes, but at the cost of simplifying, of losing context and key information.  Stories can provide examples of aspects of a concept, but they can rarely encompass the entire concept.  In a phrase I’ve always enjoyed, the plural of anecdote is not data.  Put another way, stories are not a lossless compression algorithm.

And, as we discussed before, when you’re reliant on stories, it’s easy to lose sight of what you don’t know.  It’s easy to think that the stories you know are all there is to know, or at least all you need to know.

That’s why the stories spun by political campaigns can be so successful.  Frame the issue using stories, and people forget about or don’t realize everything that’s left out or non-representative.  Use the active to leverage the passive.

I noted at the beginning that my blog posts tend to start off with a story.  The flip side is that the endings rarely include much in the way of stories, however you define them; that’s essentially limited to self-references to earlier discussions for illustration.  The reason for that is, once again, that stories only get you so far.  At some point you have to drop the stories and simply start laying out information to make your point.  It may be dry, it may be abstract, but it’s the only way not to make sure the key information isn’t lost in translation.

I’m trying to skirt anything overtly political here (that’s going to come later), so I’ll just close with this.  Stories are important for learning and understanding basics, but they’re terrible for learning and understanding in-depth.  And that ability to go in-depth, to collate, organize and understand actual and significant amounts of data, is something that’s needed more and more while being managed less and less.  That needs to change, and quickly.