Photo by Cederic Vandenberghe on Unsplash
“Who tells the story creates the world.”
~ Christopher Ryan, Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress
Storytelling, as an art, traces back to the beginning of our human origins. Starting with cave drawings it evolved to oral tellings and then, of course, to the written word.
Stories run the gamut from fairy tales, fables, parables, allegories, myths, legends, and folk tales. These ancient stories survive for thousands of years, traversing geography, time, and space to share their journeys, lessons, wisdom, and secrets.
Creation stories explain how we humans got here. Were we created from the navel of some great god? From a cosmic egg? Or did we come from nothing? Creation stories, bereft of scientific evidence, are meant to provide a reason for our existence and a direction for our lives. Some people know that these are merely stories that can offer a sense of grounding in an otherwise fathomless existence. Other people believe these stories to be literally true and turn their creation stories into religions. What is one person’s eager virgins waiting upon death is another person’s Divine birth from a virgin. Many creation myths come with a free toy at the bottom of the box: a code of ethics or a moral compass, in case you didn’t have one.
Cultural stories tell us why we are where we are. It is the story of our lineage—for a country, for people, for a family. Purportedly rooted in history, these are designed to give us a sense of purpose, meaning, and belonging. Oh, and a flag.
When we meet new people, we love to tell the story of our lives. Today, we often tell stories through pictures and images. We share “stories” on social media. Stories are passed down through family mottos, sayings, and inside jokes. Even Grandpa’s war stories give us a sense of the kind of genes we might have in our own DNA.
As we can already see, stories have many different uses: entertainment, healing, teaching, programming, brainwashing, or providing meaning, context, and purpose to our lives. They can help us remember where we came from and what matters to us, or they can be so whitewashed that they may as well be a fairy tale. The right story at the right time can help us determine what to do next in our lives, while another story makes us more fearful of going forward. Stories can be motivating, but they can also be made-up drivel designed to split us into good guys and bad guys. Self-justifying hogwash to act in ways that we would never otherwise consider. And manipulative, dangerous propaganda that can tear a country apart.
How can we know what is true and what is false? And maybe the bigger question: does it matter anymore?
True or False?
In our culture, we like simple, black-and-white answers. From this dichotomous viewpoint, a story must be either true or false, fiction or non-fiction.
We would quickly put ancient myths, legends, and fairy tales into the fictional category. But think again. Isn’t it interesting how these stories tend to speak to us in the here and now, no matter when and where they were first told? Isn’t it magical how reading an ancient myth can sometimes help us see the truth in our lives that much more clearly? How they can depict so many human archetypes at once that we’re bound to see ourselves in the story somewhere? Maybe there is more truth in these made-up stories than we initially think.
On the flip side, we’ve been told that the news is supposed to be true and that the storytellers—in this case, journalists—are the arbiters of truth. Yet, very few of us anymore have faith in these institutions — for good reason. How much, we ask ourselves every day, can the truth be “twisted,” or “spun” until it would be better labeled fiction?
Television and movies are technically fiction, but books like George Orwell’s 1984 or Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 seem to be able to tell the truth better than any newspaper could. If fiction books did not have the power to change minds and hearts, why would anyone seek to ban them? The truth has a way of coming out more succinctly through fiction than non-fiction.
“Reality TV” shows do not lift the curtain on real lives but are instead contrived, edited situations designed for maximum drama and emotion.
Meanwhile, fairy tales have a built-in “zoom-out” feature that gives us a larger, truer picture. They are neither a response nor a reflection of current events unfolding around us. Therefore, they can provide insight into current events in a way the zeitgeist cannot. In her book Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales, Marie-Louis von Franz says that a fairy tale “is not simply the tale of a personal experience,” and that they endure because they “fit the psyche of the whole collective.”
When I was a yoga teacher I taught the principle of Satya, or truthtelling. It seems like a simple code of conduct to abide by in one’s personal life. But it’s far more complicated in practice. We are always seeing the world through our particular lens. Just because something is true for us does not make it true for everyone.
In this sense, can anything anyone ever says truly be non-fiction? Can any piece of writing, book, documentary, or historical record be entirely free of objectivity, agendas, and perspectives? Maybe, like Goldilocks, we can worry a little less about finding truths that fit “just right” and pay a bit more attention to whose house we’re walking into in the first place.
Maybe we lament the fact that we don’t have more clarity and agreement about what is true and what is false anymore. Or perhaps we prefer a world in which we get to pick and choose our truths at will. Consider this quote from a 2017 New York Times article by Adam Kirsch:
“The problem with our “post-truth” politics is that a large share of the population has moved beyond true and false. They thrill precisely to the falsehood of a statement, because it shows that the speaker has the power to reshape reality in line with their own fantasies of self-righteous beleaguerment.”
As Kirsch shows, our relationship with stories is so much less about whether they are true or false and more about how they make us feel. This points to a larger interplay in our psyche of what is really happening when we tell and listen to stories. Like Ursula K. Le Guin said, “We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel… is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.”
So rather than thinking of stories in such binary terms as true or false, let us consider how stories shape and influence us.
In what way are we changed after reading a story? Does it make us angry? Sad? Lonely? Confused?
Does a television show or movie pull you deeper into a belief that life is basically a war between good and evil? Does it empower you to make changes in your personal life?
Does a story make you feel more connected, more seen? Or does it make you feel more fearful?
Stories have the power to affect our behavior, at least indirectly. They can influence our choices. Offer fresh perspective. Provide a narrative that helps us deepen into our place in society.
Stories can entertain us, distract us, or teach us something. At their best, stories empower us. They give us a sense of place, purpose, meaning, and belonging. At their worst, stories strip power from us.
Conspiracy theories are a kind of story that offers easy, simplistic answers to a complicated world in which truth and lies live side by side.
Conspiracy theories hold out hope that there is a mastermind behind all evil-doing. If only we can stop the mastermind, we can rid the world of this particular evil or darkness. A conspiracy theory becomes a “truth in a bottle” sold to people who hunger for coherence and roundedness in an uncertain world. We drink down the conspiracy theory cocktail to reduce cognitive dissonance (the feeling we get when we try to hold two opposite viewpoints simultaneously), to alleviate the pain of not knowing, and to regain a sense of control.
Rather than following the seductive sounds of the Pied Piper, or never growing up in Neverland, it is far healthier for us to learn how to live with uncertainty and ambiguity. With a little more color and a lot less black and white.
Separating truth from fiction is a losing game. Our minds are too susceptible to a well-told story. Instead, let us take a few steps to note and unravel ourselves from any negative influence of the stories we currently subscribe to.
Recognize that stories sway us—all of them. None of us are immune to the hypnotic spell of a good story. Do you subscribe to a certain creation story? Do you tend to gravitate toward victim stories? Us Vs. Them stories? Hero-to-the-rescue stories? Rags-to-riches stories? Acknowledge which ones pull you in and note how they shape your approach to the world.
Notice if a particular story frees or traps you. Does it make you feel more alone or more connected? Does it require you to dehumanize another group in order to belong? Does it ask you to cut off any existing ties, or in any other way demand obedience or blind loyalty?
Notice your personal approach to storytelling. Do you tend to embellish? Exaggerate? Do you use stories to make connections? For justification? For understanding and healing? Something else?
As you watch news, television programming, movies, entertainment, and any other narrative-based content, pay attention to the story behind the story. See it for what it is, and the emotional direction it is taking you.
You could call this a process of becoming more cynical, or you can simply see it as raising the level of your curiosity so that you, like Princess Jasmine, can get out of the castle and see “a whole new world.”
None of us are free from the influence of stories. Think of the stories of your life, or those of your relatives and friends, and how they shape and inspire you all the time. Think of the story of how you got your pet, or where you were when you met your significant other. Imagine living without stories. It would be a dull world indeed.
We may no longer write stories on cave walls, but we are storytellers (and story-listeners) at heart. Humans cannot live without stories. Nor would we want to. But maybe we should heed the advice of a fairy tale creature or two, who remind us not to bite into that tempting apple, not to climb up onto the sweet-talking crocodile’s mouth to cross the river, and never to trust a wolf in grandma’s clothing.
“Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize.”
~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie