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“Once upon a time,” is not a suitable opening for a news story. Ever.
We are spending more and more of our time trapped in other peoples’ narratives — and by narratives I don’t mean just stories. Let me explain with an example.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, I got an excited call from the editor of a magazine I wrote for. The Feds were about to de-list the American alligator from the endangered species list. After fewer than 20 years on the list the population had rebounded almost magically, proving the efficacy of the list. This was a huge story for conservationists, and I was to go get it.
It was February. The assignment was in Florida. He got no argument from me. Problem was, the story he sent me to get was dead on arrival.
Within ten minutes of my arrival at the Florida Game and Freshwater Fish Commission’s Wildlife Research Laboratory in Gainesville, the people who knew more about American alligators than anybody told me in no uncertain terms that everybody was getting the story wrong. Their methods of counting alligators had improved exponentially since the animal was listed, and they had high confidence in their current estimates of the population. The thing was, given the current count, it was mathematically impossible for the count to have been as low as it was thought to be in 1967 when it was listed. The alligator was not endangered. It was undercounted.
To say that my editors were displeased would be a major understatement. They had prepared a blockbuster cover, and had illustrated and even done headlines and subheads for the article they thought I was going to write. The article I had been assigned to write. They had the narrative in mind all along, before they knew the facts, and I had had the temerity to report that it was false. The actual article, titled “Searching for Truth in Alligator Country,” was warm beer compared to what they expected — and compared to what other publications merrily — and irresponsibly– promulgated. If you Google alligators and Endangered Species act today you will not get the truth, you will get the legend of the miraculous recovery. That is their narrative, and they stuck to it.
We are today awash in narratives that are not supported by facts. There is a narrative about the 2020 presidential election that holds it was corrupt, inept, riddled with fraud and abuse, and unjustly robbed the Republican candidate of his rightful victory. The facts that no shred of evidence has been produced in verification, that every court consulted has firmly rejected it, that no investigation has confirmed any aspect of it has not prevented a significant portion of the population from saying, “it’s my narrative and I’m sticking to it.”
There are competing narratives about the events at the US Capitol Building on January 6, 2021. One is a happy tale of a harmless bunch of patriots exercising their right of free assembly at the people’s house on a momentous day. The other tells of a mob of murderous insurrectionists 0n a rampage that probably killed one police officer and left 138 seriously injured. The narratives cannot be reconciled– only one of them can be true. And we have hundreds of hours of video showing which one is true. Yet they both survive as narratives to which people are sticking. Fox News has one set of narratives at hand, MSNBC another.
A deranged person in Atlanta opens fire in three massage parlors, killing people some of whom were most likely sex workers, and telling police who arrested him that he had a problem with sex addiction that made him do it. Yet in about 30 seconds, the narrative became that he did it because he hated Asians, and the glowing profiles of the victims portrayed them as successful entrepreneurs and pillars of the community, maintaining an artful vagueness about what they actually were doing there.
The narrative was quite different in January 2019 when Robert Kraft, billionaire owner of the New England Patriots, was caught several times on police video having and paying for sex at the Orchids of Asia Spa in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Charges against him were dropped — did I mention he is a billionaire? — but no one suggested he did it because the spa was run by Asians.
If you have a narrative, and you’re sticking to it, chances are it’s because the narrative portrays the world the way you want to see it and not the way it is. There is no way that dealing with the world on the basis of false narratives is going to do anybody any good. So suppose we do some work, with an open mind, to find out the real story, and base our actions and our arguments on that?
Yeah. You’re right. That’ll never work.
Welcome to the Age of the Barbarism of Reflection.
Yes it would appear you have a narrative and you are sticking to it.
We have an almost primal need for narratives, and that’s why they’re so easily hijacked. Combine that with the high complexity of many sectors of life and the dumbed-down educational system, and too many Americans are easily misled. (And think they’re part of a special “community” in the process.)
In an age when all speech is marketing, and “narratives” serve only to burnish “the brand,” things like nuance and complicating facts are clearly unwanted, as your alligator story illustrates. To say nothing of the fact the American audience has, in the absence of religion, embraced politics as its replacement, and their respective team provides its own litany of narratives and approved dispensaries for same. All useful to keep us at one another’s throats.
Surly, long time. How’re things at the Doomstead Diner?
Hi Tom, I don’t really hang out there anymore, so I couldn’t tell you. Good to see that you are keeping the lights on. Wishing you all the best.
I just encountered a classic example of what’s being discussed here on another forum. A libertarian whack-job made numerous posts calling the response to Covid-19 “hysteria and fear-porn”, and then in the very same thread, this individual posts a link to an article on an alt-right propaganda site positing that the vaccination campaign is actually a conspiracy to instigate mass genocide. I’m tellin’ ya, the jokes just write themselves, at this point.
” … conspiracy to instigate mass genocide … ” via vaccination.
I just read recently that 62% of Republicans are going to refuse to be vaccinated, so if the intent is genocide, it will prove unsuccessful.
Yes, coastal liberals and other government trusting types will be wiped on mass, but wouldn’t this be a good thing, if you were a libertarian?
In the final scene of ‘Hamlet’ Fortinbras enters a throne room strewn with corpses. Shocked, he asks, “where is this sight?” Horatio answers with the question, “what is it ye would see?”
Our attitudes and outlooks affect the way we perceive reality. We see what we want to see, and interpret events in a framework that calms us emotionally and confirms our personal narratives. Without such narratives – even negative ones – our lives lose meaning, and personality disintegration sets in: neurosis, criminality, substance abuse, even suicide can ensue.
In much the same manner whole societies can crumble, as competing subcultural myths erode the national consensus.
In the same play Shakespeare also writes, “to thine own self be true”…an idea that can be carried way to far!
“What is it you would see?”
World Trade Center 7. September 11, 2001, at 5:20:52 pm.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mamvq7LWqRU
Some see a classic demolition, perhaps the finest example of one ever according to many experts in the field, most however, including practically all of our best and brightest truth seekers, see one the support columns in the 70 story steel structure becoming “unseated”* on floor 14, causing the rest of 89 support columns in the building to fail simultaneously, with the result that it naturally implodes into its footprint.
Happens all the time. That’s why none of us wonder into tall buildings anymore.
We haven’t even begun to discuss false narratives in this country.
*Column 79. “Harry, what is it?” “The stuff that dreams are made of.”
I believe the trouble all began with a bunch of thinkers in Europe during the 16th/17th centuries known collectively as the Voluntarists. They believed and argued that God has complete and absolute freedom to do whatever He wants. (In other words, this was their narrative.) This belief had far-reaching consequences: it would mean nothing can be taken as proof that God exists, because to take ‘abc’ as definite proof that God exists would amount to saying that God cannot choose not to let ‘abc’ constitute proof of His existence, which would contradict the claim that He can always choose whatever He likes.
The Church initially embraced this idea happily as a means of putting down the heretical claims of those who sought God outside the Church. The trouble was that the same arguments for disarming the heretics could just as well be directed against all the claims made by the Church itself regarding God. This could well have been a major factor in the eventual decline of Christianity in the West.
Descartes — who was one of the Voluntarists — saw the danger and tried to sneak his way around it in his Meditations. Later Hume saw through the attempt and demolished it. Still later Kant came along and made everything even worse by arguing that we can never view the world but through a lens of a priori concepts and ideas, so we’ll never be able to access the truth regarding things in themselves.
From this point on it was downhill all the way for the West; the foundations of the one great narrative that sustained it for centuries were virtually all undone, leaving everything being cast adrift. You can now come up with whatever crazy narrative you like and make it your compass (as Nietzsche advocated); anything goes. And without any overriding narrative to restrain us or impose limits on what we can and cannot do, the sociopaths among us would naturally have a field day. Hence our current plight.