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.