The current election cycle, hell, the state of America at large for that matter, is all our fault. Why? Because we have forgotten a fundamental truth about what drives us.
No, this is not about economic wealth or the lack thereof. It’s not a racial divide or even the lies of politicians that is causing all this ruckus. It’s not being rich or poor, living on the right or wrong side of the tracks, being an evangelical Christian or an atheist, or being one of a seemingly endless choice of sexualities or genders.
We have forgotten that we are storytelling machines. It is in our DNA to tell stories. Almost 60% of our day is spent telling stories, either to ourselves or to others. These stories help us understand the world around us, how we fit into that world, and who we are as individuals.
In the beginning of the human race, stories were told by tribal leaders. They were oral traditions, designed to keep a community on the same page. These stories told us about what happens when we venture out at night alone, or what happens when we don’t all work together to tend to the harvest.
Stories are guide points for civilizations. They help keep us on that proverbial same page.
Before the advent of the Internet, there were people who helped us do that. These book and newspaper editors were stalwarts defenders of storytelling. Yes, they decided to some extent what we should consume, but in doing so, they helped us stay together as a civilization.
Everyone read the same bestseller or classic or a book highly recommended by a trusted friend. We subscribed to trusted publications like Look, Life, Time and Newsweek. We voraciously consumed knowledge because it taught us – these stories – about us. It gave us context for fitting into, and contributing to, an increasingly changing and challenging world. And it kept us relevant in it.
To some extent, television did the same thing. In the United States, we even became more homogenous. Certainly, the Boomers became more so, for the stories we consumed were common to all of us. We only needed to mention a few words about a TV show and others would nod in agreement or add their own two cents to the discussion. We were all on the same page as we continued to share stories.
In many cases, these stories helped shape our world, such as the nightly broadcasts. We saw the horrors of the Vietnam War, watched a president resign in disgrace and wept a collective tear when the Challenger exploded.
Yes, we were often divided on the issues, but we continued to have a shared sense of destiny. Truth was the rule, not the exception, and we engaged in open dialogue, sharing views about the world, culled from our vast individual resources. We became a collective, rather than separate, mind.
The Internet is changing our stories and ourselves. Increasingly, we are tuning out stories that cause us to question our belief system, our faith, our values or politics, because doing so requires us to question ourselves.
Rather than do all that difficult work, we have the option to select our own narrative. We can choose to tune out actual facts and instead live in a world where others spoon feed us what they want us to know, whether they are indeed actual facts or twists of reality to the point where everything is a conspiracy carried out by others.
Yes, the others. Those evil-doers that drive the plot lines in fiction are now becoming real to us. They are the ones seeking to control the media, bring us all to personal ruin, destroy the country we love, undermine our freedom, take away all our rights. After all, isn’t that what makes fiction so wonderful? A classic antagonist?
Of course, in these works of fiction, the good guy always triumphs. And when he or she does, we revel in the fact that we triumph as well because we can see ourselves in that individual. We lived through all those dangers, right by their side, and emerged unscathed. In the process, we learned just a little more about who we are as a person.
Sadly, we are increasingly confusing fact from fiction in this world of ours and there’s a good reason.
Recent studies using MRIs have clearly shown that the human brain can’t tell fact from fiction. The brain registers it all the same, whether something is true or not. Before I go on with this, let’s clarify something. I’m not talking about facts with varying degrees of truth. I’m talking about absolute, verified, simple truths. Like the earth is round. Or Washington was the first president.
The goal of these studies was to find out if we have a built in B.S. Meter. Unfortunately, we don’t.
The only thing allowing us to tell fact from fiction, truth from bald face lie, are the stories we have been told and tell every day. Our entire understanding of the world, based on everything we have learned to date, is what lets us know what is true and what is not.
And there’s the rub. The Internet allows us to sink into a world of our own making, surrounded by all the sunshine and lollipops we need to exist in this world. Reality, truth and facts aren’t relevant in this made up world. We don’t have to engage in the truly hard work of deciding what is real and what is not. Of discerning fact from fiction. Or even, determining what is right and what is wrong, often at the most basic moral level.
Rather than live in a difficult world with competing belief systems and honest, and often uncomfortable dialogue, we revel in the false security of our own homogenous world. Not a homogenous society, mind you. But a homogenous world of a few or even just one.
We eventually sink into our own madness, a madness where our own version of truth is all that matters, regardless of whether it is considered madness from an objective standpoint. Everyone else becomes the crazy ones as we live in the false world of our own stories and the stories of others who are “smart” enough to see the world as we do. We become the Charles Mansons and Unabombers of the world.
This is the true danger to our society and to our republic. It’s the slithering and slinking into a world, our own world, where facts and truth no longer matter. Where lies and deceits are so widespread, so often told, they become the new reality.
Gee, where have we seen that before?
In the Emerald City, refusing to believe that our better days are behind us or that the current snake oil salesmen have the easy answers,
- Robb