The story paradox : how our love of storytelling builds societies and tears them down

The story paradox How our love of storytelling builds societies and tears them down

Jonathan Gottschall

Book - 2021

"In 2012, Jonathan Gottschall received a strange letter from DARPA, the research and development arm of the United States Department of Defense. What could a military research program possibly want with a literary critic? The letter was an invitation to a conference for a new program called STORYNET, a plan to map how stories affect our brains and use that knowledge to craft narratives that could more effectively drive compliance with military initiatives. DARPA was trying to turn stories into weapons. Reading this invitation (which Gottschall declined), he remembered a famous proverb: The one who tells the story rules the world. Stories are fundamental to how we think, and how we change our minds. Our brains value them so highly that ...we often seem them even when they aren't there: when scientists showed subjects a video of simple shapes moving randomly around a screen, they interpreted the scene as a love story between two triangles. Countless books celebrate the ability of storytelling to help us think and communicate more effectively, including Gottschall's own bestselling The Storytelling Animal. But in The Story Paradox, he argues that there is a dark side to storytelling, and we ignore it at our peril. At base, stories are tools. They help us create a shared reality. But stories are also inherently manipulative and divisive: they split the world into heroes who represent something good, and villains who do not. For most of human history, this was a manageable problem. But we now find ourselves in what Gottschall calls a "story explosion," an era in which new storytelling technologies allow people to tell stories of unprecedented scale and sophistication. Virtual reality, personalized newsfeeds, stories that viewers can tailor in real time, deepfakes: these make it harder for us to deal with the ways that stories can confuse and divide us. If we're not careful, they could cause the shared reality we all depend on to collapse. The Story Paradox is a provocative and personal reckoning with the ways that storytelling lies at the heart of some of humanity's greatest threats. Gottschall explains why authoritarians like Trump rise and fall and how the media helps them, why radical ideologies are so effective at stamping out other belief systems, and how good stories compel us to accept conspiracy theories about which we should know better. When Plato envisioned the perfect state in The Republic, he saw a world in which storytellers were banned. They were simply too dangerous. The Story Paradox is a crucial counterpoint to books like Made to Stick or The Story Factor, arguing that the most urgent question we can ask ourselves now, is not: "how we can change the world through stories?" Rather, it's "how can we save the world from stories?""--

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Subjects
Persuasion (Rhetoric)
Storytelling > Social aspects.
Storytelling > Psychological aspects.
Rhetoric > Social aspects.
Published
New York : Basic Books 2021.
Language
English
Main Author
Jonathan Gottschall (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
ix, 258 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN
9781541645967
  • Introduction
  • 1. "The Storyteller Rules the World"
  • 2. The Dark Arts of Storytelling
  • 3. The Great War for Storyland
  • 4. The Universal Grammar
  • 5. Things Fall Apart
  • 6. The End of Reality
  • Conclusion: A Call to Adventure
  • Acknowledgments
  • References
  • Notes
  • Index
Review by Choice Review

A distinguished research fellow at Washington and Jefferson College, Gotschall is a storytelling scholar. In a previous book, The Storytelling Animal (CH, Sep'12, 50-0062), he focused primarily on the positive elements of the storytelling craft. The Story Paradox provides an antithesis to that theme, offering substantial evidence of how stories sway individuals to negative behaviors. Beginning with the premise that "stories are the single most potent way of influencing other minds," Gotschall views his book as a "story paradox"--as both a curse and a blessing--raising humanity up but at the same time suggesting paranoid and vindictive narratives that can lead to a dark conspiracy. Using examples as far back as Plato and as current as the presidency of Donald Trump, the author describes the ruthless control of narrative used by leaders including Lenin, Hitler, Mao Zedong, and Kim Il-sung to sway followers toward the leaders' ideals of toxic behaviors by offering conspiracy theories that may originally seem outlandish, but are, over time, accepted as the norm. Gotschall offers some 30 pages of contemporary research and an additional 11 pages of endnotes as evidence of the scholarship involved in crafting this exceptional book. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty. --Ann Krell Petersen, emeritus, Buena Vista University

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Gottschall recycles many of his previous claims about the power and danger of narratives in this tedious and self-contradictory sequel to The Storytelling Animal. Contending that "all narrative is reductionist" and that storytelling is humanity's "essential poison," Gottschall cherry-picks dozens of examples to build his case, noting, for instance, that Plato's Republic "condemned storytellers as professional liars who got the body politic drunk on emotion," and that Tommy Wiseau's notoriously bad 2003 movie, The Room, fails to convey its misogynistic message because it doesn't generate "narrative transportation." In Gottschall's view, historical storytelling "frequently amounts to a kind of revenge fantasy, where the malefactors of our past can be resurrected, tried, and convicted for violating moral codes they frequently hadn't heard of." But he downplays contemporaneous evidence of people risking their lives to, for instance, resist the Nazi Party and end slavery in the American South, and he doesn't acknowledge any social and cultural histories that do not "wrench real-world facts into line with the most powerful grammar of fiction." Though his sharp sense of humor entertains, Gottschall's overly broad and reductive argument falls flat. This study is more provocative than persuasive. (Nov.)

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Why humans need to tell new stories. Literary scholar Gottschall, who celebrated humans' propensity for telling tales in The Storytelling Animal, now considers ways stories "sway us for the worse." Why, he asks, thinking of conspiracy stories (which are not, he insists, theories), climate change deniers, and news stories that produce feelings of despair, "do stories seem to be driving our species mad?" Given the ubiquity of stories in every culture and their potential to create conflict, he focuses his thoughtful and entertaining investigation on a critical question: "How can we save the world from stories?" Drawing on philosophy (Plato is a recurring figure), psychology, anthropology, neurobiology, history, and literature and interweaving personal anecdotes and snippets of popular culture, Gottschall acknowledges that stories have powerful emotional impact. From ancient times, they emerged "as a tool of tribal cohesion and competition," structured with a "universal grammar" that is "paranoid and vindictive": Characters try to solve predicaments, facing trouble and often a clearly defined villain. Such stories generate empathy for the characters in peril while creating a kind of "moral blindness" regarding villains. This paradigm, Gottschall argues, shapes our stories about society, politics, and even history, "a genre of speculative narrative that projects our current obsessions onto the past." Rather than depict Nazis or White supremacists as villains, Gottschall suggests that they were not "worse people than us" but had the "moral misfortune" of being born into cultures which mistakenly defined bad as good. When we villainize, he warns, we dehumanize, sinking into sanctimony and hate. With "folk tales" erupting and spreading "with incredible speed and ease on the internet" and with a political figure he dubs the Big Blare reigning as a supreme storyteller, Gottschall exhorts readers to become aware of storytelling biases and to learn to tell a story "where we are protagonists on the same quest." Fresh insights about the ways we understand reality. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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