Our fondness for narratives is driving us mad

We seem to be in a golden age of storytelling. Is it inhibiting rather than creating empathy?

By Jonathan Gottschall. Excerpts:

"Well-publicized studies have shown that empathy is a bit like a muscle: The more we flex that muscle by consuming fiction, the more it swells. Research conducted around the world has repeatedly found that merely watching television shows or listening to radio dramas featuring diverse protagonists reduces a variety of viewer prejudices with more power and durability than do more conventional approaches to prejudice reduction like diversity training. Moreover, in an age of furious polarization, a 2021 study in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that humble personal anecdotes can bridge fraught moral and political divides even when factual information can’t."

"The act of generating empathy can also produce empathy’s inverse: a kind of moral blindness to the humanity of whoever’s forced into the villain’s role. Fiction, as Fritz Breithaupt explains in his 2019 book “The Dark Sides of Empathy,” conjures not just empathy but “empathetic sadism,” which he defines as “the emotional and intellectual enjoyment that most people feel in situations of altruistic punishment” — for example, when the hero kills, captures, or humiliates the villain.

Empathetic sadism can spill over tragically from fiction to reality. A classic example is “Birth of a Nation,” the 1915 film that spread the mythology of the KKK. But its effects are most destructive in the narratives we label as nonfiction. Research in the emerging field of narrative psychology shows that people don’t come equipped with two narrative modes — one to cope with the neverlands of fiction and another to cope with the complexity of real life. Regardless of where stories sit on the fact-fiction continuum, they have a tendency to divide people into a moralistic trinary of heroes, villains, and victims."

"how can we tell stories that build empathy and connection while weakening their capacity to provoke divisive us-vs.-them thinking?

We need to move past any simple, naive intuition that storytelling must be a net good in human life. We have to recognize how our political narratives lure us into fantasies where “we” are good guys and “they” aren’t. These stories not only make us angry and judgy; they make us feel triumphantly virtuous for being so angry and judgy. It’s true that the most febrile narratives of wicked conspiracy, invented or elaborated by the most dangerously talented political storyteller in American history, are boiling up on the American right. But narratives on the left, for all the empathy they claim to champion, are also guilty of villainizing and thereby dehumanizing people on the other side."

"by stripping away the caricatured villains from our political narratives and embracing the principle of moral ambiguity, we can make our stories of reality not only as empathetic and socially productive as great fiction but perhaps even as true."

Inside and Outside Perspectives on Institutions: An Economic Theory of the Noble Lie

By Cameron Harwick. From The Journal of Contextual Economics.

"Abstract

If there exist no incentive or selective mechanisms that make cooperation in large groups incentive-compatible under realistic circumstances, functional social institutions will require subjective preferences to diverge from objective payoffs – a “noble lie.” This implies the existence of irreducible and irreconcilable “inside” and “outside” perspectives on social institutions; that is, between foundationalist and functionalist approaches, both of which have a long pedigree in political economy. The conflict between the two, and the inability in practice to dispense with either, has a number of surprising implications for human organizations, including the impossibility of algorithmic governance, the necessity of discretionary rule enforcement in the breach, and the difficulty of an ethical economics of institutions.

Leeson and Suarez argue that “some superstitions, and perhaps many, support self-governing arrangements. The relationship between such scientifically false beliefs and private institutions is symbiotic and socially productive” (2015, 48). This paper stakes out a stronger claim: that something like superstition is essential for any governance arrangement, self- or otherwise.

Specifically, we argue that human social structure both requires and maintains a systematic divergence between subjective preferences and objective payoffs, in a way that usually (though in principle does not necessarily) entails “scientifically false beliefs” for at least a subset of agents. We will refer to the basis of such preferences from the perspective of those holding them as an “inside perspective,” as opposed to a functionalist-evolutionary explanation of their existence, which we will call an “outside perspective.” Drawing on the theory of cooperation, we then show that the two perspectives are in principle irreconcilable, discussing some implications of that fact for political economy and the prospects of social organization."

Cameron Harwick did a good Twitter thread on this. Click here to read it.

I asked Dr. Harwick "Is the Noble Lie like myths or mythology?"

He said "Definitely includes that, among other things."

Impostor scams succeed mainly because of the ability to tell a convincing story

See The Age-Old Secrets of Modern Scams: From medieval forgers to online Elon Musk impersonators, con artists tell stories their victims want to hear by Ariel Sabar. Mr. Sabar is a journalist and the author of “Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife,” recently published by Doubleday. Excerpts:

"From the headlines last month, you’d have thought it was a hack for the ages. Scammers infiltrated the Twitter accounts of public figures like Barack Obama, Elon Musk and Kim Kardashian West, then tweeted an offer too good to be true: Send bitcoin and get paid back double. When a 17-year-old from Tampa, Fla., was charged on July 31 with orchestrating the scheme, prosecutors called him the “mastermind” of a “massive fraud…designed to steal money from regular Americans.”

But if the aim was to trick the celebrities’ millions of social media followers out of piles of money, it was something of a flop. The alleged culprits made off with an estimated $118,000, a pittance compared with a similar but less-noticed scam in June in which hackers impersonating Mr. Musk on YouTube took victims for as much as $464,000."

"impostor scams succeed less because of technical skill—like breaking into a high-profile account or imitating an artist’s brush strokes—than because of the ability to tell a convincing story, to plant a lie in an otherwise true tale.

The Twitter hackers got inside the accounts of famous people whose influence they sought to exploit, but posted generic messages that sounded a lot like one another and not particularly like the account holders. In the YouTube scam, on the other hand, channels disguised with the SpaceX logo played real video of Musk speaking at a conference. Framing the footage were captions about a “Special Event” that tied the video to the thrilling launches, days earlier, of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon and Falcon 9 spacecraft.

The videos were live-streamed, as if Musk’s 2-for-1 bitcoin giveaway were unspooling in real time to viewers lucky enough to tune in. A linked website with “SpaceX” in its URL quelled doubt with a thoughtful-sounding message: “We understand the financial uncertainty that some people may be facing right now. SpaceX is here to offer all the help that we can.” Tucked into the alphanumeric bitcoin addresses where victims were asked to send money were the words “Musk” and “Space.” 

Key to this immersive tale was its bogus protagonist. More than any other CEO, Mr. Musk, a tech-world sage with a reputation as an unpredictable iconoclast, seemed like someone who might well give cryptocurrency to strangers for his own inscrutable reasons. “If this was Bill Gates, I would’ve just scrolled past it,” a savvy internet user who nearly fell for the YouTube fraud told the online investigations website Bellingcat."

"The motives of con artists are as various as those of their victims. But whether the come-on is biblical or bitcoin, the best of them gild their stories with details drawn from the real world—to blind us to the one crucial detail that isn’t."

Entrepreneurial Visions as Rhetorical History: A Diegetic Narrative Model of Stakeholder Enrollment

From Academy of Management Review. By Roy Suddaby, Trevor Israelsen, J. Robert Mitchell and Dominic S.K. Lim.

Abstract

"Research suggests that entrepreneurs persuade stakeholders to engage in risky projects in an uncertain future through visions, compelling narratives of the future. A unique challenge for entrepreneurs, however, is how entrepreneurs can construct a narrative that unites stakeholders with different perceptions of the degree of risk or uncertainty posed by the future. We address this question with a diegetic narrative model of stakeholder enrollment. Our primary argument is that to reduce variation in how potential stakeholders view the future, a story must embed a vision of the future in a coherent and collectively held narrative of the past. We introduce rhetorical history as the primary construct through which this occurs. We demonstrate how successful visions employ historical tropes at the intradiegetic level to appeal to individual perceptions of risk or uncertainty and how those historical tropes are combined into meta-narratives or myths drawn from the collective memory of a community to create broad, extradiegetic appeal to all stakeholders regardless of their temporal orientation. Finally we describe three categories of historical reasoning – teleological, presentism, and retro-futurism – that act as bridging mechanisms between past, present and future that provides stakeholders with an enhance sense of agency in the future."  

Trevor Israelsen did a good Twitter thread on this. Click here to read it.

Financiers use rituals & symbols to reinforce their social ties and worldview and share a creation myth

See Anthro-Vision’ Review: How to Take the Blinders Off by Tunku Varadarajan of The WSJ.

He reviews the book Anthro-Vision: A New Way To See In Business And Life by Gillian Tett. Excerpts:   

"Ms. Tett’s doctoral research, conducted in 1990 in a remote valley in Soviet-era Tajikistan, had focused on Tajik wedding rituals, as well as on the friction between Communism and Islam in that erstwhile backwater of the U.S.S.R. Fifteen years later, at a European Securitization Forum in Nice, France, she observed that the assembled financiers—“ranks of chino- and pastel-shirt-clad men”—were using rituals and symbols to “reinforce their social ties and worldview.” In Tajikistan, this bonding had occurred with a complex cycle of wedding ceremonies, dancing and gifts of embroidered cushions. In Nice, the bankers were swapping business cards, rounds of alcohol and jokes while engaging in “communal golf tours” and watching PowerPoint presentations.  

In both cases, Ms. Tett writes, the rituals and symbols were part of a “shared cognitive map,” one designed by biases and assumptions held in common. For all their globe-trotting and polyglot panache, the financiers were no less insular than Tajik matrons. They were, she says, a close-knit tribe “with little external scrutiny” who “could not see whether their creations were spinning out of control”—which they were, as the financial collapse of 2008 was to confirm. Because they shared such a strong “creation myth” about the benefits of novel instruments—such as collateralized debt obligations and other financial confections that brought markets crashing down—they needed someone in their midst who could see the “blind spots” they could not see for themselves."

Are false beliefs necessary for people’s well-being?

There is a new book out called "USEFUL DELUSIONS: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain" by Shankar Vedantam and Bill Mesler.  Click here to read the review from The New York Times.

"Should we always advocate for truth? History tells us false beliefs can be dangerous, leading to genocide, racism and attacks on democracy. However, they can also bring harmony and help us thrive. Consider the health benefits of placebos or the comfort of religion. It is not the veracity, but the consequence, of a belief that makes it good or bad, Vedantam and Mesler argue. “Life, like evolution and natural selection, ultimately doesn’t care about what’s true. It cares about what works.” And if you believe in science you must acknowledge the overwhelming evidence that false beliefs are necessary for people’s well-being, as they often help reduce anxiety and increase motivation. “You can’t go around thinking of yourself as a breathing piece of defecating meat. It gets in the way of happy hour.”

Accepting that people’s beliefs depend less on evidence than on their hopes, emotions and tribal affiliations is vital for addressing global threats such as climate change. Persuading people to act requires us to go along with how the brain works, rather than working against it. Fighting irrational beliefs with numbers and graphs alone is ineffective. Instead, we must fulfill people’s desires and need for belonging. True to their thesis, Vedantam and Mesler pepper hard data with compelling stories to make their case. Vedantam’s empathy and intuitive understanding of human nature, which shine on his popular “Hidden Brain” podcast, come through in “Useful Delusions.”"

Mythology brings Jordan Peterson and Joseph Schumpeter together

See The Man They Couldn’t Cancel by Barton Swaim of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"He brings together a dizzying array of texts and traditions—Jungian psychoanalysis, the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, Frederick Nietzsche, Søren Kierkegaard and much else—to formulate basic lessons, or “rules,” about how humans might overcome their natural tendency to lassitude and savagery."

"The mention of environmentalism brings to mind the cultish side of modern progressivism. Is this desire to flog and destroy, as he puts it, a sign of some twisted spiritual longing? “I think so,” Mr. Peterson says. “The people who caricature Western society as a patriarchy, and then describe it as evil, they’re possessed by a religious idea.” He thinks the problem with modern enlightenment intellectuals—he names the American philosopher Sam Harris, the British conservative writer Matt Ridley and the British broadcaster and writer Stephen Fry, all atheists—is that they offer no mythology, no “adventure.”

“They leave this nihilistic nothingness in their wake, and what happens?” he says. “These kids turn to radical political correctness.” Messrs. Harris, Ridley, Fry, et al. aren’t happy about political correctness, Mr. Peterson notes, but “what did they expect to happen? Did they expect these kids would settle for their insipid rationalism?”

This search for a metaphysical teleology denied young people by “insipid rationalism,” in his view, is also “what motivates antifa and Black Lives Matter and white nationalism and all these other romantic revolutionary rebellions. It’s the romance and the heroism these movements offer.” Mr. Peterson recalls the famous line of George Orwell in his review of “Mein Kampf” in 1940: “Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people ‘I offer you a good time,’ Hitler has said to them ‘I offer you struggle, danger and death,’ and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet.”

Taking Orwell’s terms “socialism” and “capitalism” both to mean, roughly, life without transcendence or any hint of the supernatural, the point seems defensible. Mr. Peterson thinks atheistic materialism has nothing to compare to religious worldviews. Rather than telling people simply not to do bad things, he says, “the right approach is to say to them: Here’s a better adventure. Now go conquer your own demons.”"

So I sent the following letter to The WSJ:

"Jordan Peterson's criticism of the rationalism of modern intellectuals is reminiscent of Joseph Schumpeter's criticism of capitalism ("The Man They Couldn’t Cancel," May 1). Mr. Peterson says "that they offer no mythology, no “adventure”" and just a "life without transcendence or any hint of the supernatural." Schumpeter said of capitalism that it has no "trace of any mystic glamour" and that "the stock exchange is a poor substitute for the Holy Grail." The bourgeois are "rationalistic and unheroic" and thus incapable of leading a nation. Schumpeter might agree with Peterson that the prevailing rationalist ideology leads people to seek fulfillment in some type of social movement to take the place of the modern world's missing adventure. People may need to be offered more than just a good time and be told to be good."

But I had some additional thoughts later.

Joseph Campbell sometimes said something like "I am not a Jungian but he gives me the best clues I've got." So both Campbell and Peterson draw inspiration from Jung and both see mythology as being important.

Carl Jung said "A sense of a wider meaning to one's existence is what raises a man beyond mere getting and spending. If he lacks this sense, he is lost and miserable." This is like Peterson saying that capitalism and socialism need to do more than just offer people a good time.

Jung also said that the most important question anyone can ask is “What myth am I living?”

Here is a relevant passage from Schumpeter:

"there is surely no trace of any mystic glamour about [the industrialist and the merchant] which is what counts in ruling men, [wrote Schumpeter in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy.] The stock exchange is a poor substitute for the Holy Grail. We have seen that the industrialist and merchant, as far as they are entrepreneurs, also fill a function of leadership. But economic leadership of this type does not readily expand, like the medieval lord’s military leadership, into the leadership of nations. On the contrary, the ledger and the cost calculation absorb and confine.

I have called the bourgeois [i.e, the businessman] rationalist and unheroic. He can only use rationalist and unheroic means to defend his position or to bend a nation to his will. [In other words, the businessman is not good at using or applying force, so he must use his wits, just as Pareto warned.] He can impress by what people may expect from his economic performance, he can argue his case, he can promise to pay out money or threaten to withhold it, he can hire the treacherous services of a condottiere or politician or journalist. But that is all and all of it is greatly overrated as to its political value. Nor are his experiences and habits of life of the kind that develop personal fascination. A genius in the business office may be, and often is, utterly unable outside of it to say boo to a goose—both in the drawing room and on the platform. Knowing this he wants to be left alone and leave politics alone."

Since Peterson thinks mythology (and therefore storytelling) is so important, it reminds me of the book The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human by Jonathan Gottschall. Here is the description from Amazon:

"Humans live in landscapes of make-believe. We spin fantasies. We devour novels, films, and plays. Even sporting events and criminal trials unfold as narratives. Yet the world of story has long remained an undiscovered and unmapped country. It’s easy to say that humans are “wired” for story, but why?

In this delightful and original book, Jonathan Gottschall offers the first unified theory of storytelling. He argues that stories help us navigate life’s complex social problems—just as flight simulators prepare pilots for difficult situations. Storytelling has evolved, like other behaviors, to ensure our survival.

Drawing on the latest research in neuroscience, psychology, and evolutionary biology, Gottschall tells us what it means to be a storytelling animal. Did you know that the more absorbed you are in a story, the more it changes your behavior? That all children act out the same kinds of stories, whether they grow up in a slum or a suburb? That people who read more fiction are more empathetic?

Of course, our story instinct has a darker side. It makes us vulnerable to conspiracy theories, advertisements, and narratives about ourselves that are more “truthy” than true. National myths can also be terribly dangerous: Hitler’s ambitions were partly fueled by a story.

But as Gottschall shows in this remarkable book, stories can also change the world for the better. Most successful stories are moral—they teach us how to live, whether explicitly or implicitly, and bind us together around common values. We know we are master shapers of story. The Storytelling Animal finally reveals how stories shape us."

Terry Eagleton shares Campbell's idea of the sociological function of myths, which can be seen as "naturalizing and universalizing a particular social structure, rendering any alternative to it unthinkable." (Eagleton, 188)  He does see myth and ideology working together because the rational side of any movement, ideology is not enough to stimulate political action on the part of the members of some group.

"Men and women engaged in such conflicts do not live by theory alone; socialists have not given their lives over the generations for the tenet that the ratio of fixed to variable capital gives rise to a tendential fall-off in the rate of profit.  It is not in defence of the doctrine of base and superstructure that men and women are prepared to embrace hardship and persecution in the course of political struggle.  Oppressed groups tell themselves epic narratives of their history, elaborate their solidarity in song and ritual, fashion collective symbols of their common endeavour.  Is all this to be scornfully dismissed as so much mental befuddlement?" (Eagleton, 191-2)

His answer is no.  It is all designed to "foster solidarity and self-affirmation." (Eagleton, 192)  

(Eagleton, Terry. 1991. Ideology. Vreso: London.)

Also see my paper "Economists, Parsifal, and the Search for the Holy Grail," Journal of Economic Issues, December 1996.

Abstract:

Modern economists behave like Parsifal. He is a poor and innocent boy who becomes a knight for King Arthur, finds the Grail Castle and eventually replaces the Fisher King as the guardian of the Holy Grail. He has to widen his consciousness and travel beyond his station as a naive fool to discover himself and to reconcile the conflicting aspects of his psyche. Economists should take Parsifal as a model and expand their consciousness to remedy their cynicism and despair, and enliven their field.