Friendly reminder: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/yes-science-is-political/
this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2025
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If the stories aren't working, they're not better.
"Better" here is going to be a highly loaded word, and revolves a lot around what results you're seeking. Humans connect with stories that connect with their feelings, it's how they got exploited to get us here. Decades of people signing away their own rights in service of stories that momentarily scared them, and here we are in the culmination of all these tiny stories and resulting policies that have been made to steer people to this place and time.
You can't just tell people now "Trump is the bad guy, trans people aren't threatening us, we have to help Ukraine, the wealthy elite are our real enemies."
It doesn't matter if the story is true, that story doesn't move people. It's just lecturing to the toddler-mind that makes up the bulk of our population. You can't make the people better. We HAVE to abandon this idea that everyone wants to "do the right thing" on some level. No we fucking don't. People want to feel validated. Not even feel good, that's less important to people than feeling heard and validated. Our stories need to make individuals feel something, individuals who view everything outside of their immediate sphere of awareness as abstractions and theory, not reality. You can't make these people feel sympathy or care for others, so we have to make them feel something else.
I cannot upvote this comment as much as I would want to upvote it.
Can you give examples of what you think might be working stories?
Bravo!
hey, just chiming in to say I really do appreciate your perspective -- Narrative therapy is a real tool that can help people. and yet i think by implying that a narrative is "worse" if it doesn't "work", you're overlooking the force of other systemic factors. just think about the logistics of these stories reaching people's ears. who has command over our attention? what narratives are people exposed to on a day-to-day basis? where does the power lie behind those messages? the idea that the best narrative is the one that thrives is akin to meritocratic thinking -- a demonstrably flawed system.
I was pretty clear that the effectiveness of a narrative is dependant on the results you're seeking. I think you can turn a narrative loose into the world and it will run autonomously to a degree, and you could use a story's ability to thrive and survive as a measure of at least how attractive and engaging it is, but no, I don't think that is what makes a story effective for the purposes of influencing a large amount of people to make better choices, to have more curiosity, to think more about things they don't normally think about.
Social engineering like this does take deliberate work. It takes effort and work to keep a story alive and growing. The problem is we already have tons of people doing this work for their own agendas. Sometimes they're good stories, sometimes they're terrible stories, but it almost doesn't matter the "quality" of the narrative, since our brains are designed to hook into narratives to explain the world even if the explanation doesn't even make a lick of sense. See: anti-vax doctors and flat earthers.