A short study of self-delusion
Many artists and thinkers talk reverently about the power of stories. Whether delivered by spoken word, written text or music, our brains just love the dopamine hit of a something new, something that seems to make sense, something memorable/surprising/funny, something with that “a-ha” moment. Combine a couple of desirable attributes, and the story will be a verifiable hit! Oh to be lucky and hear an a) funny story b) affirming our worldview that c) also rhymes! (I think of rhyming as the best pyrotechnics of language, lighting up fireworks in our brains.)
Each cohesive society has a cohesive set of stories (and divided societies multiple, incompatible sets of stories) the population ingests from birth that sets their worldview and preferences to a remarkable, but almost completely unacknowledged degree. Old brain so loves the moments of joy stories bring that it tends to suspend all critical faculties, absorbing it wholly, including the facts and values embedded in them, with very little checking. Even simple, obviously wrong propositions like “you get what you pay for”, if delivered often enough, will become unquestioned wisdom. Bernard Shaw sarcastically prayed for forgiveness for those that ingested the customs of his tribe hard, even to the point of believing them to be the laws of nature, but I just feel pity for the masses of people who could be sane but for a wholehearted acceptance of the content of the stories served.
You, the reader may think “sure, but not me”… but are you sure? So insidious is this indoctrination that unfortunately for all, you included, may be much deeper in than imagined. Need convincing? Try this exercise:
Make a moral/intellectual inventory of all things you hold valuable, beautiful or right (exclude empirical truths). Make your own list or start with and add to categories below:
1) Behavioural and moral norms of my society
2) Interpretation of deity/deities
3) Attitudes to sexual practices/orientations and family dynamics
4) Attitudes toward individualism or collectivism/duty/authority
5) Attitudes to law and order
8) Attitudes to human rights issues
Now, for each item, ask yourself: had I been told different, had I been born in a different century or society, would I place the same value to each item? If unsure, try to imagine yourself in the following situations:
- In times of a revolution, if growing up in as a well-to-do landowner, would my opinion on law-and-order be likely the same as the hungry peasant’s? Or born into an Essex household in England, would I as likely think of IRA members as freedom fighters as a Catholic Belfast person?
- Born in Netherlands, would I think in religious terms and have same attitudes to sexual relationships as if I was born into a tribe in remote hills of Afghanistan?
- Seeing a foreign flag and listening to a foreign anthem, would my heart rate quicken as much as my usual one?
- Would today’s New Yorker accept witch-hunts with glee like their predecessors did a few centuries ago? Or think right that black people can be owned as productive chattel?
- Would I be as likely to stand up for the rights of cyclists if not one myself?
- Would I defend market capitalism with same vigour whether stuck at dead-end job or a successful financier?
The honest answer is: of course not.
We think we are a sovereign individual on top of these tricky topics, but outsiders will very quickly identify the massive overlap in any society’s individual’s programming. We think we believe and act out of our own free will, but really almost everything depends on the place and time of our birth (different time is a lot like a different place — as L.P. Hartley said, “the past is a foreign country”) and some, often random personal choices at various forks of the road, like falling into an occupation because a friend told us about it. You don’t even need to move much in space or time — just think how every generation under this sun said “the trouble with the young people today…” or how often people dislike those in neighbouring countries or those from another socioeconomic layer in their own country — the only thing dividing them being the stories they were exposed to. Even slight separations in worldview can create a little lack of empathy, maybe slight antipathies — seemingly not much, but any such small gap can be whipped up through fear and anger to something much more menacing when powers that control the narrative want to introduce a bout of identity politics.
It is not all negative — stories are powerful two edged swords and therefore the responsibilities on the storyteller’s shoulders are massive. If we challenge ourselves with constructive, insightful content (let’s call them whole-food stories), not only we gain knowledge, but we may become more open to a hitherto foreign world, on our way to personal growth — maybe getting to know ourselves better or building understanding of, and therefore empathy for people we couldn’t imagine before. But we also may give in to our inherent mental laziness, absorb easy but bad stories (fast-food stories?) and become a narrow ideologue. We can even become willing to give up our most precious things (long-held relationships, our lives) — all for an acquired worldview that is but the end result of the random selection of simplistic stories we happened to be served or just come across. Massive changes either way… stories really create parallel worlds for us to live in.
The stories being all-powerful, foundational even, is a very old thought. The Bible opens with the heavyweight philosophical lesson (rediscovered by scores of philosophers, Wittgenstein being the last, for now) of words creating, and giving structure to a world. It was written that the Creator said “let there be light…and there was light”. Just in case a refresher was needed, in the New Testimony John’s book opens with an even more explicit formulation of this idea: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God“. Wow, now that point is hard to miss — Language is the Creator and the Creator is Language.
An aside:
Throughout human history, Gods are, as a rule, created in the image of humans, and (fundamentalist believers, close your eyes now) foundational writers of Abrahamic traditions may have just done the same: imagined GOD creating the world with language because WE create our worlds with language.
Language in effect sets the person’s world’s absolute limits by bringing into existence (as Heidegger said, “Language is the house of Being”). This is not an intuitive idea at first, but once propositioned, it is easy to see that we can’t incorporate anything into and communicate about our worldview for which we don’t have words/language for. Words define, and only what is defined can the rational mind deal with constructively — inchoate emotions bubbling up just won’t cut it, or as Wittgenstein’s puts it, “Whereof we cannot speak there we must be silent”. I think the silent limits of my language as the absolute limits of the construct that is my world, or as Romano Guardini’s words paint it more visually, “language is the room in which man lives”. Learning how many light years away galaxies are is a trivial way to grow one’s world, but learning a new concept to think about and communicate does meaningfully expand one’s world. This explains the importance of reading: acquiring language will grow one’s world with it. This is also how creation works in the Biblical sense.
Less ambitiously but more powerfully, language we use or allow to enter our conscious also shapes our thinking and the world as it appears to us looking out from our heads (if interested, read up on “linguistic relativity principal”). So prepared, our brains will be happy with stories that fit our narrative, even if clearly made up. These, often emotion-led warpings of reality add up to creating individual, subjective, distorted world for every human, which if not perpetually fought with thoughts like ones contained in this text, take place in the individual’s mind as the objective reality. This is largely how language works when humans create their world, and the stories are what delivers the payload.
An aside:
Some values and mores will be partially based on realities — for instance, one’s mental makeup may determine suitability to a stoic outlook and solitary life, while someone else prefers the wild ride of emotions and busy social calendar. These partly depend on how we are individually wired, and are not wholly the results of stories we give ourselves — so indulge away in them, just make sure not to try to judge or try to proselytise others into them. In these cases, try to live and let live — don’t think what is true for one must be true for all.
The dangers of a limited viewpoint cannot be overstated. Think of the 3-D object in the illustration below as the objective full reality, and our limited understanding as the shadows on the walls. Notice how for someone having an ability to see the object from all sides the picture is clear and viewing position no longer matters, but those that only ever had a single viewpoint can, depending on the viewer’s relative position, have a wildly different understanding of the object:
The graphic clearly illustrates why anthropologists say that only by immersing ourselves into a culture that is very different can we understand our own — we need perspective, innit?
It is very frustrating for those that have some inkling of the 3-D shape’s complex form to listen to others arguing and often overreacting with little perspective about what is right and what is beautiful, in this example “it is a square”, “no, it is a triangle”. Like the daughter in the 2022 movie “Everything Everywhere All at Once”, we would care about the prescriptive morals much less if we could see every universe in the multiverse all at once, i.e. every repercussion of every choice we make. The less we know, the more judgemental we get and vice versa.
The good stories can help round out the complex 3-D picture in our heads, but more often than not we seek out what we know already and are fed further bad stories, creating the simple, comfortable world that will actually prevent the realisation of the full mental picture.
An aside:
People believing their way is self-evidently the best is the straightforward outcome of badly-storied, narrow minds. Plainly an ignorant thing to say (I mean just need to ask them “by claiming ‘best’ you mean you know them all?”), but if willing, they can build on the earlier exercise for a massive personal improvement: For all the values on the moral inventory compiled earlier, find a group that holds a different interpretation (different shaped shadow), and see if you can find a larger (3-D) picture that explains the differences. A powerful tip: try to place yourself in the other’s shoe, for example: A German man may think of Greek people as lazy, but if he travels to Greece and feels the heat and notices the low wages, within a day it becomes very obvious why the movements are minimised and slower. If he is smart, while in Greece he will become much more Greek himself (when in Greece…). Also, next time another German opines about Greeks laziness in front of him, our hero will likely channel Jimmy Hendrix in some form, and ask “Are you experienced?”. I would encourage everyone to go and experience different things — your little world will let you go.
So, our attraction to stories may enrich us, give meaning to our lives, comfort us, but also can have a very high cost of wiping out a large part of human cognisance. Even more powerfully, the reality-conquering power of stories are super-sticky. Aristotle said “give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man”. Why is that? Why, when we happen onto an idea (through parents, teachers, media), do we doggedly defend that until the end, with our lives if need to? How can we think our circumstances were so special that we got this insight and very few others do? Of the 3,000 Gods humans believed in, we think only ours, and only our understanding of him, is the one true God? Of all the nations on this great Earth, the one we happen to be born into is the exceptional one? What a massive and violent ego trip most of us are on. And all for something demonstrably subjective (remember the earlier exercise: since objective reality wouldn’t depend on our particular viewpoint — it wouldn’t matter where and when we are born — but being born in a different place and time would change almost everything, we can conclude that almost everything we think important and real is not objective but in fact social constructs, at best partly-true, but possibly wholly illusory). We mostly behave a certain way and believe certain things not because they are demonstrably true, but because that is how we are socialised, full stop.
Socrates questioned these underlying stories, and was killed for his troubles. Turns out we don’t much like disturbing those shaky foundations. This crazy rigid adherence to our chosen world of stories consumed affect all our deepest-seated impulses, like religion, patriotism, political tribalism, societal attitudes and rules that govern relationships. As James Baldwin said, “we sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, and imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, symbols, blood sacrifices, steeples, worship, races, armies, flags, nations”. Even the obviously fake, manipulative stories of advertisements we consume and program our minds with little resistance. Why do we do that? To obtain meaning, and ultimately deny the fact of death (Baldwin’s thesis)? Or do we subconsciously love that ego-boost so much that we will bend our rational mind to bizarre ideas for the momentary rush of “I know something very few others know”? Or is that just a comfort-seeking tactic, a way to fit in, an intellectual equivalent of automatically smiling when someone smiles at us? Is it to make a complex world simpler to think about, so that our heads don’t hurt so much?
Ask these (or other “why” type) questions, and you often get blank looks and silence. We don’t know. Turns out that while we are proudly fighting for that troublesome freedom of speech, we rarely exercise the super-available, super-beneficial freedom of thought. My take on this: the predominant dynamic is that ready-made opinions are easy, thinking and memorising is hard/energy intensive, and our brains, geared to find answers, want to feel good and right but are lazy/efficient. Our hearts also seek to belong, and for that, willing to override the mind. Because of these two motivations, we seek out and hold onto simple, easily memorised stories that cleanly fit into an already accepted group-narrative. Counterintuitively, intelligence will not help: turning the intellectual abilities against ourselves, the most intelligent among us will be also the most capable of tricking their own selves, and fall for the randomly served or chosen narratives the hardest.
Finding, feeding ourselves and digesting whole-food/enriching stories is hard work, and our defenses against being fed fast-food stories are weak. Whenever the media and the political class decide to exercise control through coordinated official narratives, we are inevitably and immediately plunged into the divisive culture wars. Even slight antipathies are enough for the political operators to exploit and turn into support for highly damaging, divisive parties. Bringing us down with bad stories is easy — and the unquestioning, accept-and-hold mentality past the age of seven is preventing all of us to move towards more truthful, productive views and activities. The damage caused by weakness for stories is truly beyond anyone’s estimate. What a wonderful world this could be, indeed.
Mixed mental positions of variously storied minds that are organic and randomly acquired introduce some meaningless noise, some sub-optimal outcomes. They are sometimes funny, sometimes annoying. But when forces gather behind a particular narrative and push that systematically into young brains, the world is at the edge of a great chasm. The USA proudly boasts that they are the best in capturing hearts and minds (i.e. feeding narrow, bad stories — when the population is sufficiently brainwashed, there is no need to cover brainwashing up anymore), and China is quick to re-educate “wayward” minds, but both are just making their populations more willing to destroy another with complete and utter moral clarity. Be aware of stories that are uniformly held by a large percentage of the population. If powerful enough, badly-storied, narrow societies made up by patriots, members of religious orders, economic ideologues or fanatical adherents to some social norms are just a spark away from inflaming much larger regions, and since the 20th century, that can mean the whole world.
