Stories are terrifyingly powerful in a way we frequently don’t notice. Everyone knows the difference between fiction and reality, or they think they do – and, indeed, they probably know the difference between real and fictional events, but that’s not quite the same thing. A story doesn’t merely consist of its events, but also of an internal logic which drives those events – a logic which does not, I suspect, receive the same degree of scrutiny, and which even people who consider themselves realistic and grounded can find themselves quietly unconsciously adopting.
As an example, it is difficult now not to be somewhat dismayed observing the overwhelming prevalence of political analogies based off of children’s and young adult fiction. Public figures get fan-cast as heroes and villains, with the implicit argument that the story will play out the same way in reality, that the prophecy must be fulfilled. I don’t think these people literally believe that a book they like is a prophecy – just that they somehow believe, in a way that they’d never admit to themselves, that the world somehow adheres to the structure of those stories. They expect the arc of the universe to bend towards narrative satisfaction. And this seems ridiculous, and is a characterization few would embrace of themselves, but it’s hard once you look for it not to see people embracing the narratively satisfying over the factually accurate, the aesthetic over the material.
In her essay ‘Getting High Off Your Own Supply,’ Liz Ryerson mentions (referring to a segment I haven’t listened to on the Chapo Trap House podcast) that while revolutions often end in toppling statues, it is uncommon that they begin that way. All of the statue-toppling that has happened recently is, as charming as it may be, inverting the usual relationship of action to revolution, invoking the form of a successful revolution without manifesting its underlying material reality – skipping straight to the end of the movie. Perhaps it could even work, the cause emerging from the effect, in this world where our love of narrative satisfaction outstrips our grip on concrete reality – but it ought to be understood that it is at best an experimental and untested strategy.
I’m stuck somewhere between distress and inspiration. I love the power of storytelling and analogy – both for explaining ideas and for further developing them by expanding the analogy – but I’ve become acutely aware of how misleading and dangerous an analogy can be. Once you tell a story, once you make an analogy, it takes on a life of its own, an unaccountable and wild logical process that can argue for anything, make excuses for anything, justify anything. Analogy begins with equating reality to some concept and ends with equating the concept back to reality after performing an operation on it, similar to solving a problem with mathematics – I would actually argue that solving a problem mathematically is itself an application of analogy. However, as with mathematics, there’s plenty of room to make mistakes both in the initial analogizing of reality into abstract and the de-analogizing back to reality at the end (unit conversions are a frequent source of such errors in the application of mathematics). Also, naturally, in between the first and last step there are many opportunities for more obvious and quantifiable logical errors with the operations along the way. Even a well-meaning person might find themselves arguing something they don’t believe, or even find morally abhorrent, just because their flawed analogies have led them far astray.
This is what stories are for us: A cognitive toolkit for understanding a complex reality via narrative shorthand. It’s useful, but you ought never to convince yourself that the model you create this way is reality.
This has strange effects on our relationships to art as well. There’s this vague sense of awareness that art is changing the world, but not of how it’s doing it. This has resulted in weird sorts of prudishness, demanding perfect heroes and flawless societies rather than desirable models of consequence. Good people doing bad things and bad people having good things happen for them are not themselves likely to lead people towards harmful worldviews – however, the single-minded focus on portrayals of strangely conservative worldviews where kindness and justice are incompatible, where the just-world rewards those who are judged good and punishes those who are not, where no big problems are only solvable with the help of a hero sent by divine providence, where the system is always valid and it’s just bad people which make it not work, probably does cause harm.
Usually we just do whatever we can to get a happy ending. There’s no such thing, though, of course – not because of the impossibility of happiness, but because nothing ever really ends, just has repercussions which trail off into smaller and smaller ripples until, someday soon, they’re too small for our eyes to perceive.