Here’s the reason the fantasies of the Tea Party folks have such strong hold on them. In short, it could be you. It depends on your story.
ALL of us (not some of us) live in a fantasy world, since because of the way we are biologically wired as human beings, we live each moment in a story-in-our-heads.
And not “partially” but entirely and totally.
The reason for this is fundamental: our brains filter out most of the information our senses provide to us and leave us with only that which is vital. Were that not the case, we would be completely overwhelmed by our environment. This is not news, but well known, although often overlooked.
This filtering leaves us with only the highlights, the most salient parts, the “synopsis” of the sequence of events around us. And this synopsis is the very definition of what a story is.
When we think of stories, we often think of books or lectures or tales told by friends. A good author will find exactly the right balance between too much detail and too little; just as a good filmmaker learns what to leave out and what to include to push the story forward.
Stories are condensations of events, a synopsis – the highlights. None of us deal with “reality” – we deal with our sensory-limited, brain-adjusted, filtered and refined moment-to-moment stories in our heads.
Human beings are the only creatures on earth that train their young through the use of stories. The reason is simple: that’s the way we deal with our environment moment to moment, as humans. It’s the way we are wired. It’s not a defect; it’s how humans work. As our children get older, the stories evolve to include more detail, and less metaphors, to contain more accurate descriptions. But they are and remain stories.
But nonetheless, because of the way our senses work; because of the way our brains work; we spend all of our lives wrapped up in the mental stories we carry around with us about our environment- our “reality.”
This ability to filter out the irrelevant is critical for our survival. That tree on the savanna that has been there forever isn’t much of a threat, but the lion approaching us certainly is. So, we filter out probably 99% of what our senses provide and base our actions on the remaining 1%; on the “story” that we extract moment to moment in our daily lives.
As children, the stories we hear bear little relationship to day-to-day life. At first, they consist mostly of nouns helping to identify things seen, such as mother or father or food. Later, as the education of the child begins, the stories become more metaphorical, and then gradually less so, coming closer and closer to describing the real daily environment.
So what?” You may be thinking. “That’s obvious.” Yes, and in fact so obvious that we overlook it, forget it.. or, more correctly, most of us do.
But you can be quite sure that people who want to manipulate us: advertisers, governments, politicians, con-men, lovers, and even each other, are all experts at manipulating the stories we share. It’s just that some of us are very much aware of doing it while for the rest of us it’s unconscious.
And as I said above, this is hardly news. Politicians feed us stories; advertisers feed us stories; filmmakers feed us stories. Skillful people understand this and know how to use it to their advantage.
The most common technique is to manipulate a story that the listener, the target, already believes. This is very easy to do: simply replace a key word in the story with a similar one but which has a different meaning.
For example, “fetus” becomes “baby”; “estate tax” becomes “death tax”; and so on. Another technique is to associate words with entire stories. “Chevy” becomes associated with “American” and “Honda” is associated with “foreign,” (despite the fact that Chevys are made in Mexico, and Hondas are assembled in Kentucky.)
Try thinking of the spectrum of how close your stories are to actuality like this: think of the long strip of paper – black at one end and gradually fading to white at the other. Let’s call this the scale of association of stories to actuality. It’s important to remember that virtually none of us, no one, sees, deals with, or interacts with actual reality – the white end of the strip (with the possible exception of a few enlightened beings.) Most of us fall somewhere in between less-than-white, and less-than-black.
At the far black end would be psychotics, and close by would be babies and then children. All the rest of us fall somewhere in between. Further, it’s not a single fixed point for each of us either. For example, my mental story of how an airplane flies is considerably further towards the black end of the strip, then is that same story belonging to an airline pilot, who certainly understands far more than I do about what keeps a plane in the air.
On the other hand, my mental stories about photography or computers are probably much closer to the white end of that scale than his are. If you are a mechanic, your story about automobiles and how they work is much closer to the white than mine. But, in each of these cases, they are still just stories. We learn them over time; refine them; and gradually pushed them towards the white and.
And that’s where the manipulation comes in. The closer you are to the black end (that is, the less accurate your story is about some given subject) the easier it is to have someone fill in that story with new information. That is, if you don’t know much about something, you tend to believe what ever new information you receive. If, on the other hand, you are an expert in something (that is, your story is closer to the white end of the scale) the more difficult it is to be fooled.
And here’s the rub, as they say: if your story about something is towards the black and, and you are filled by others with incorrect information, you will nonetheless think you are approaching the light end. That is, you are building your story with more information but the information is wrong. That is precisely how you are manipulated by politicians and advertisers, filmmakers, book authors, used car salesman, and even your best friend.
If you were to map the population across that spectrum, dark to light, you’d find (by definition) that about 30% of them would fall at the end where belief in stories remains high.
Interestingly, that 30% is about the size of the Tea Party contingent, and hangers-on.
Now, on some unconscious level, we all know and understand that we are dealing with mere stories in our heads. Some of us find it easier to change or correct those stories than others do. Some of us find it easier to tell when we are being fed twisted and false additions to our stories.
That’s where education comes in. I’m often saddened to hear people say “I don’t need my head filled up with a bunch of facts…” because that’s decidedly NOT what schooling is about. Education is about learning how to think; not what to think. Sure, there are some facts and memorizing in there because some of that is useful stuff to know, but what you’re really doing is learning how to tell the cow from the manure. In short, how to tell if the story you’re hearing is likely to be true or not.
Have you ever had a conversation with someone who is so set in the belief of their own stories in their head, that you can literally lay facts on the table before them; hold up a photograph in front of their face which proves conclusively that their story is incorrect, and they flatly refuse to even accept the evidence? It can be maddening! But the reason is very simple: it is because on some level we understand the truth of what I’ve been saying: that our beliefs are stories. And as we came out of childhood, we learned that “stories” are just that – stories. And as a “story” it need have no stringent relationship to “reality.”
And that brings us right back to the savanna again. It is the case that those people literally do not see the contrary evidence. Their senses filter it out because the strength of their stories is so strong that they do not see it as vital or useful or important information. In short that is why you will never change the mind of someone with a deep belief in his internal story, by presenting him with “facts.” He literally will not see them.
And let me point out that while education certainly has something to do with one’s ability to modify his internal stories based on experience, intelligence does not. That’s where the typical “left” reaction to Tea Partiers gets it wrong. There are very intelligent people who cling to their internal stories. Dick Cheney comes to mind, and of course, George Bush.
And if you think I’m stretching the point too far, then consider that this was pointed at by none other than Carl Rove when he observed that liberals “…live in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. That’s not the way the world really works anymore.”
Mr. Rove is widely acknowledged to be one of the master manipulators of the modern age. And he did all of it using the techniques I have described above.
Then, how important are these stories of ours? Well, like survival on the savanna, it’s vital: we base very real-world actions, and even our very lives, on our belief in our own stories.
For example, if your mental story about automobiles is that a Chevrolet is exactly as good as a Mercedes, then you will, in the real world, purchase a Chevrolet instead of a Mercedes. And when you proudly take your shiny new Chevy to show off at the annual fine car club convention (amid Ferraris, Jaguars, Maybach, Rolls-Royce, and Mercedes) you’re going to be in for quite a surprise.
Because we take actions based on the stories in our heads it is literally true that our survival depends on the accuracy of our stories. If you believe you can fly, you will jump off a cliff. If you believe you cannot fly, you won’t.
And because our actions, things we do in the real world, are determined by our stories, anything that threatens our stories, ipso facto, threatens us. We become very defensive.
On the other hand, the more support we can find among our fellow human beings for the story that we believe, the less we have to worry about its accuracy. Consensus builds belief; consensus builds stories. In fact, consensus provides security and that in turn, makes it less likely that we will consider our stories might be in error. It does not take long within this kind of feedback loop, to reach the point where our security in the story is so high that we “no longer think about it.” We have then reached the point where “the story becomes reality.” This relieves us of the need to think about it anymore; removes the stress of that; and allows us to move on.
And yes, this too has a survival benefit.
You can see this in action if you watch a dynamic speaker manipulate his audience. He will begin with some common, widely held story and repeat it. The audience comes to the consensus that yes, this is true (while in fact, it is only mutually agreed upon.) Then the speaker will change a word or alter the meaning of a word in that story. He may expand on it, pausing long enough only to let the consensus reappear. By carefully choosing which words to manipulate; which words to replace, the speaker can get a crowd of people to do almost anything.
I did not discover this. Karl Rove did not discover this. Hitler did not discover this. PT Barnum did not discover this. Julius Caesar did not discover this. Understanding how to manipulate people has been around since the beginning of time.
Even religious ecstasy is an example of what we’ve been talking about. The sense of relief; the feeling of being “washed over” and the “release”, from accepting “the story” and no longer worrying about the need to question. Most people find thinking difficult to do, particularly about deep subjects such as religion, so the release that comes from no longer questioning is no particular wonder. (Note: I’m not dismissing religion here, nor God, but merely explaining a human phenomena.)
All of this isn’t merely “human nature;” it’s the nature of being human. That being so, I’m not surprised that 30% of us live towards the darker end of that imaginary fade-to-white strip. These are the folks who live in the stories in their heads; whose common response to things is often “I don’t think about it.” They buy “faux” pearls because they think “faux” means “French” and believe that the President was born in a foreign country (a “fact” which somehow escaped the entire Republican Party and the Congress of the United States.) When you find it hard to think, and even proudly declare that you don’t, then your use of stories instead is that much stronger, and thus you are exceedingly easy to manipulate, something Carl Rove, Wall Street and Madison Avenue know all too well.
My point in bringing all this up is, like the savanna, to help with your survival. It is not to “diss” you if you’re in the 30% (although I’m a bid saddened that you’ll be taken advantage of all your life. ) It is important (for your own sake) that you understand how you work, how all human beings work, so that you can properly defend yourself. This dependence on stories is not a defect; it is not something that we can “get over” – it is built into our very biological human nature.
Failing to understand that merely makes you prey for those who do.
