But that’s not how we live our lives. Humans might be in unique possession of the knowledge that our existence is essentially meaningless, but we carry on as if in ignorance of it. We beetle away happily, into our minutes, hours and days, with the fact of the void hovering over us. To look directly into it, and respond with an entirely rational descent into despair, is to be diagnosed with a mental-health condition, categorized as somehow faulty.
The cure for the horror is story. Our brains distract us from this terrible truth by filling our lives with hopeful goals and encouraging us to strive for them. What we want, and the ups and downs of our struggle to get it, is the story of us all. It gives our existence the illusion of meaning and turns our gaze from the dread. There’s simply no way to understand the human world without stories. They fill our newspapers, our law courts, our sporting arenas, our government debating chambers, our school playgrounds, our computer games, the lyrics to our songs, our private thoughts and public conversations and our waking and sleeping dreams. Stories are everywhere. Stories are us.
We experience our day-to-day lives in story mode. The brain creates a world for us to live in and populates it with allies and villains. It turns the chaos and bleakness of reality into a simple, hopeful tale, and at the center it places its star — wonderful, precious me — who it sets on a series of goals that become the plots for our lives. Story is what brain does. It is a story processor, not a logic processor.
I wanted to find out how intelligent people end up believing crazy things. The answer I found was that, if we’re psychologically healthy, our brain makes us feel as if we’re the moral heroes at the center of the unfolding plots of our lives. Any “facts” it comes across tend to be subordinate to that story. If these “facts” flatter our heroic sense of ourselves, we’re likely to credulously accept them, no matter how smart we think we are. If they don’t, our minds will tend to find some crafty way or rejecting them.
It’s people, not events, that we’re naturally interested in. It’s the plight of specific, flawed and fascinating individuals that makes us cheer, weep, and ram our heads into the sofa cushion. The surface events of the plot are crucial, and structure ought to be present, functional and disciplined. But it’s only there to support its cast.
Change is endlessly fascinating to brains. Almost all perception is base don the detection of change. Our perceptual systems basically don’t work unless there are changes to detect. In a stable environment, the brain is relatively calm. But when it detects change, that event is immediately registered as a surge of neural activity.
But what’s all this neural power for? Evolutionary theory tells us our purpose is to survive and reproduce. These are complex aims, not least reproduction, which, for humans, means manipulating what potential mates think of us. Convincing a member of the opposite sex that we’re a desirable mate is a challenge that requires a deep understanding of social concepts such as attraction, status, reputation and rituals of courting. Ultimately, then, we could say the mission of the brain is this: control. Brains have to perceive the physical environment and the people that surround it in order to control them. It’s by learning how to control the world that they get what they want.
Control is why brain are on constant alert for the unexpected. Unexpected change is a portal through which danger arrives to swipe at our throats. Paradoxically, however, change is also an opportunity. It’s the crack in the universe through which the future arrives. Change is hope. Change is promise. It’s our winding path to a more successful tomorrow. When unexpected change strikes we want to know, what does it mean? Is this change for the good or the bad? Unexpected change makes us curious, and curious is how we should feel in the opening movements of an effective story.
The image every TV director in fact or fiction always looks for is the close-up of the human face as it registers change.
There’s no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.
In life, most of the unexpected changes we react to will turn out to be of no importance: the bang was just a lorry door; it wasn’t your name, it was a mother calling for her child. So you slip back into reverie and the world, once more, becomes a smear of motion and noise. But, every now and then, that change matters. It forces us to act. This is when story begins.
Humans have an extraordinary thirst for knowing how things work and why. Storytellers excite these instincts by creating worlds but stopping short of telling readers everything about them.
But that’s not how it feels to be a living, conscious human. It feels as if we’re looking out of our skulls, observing reality directly and without impediment. But this is not the case. The world we experience as “out there” is actually a reconstruction of reality that is built inside our heads. It’s an act of creation by the storytelling brain.
You’ll never experience actual reality because you have no direct access to it. Consider that whole beautiful world around you, with all its colors and sounds and smells and textures. Your brain is not directly experiencing any of that. Instead, your brain is locked in a vault of silence and darkness inside your skull.
This hallucinated reconstruction of reality is sometimes referred to as the brain’s “model” of the world.
That large fuzzy area of your vision is sensitive to changes in pattern and texture as well as movement. As soon as it detects unexpected change, your eye sends its tiny high-definition core to inspect it. This movement is the fastest in the human body.
Disturbingly, we don’t know for sure. Like an old TV that can only pick up black and white, our biological technology simply can’t process most of what’s actually going on in the great oceans of electromagnetic radiation that surround us. Evolution shaped us with perceptions that allow us to survive, but part of that involves hiding from us the stuff we don’t need to know. And that’s pretty much all of reality, whatever reality might be.
Even sleep is no barrier to the brain’s story-making processes. Dreams feel real because they’re made of the same hallucinated neural models we live inside when awake. The sights are the same, the smells are the same, objects feel the same to the touch. Craziness happens partly because the fact-checking senses are offline, and partly because the brain has to make sense of chaotic bursts of neural activity that are the result of our state of temporary paralysis. It explains this confusion as it explains everything: by roughing together a model of the world and magicking it into a cause-and-effect story.
The most common is being chased or attacked. Other universal themes include falling from a great height, drowning, being lost or trapped, being naked in public, getting injured, getting sick of dying, and being caught in a natural or manmade disaster.
A real work of art destroys, in the consciousness of the receiver, the separation between himself and the artist.
Grammar acts like a film director, telling the brain what to model and when. Grammar appears to modulate what part of an evoked simulation someone is invited to focus on, the grain of detail with which the simulation is performed, or what perspective to perform that simulation from.
We start modeling words as soon as we start reading them. We don’t wait until we get to the end of the sentence.
Instead of telling us a thing was terrible, describe it so that we’ll be terrified. Don’t say it “delightful”, make us say “delightful” is thin gruel for the model-building brain. In order to experience the character’s terror or delight or rage or panic or sorrow, it has to make a model of it. By building its model of the scene, in all its vivid and specific detail, it experiences what’s happening on the page almost as if it’s actually happening. Only that way will the scene truly rouse our emotions.
Their wonder lies in the fact that they’re merely suggested. Like monsters in the most frightening horror stories, they feel all the more real for being the creations, not of the writer, but of our own incessant model-making imaginations.
Like all animals, our species can only detect the narrow band of reality that’s necessary for us to get by. Dogs live principally in a world of smell, moles in touch and knife-fish in a realm of electricity. The human world is predominantly that of people. Our hyper-social brains are designed to control an environment of other selves.
Humans have an extraordinary gift for reading and understanding the minds of other people. In order to control our environment of humans, we have to be able to predict what they’re going to do. The importance and complexity of human behavior means we have an insatiable curiosity about it. Storytellers exploit both these mechanisms and this curiosity; the stories they tell are a deep investigation into the ever-fascinating whys of what people do.
For earlier humans that roamed hostile environments, aggression and physicality had been critical. But the more cooperative we became, the less useful these traits proved. When we started living in settled communities, they grew especially troublesome. There, it would’ve been the people who were better at getting along with others, rather than the physically dominant, who’d have been more successful.
This success in the community would’ve meant greater reproductive success, which would’ve gradually led to the emergence of a new strain of human. These humans had thinner and weaker bones than their ancestors and greatly reduced muscle mass, their physical strength as much as halving. They also had the kind of brain chemistry and hormones that predisposed them to behavior specialized for settled communal living. They’d have been less interpersonally aggressive, but more adept at the kind of psychological manipulation necessary for negotiating, trading and diplomacy. They’d become expert at controlling their environment of other human minds.
A wolf survives by cooperating as well as fighting for dominance and killing prey. A dog does so by manipulating its human owner such that they’d do anything for them.
No other animal has taken domestication to the extent that we have. Our brains may have initially evolved to cope with a potentially threatening world of predators, limited food and adverse weather, but we now rely on it to navigate an equally unpredictable social landscape.
For modern humans, controlling the world means controlling other people, and that means understanding them. We’re wired to be fascinated by others and get valuable information from their faces.
By the time they’re adults, they’ve become so adept at reading people that they’re making calculations about status and character automatically, in one tenth of a second. Human obsession with faces is so fierce we see them almost anywhere: in fire, in clouds, down spooky corridors, in toast.
There’s a park bench, in my hometown, that I don’t like to walk past because it’s haunted by a breakup with my first love. I see ghosts on that bench that are invisible to anyone else except, perhaps, her. And I feel them too. Just as human worlds are haunted with minds and faces, they’re haunted with memories.
Everything our attention rests upon triggers a sensation, most of which are minutely subtle and experienced beneath the level of conscious awareness. These feelings flicker and die so rapidly that they precede conscious thought, and thereby influence it. All these feelings reduce to just 2 impulses: advance and withdraw. As you scan any scene, then, you’re in a storm of feeling; positive and negative sensations from the objects you see fall over you like fine drops of rain.
We use around 1 metaphor for every 10 seconds of speech or written word. If that sounds like too much, it’s because you’re so used to thinking metaphorically — to speaking of ideas that are “conceived” or rain that is “driving” or rage that is “burning” or people who are “dicks.”
Metaphor is far more important to human cognition than has ever been imagined. Many argue it’s the fundamental way that brains understand abstract concepts, such as love, joy, society and economy. It’s simply not possible to comprehend these ideas in any useful sense, then, without attaching them to concept that have physical properties: things that bloom and warm and stretch and shrink.
When participants in one study read the words “he had a rough day,” their neural regions involved in feeling textures became more activated, compared with those who read “he had a bad day.” Those who read “she shouldered the burden” had neural regions associated with bodily movement activated more than when they read “she carried the burden.”
A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image. The use of that huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.
Whenever anything appeared incomprehensible, it was either omitted or explained, in much the same way that an editor might fix a confusing story.
Turning the confusing and random into a comprehensible story is an essential function of the storytelling brain.
This experience suggests that the brain’s been monitoring myriad conversations and has decided to alert you to the one that might prove salient to your wellbeing. It’s constructing your story for you: sifting through the confusion of information that surrounds you, and showing you only what counts. This use of narrative to simply the complex is also true of memory. Human memory is “episodic” (we tend to experience our messy parts as a highly simplified sequences of causes and effects) and “autobiographical” (those connected episodes are imbued with personal and moral meaning).
When posed with even the deepest questions about reality, human brains tend towards story. What is a modern religion if not an elaborate neocortical “theory and explanation about what’s happening in the world and why”? Religion doesn’t merely seek to explain the origins of life, it’s our answer to the most profound questions of all: What is good? What is evil? What do I do about all my love, guilt, hate, lust, envy, fear, mourning and rage? Does anybody love me? What happens when I die? The answers don’t naturally emerge as data or an equation. Rather, they typically have a beginning, a middle and an end and feature characters with wills, some of them heroic, some villainous, all co-starring in a dramatic, changeful plot built from unexpected events that have meaning.
Whether it’s memory, religion, or the War of the Ghosts, it rebuilds the confusion of reality into simplified theories of how one thing causes another. Cause and effect is a fundamental of how we understand the world. The brain can’t help but make cause and effect connections.
Cause and effect is the natural language of the brain. It’s how it understands and explains the world. Compelling stories are structured as chains of causes and effects. A secret of bestselling page-turners and blockbusting scripts is their relentless adherence to forward motion, one thing leading directly to another.
The issue isn’t simply that scenes without cause and effect tend to be boring. Plots that play too loose with cause and effect risk becoming confusing, because they’re not speaking in the brain’s language.
An essential difference between commercial and literary storytelling is its use of cause and effect. Change in mass-market story is quick and clear and easily understandable, while in high literature it’s often slow and ambiguous and demands plenty of work from the readers, who has to ponder and decode the connections for themselves.
Expert readers understand that the patterns of change they’ll encounter in art-house films and literary or experimental fiction will be enigmatic and subtle, the causes and effects so ambiguous that they become a wonderful puzzle that stays with them months and even years after reading, ultimately becoming the source of meditation, re-analysis and debate with other readers and viewers.
So our mystery is solved. We’ve discovered where a story begins: with a moment of unexpected change, or with the opening of an information gap, or likely both. As it happens to a protagonist, it happens to the reader or viewer. Our powers of attention switch on. We typically follow the consequences of the dramatic change as they ripple out from the start of the story in a pattern of causes and effects whose logic will be just ambiguous enough to keep us curious and engaged. But while this is technically true, it’s actually only the shallowest of answers. There’s obviously more to storytelling than this rather mechanical process.
It isn’t enough to tell us what a man did. You’ve got to tell us who he was. How is he different from Ford? Or Hearst, for that matter? Or John Doe?
Good stories are explorations of the human condition; thrilling voyages into foreign minds. They’re not so much about events that take place on the surface of the drama as they are about the characters that have to battle them. Those characters, when we meet then on page one, are never perfect. What arouses our curiosity about them, and provides them with a dramatic battle to fight, is not their achievements or their winning smile. It’s their flaws.
But because this distorted reality is the only reality we know, we just can’t see where it’s gone wrong. When people plead with us that we’re mistaken or cruel and acting irrationally, we feel driven to find a way to dismiss each argument they present to us. We know we’re right. We feel we’re right. We see evidence for it everywhere.
These distortions in our cognition make us flawed. Everyone is flawed in their own interesting and individual ways. Our flaws make us who we are, helping to define our character. But our flaws also impair our ability to control the world. They harm us.
Correcting our flaws means, first of all, managing the task of actually seeing them. When challenged, we often respond by refusing to accept our flaws exist at all. People accuse us of being “in denial.” Of course we are: we literally can’t see them. When we can see them, they all too often appear not as flaws at all, but as virtues.
Identifying and accepting our flaws, and then changing who we are, means breaking down the very structure of our reality before rebuilding it in a new and improve form. This is not easy. It’s painful and disturbing. We’ll often fight with all we have to resist this kind of profound change. This is why we call those how manage it “heroes.”
The further you travel from those you admire, the more wrong people become until the only conclusion you’re left with is that the entire tranches of the human population are stupid, evil or insane. Which leaves you, the single living human who’s right about everything — the perfect point of light, clarity and genius who burns with godlike luminescence at the center of the universe.
As wrong as we are, we rarely question the reality our brains conjure for us. It is, after all, our “reality.” As well as this, the hallucination is function.
Stevens is passionate about his calling and muses about the “special quality” that made his father, and butlers like him, so great. “Dignity,” he decides, the key to which is “emotional restraint.” Just as the English landscape is beautiful because of its lack of obvious drama or spectacle, a great butler will not be shaken out by external events, however surprising, alarming or vexing.
Emotional restraint is why the English make the best butlers. “Continentals are unable to be butlers because they are a breed incapable of the emotional restraint which only the English race are capable of.” They are like a man who will, at the slightest provocation, tear off his suit and his shirt and run about screaming. Emotional restraint is the pivotal idea around which his neural model of the world is built. It’s his theory of control. If he adheres to it, he’ll be able to manipulate his environment in such a way that he’ll get what he wants.
The only way you can describe a human being truly is by describing his imperfections.
Those high in extraversion are gregarious and assertive, seekers of attention and sensation. Being high in neuroticism means you’re anxious, self-control and prone to depression, anger and low self-esteem. Lots of openness makes for a curious soul, someone artistic, emotional and comfortable with novelty. High-agreeable people are modest, sympathetic and trusting while their disagreeable opposites have a competitive and aggressive bent. Conscientious people prefer order and discipline and value hard work, duty and hierarchy.
Our habit of leaving revealing clues in our environment is why journalists prefer interviewing subject in their homes.
We often think of “culture” as surface phenomena, such as opera and literature and modes of dress, but culture is actually built deeply and directly into our model of the world. It forms part of the neural machinery that constructs our hallucination of reality. Culture distorts and narrows the lens through which we experience life, exerting a potent influence on us, whether by dictating the moral rules we’ll fight and die to defend or defining the kinds of foods we’ll perceive as delicious.
Caregivers don’t merely read morally charged stories to their children, they often add their own narration, underlining the narrative’s message.
Individualists tend to fetishize personal freedom and perceive the world as being made up of individual pieces and parts. This gives us a set of particular values that strongly influence the stories we tell. According to some psychologists, it’s a mode of thinking that arose from the physical landscape of Ancient Greece. It was a rocky, hilly, coastal place, and therefore poor for large group endeavors like farming. This meant you had to be something of a hustler to get by. The best way of controlling that world, in Ancient Greece, was by being self-reliant.
Because individual self-reliance was the key to success, the all-powerful individual became a cultural ideal. The Greeks sought personal glory and perfection and fame.
Compare this pushy, freedom-loving self to the one that emerged in the East. The undulating and fertile landscape in Ancient China was perfect for large groupish endeavors. Getting by would have probably meant being a part of a sizeable wheat- or rice-growing community or working on a huge irrigation project. The best way of controlling that world, in that place, was ensuring the group, rather than the individual, was successful. That meant keeping your head down and being a team player. This collective theory of control led to a collective ideal of self. In the Analects, Confucius is recorded as describing “the superior man” as one who “does not boast of himself,” preferring instead the “concealment of his virtue.” He “cultivates a friendly harmony” and “lets the states of equilibrium and harmony exist in perfection.”
For the Greeks, the primary agent of control was the individual. For the Chinese, it was the group. For the Greeks, reality was made up of individual pieces and parts. For the Chinese, it was a field of interconnected forces. Out of these differences in the experience of reality come different story forms. Greek myths usually have 3 acts, Aristotle’s “beginning, middle and end,” perhaps more usefully described as crisis, struggle, resolution. They often starred singular heroes battling terrible monsters and returning home with treasures.
Stories weren’t like this in Ancient China. This was a realm so other-focused there was practically no real autobiography for 2000 years. When it did finally emerge, life stories were typically told stripped of the subject’s voice and opinions and they were positioned not at the center of their own lives but as a bystander looking in.
In such stories, you’re never given the answer. There’s no closure. There’s no happily ever after. You’re left with a question that you have to decide for yourself. That’s the story’s pleasure. In Eastern tales that did focus on an individual, the hero’s status tended to be earned in a suitably group-first way. In the West you fight against evil and the truth prevails and love conquers all. In Asia it’s a person who sacrifices who becomes the hero, and takes care of the family and the community and the country.
What these forms reflect is the different ways our cultures understand change. For Westerners, reality is made up of individual pieces and parts. When threatening unexpected change strikes, we tend to reimpose control by going to war with those pieces and parts and trying to tame them. For Easterners, reality is a field of interconnected forces. When threatening unexpected change strikes, they’re more likely to reimpose control by attempting to understand how to bring those turbulent forces back into harmony so that they can all exist together. What they have in common is story’s deepest purpose. They teach lessons in control.
Since birth, it’s been in a state of heightened plasticity that has enabled it to build its models. But now it becomes less plastic and harder to change. Most of the peculiarities and mistakes that make us who we are have become incorporated into its models. Our flaws and peculiarities have become who we are. Our minds have been made up.
From being model-builders we become model defenders. Now that the flawed self with its flawed model of the world has been constructed, the brain starts to protect it. When we encounter evidence that it might be wrong, because other people aren’t perceiving the world as we do, we can find it deeply disturbing.
These emotional responses happen before we go through any process of conscious reasoning. They exert a powerful influence over us. When deciding whether to believe something or not, we don’t usually make an even-handed search for evidence. Instead, we hunt for any reason to confirm what our models have instantaneously decided for us. As soon as we find any half-decent evidence to back up our “hunch” we think, “Yep, that makes sense.” And then we stop thinking. This is sometimes known as the “makes sense stopping rule.”
Not only our neural-reward systems spike pleasurably when we deceive ourselves like this, we kid ourselves that this one-sided hunt for confirmatory information was noble and thorough. This process is extremely cunning. It’s not simply that we ignore or forget evidence that goes against what our models tell us (although we do that too). We find dubious ways of rejecting the authority of opposing experts, give arbitrary weight to some part of their testimony and not others, lock onto the tiniest genuine flaws in their argument and use them to dismiss them entirely. Intelligence isn’t effective at dissolving these cognitive mirage or rightness. Smart people are mostly better at finding ways to “prove” they’re right and tend to be no better at detecting their wrongness.
Incredibly, the brain treats threats to our neural models in the much same way as it defends our bodies from a physical attack, putting us into a tense and stressful fight-or-flight state. The person with merely differing views becomes a dangerous antagonist, a force that’s actively attempting to harm us.
So we fight back. We might do so by trying to convince our opponent of their wrongness and our rightness. When we fail, as we usually do, we can be thrown into torment. We chew the conflict over and over, as our panicked mind lists more and more reasons why they’re dumb, dishonest or morally corrupt. After an encounter with such a person, we often seek out allies to help talk us down from the disturbance. We can spend hours discussing our neural enemies, listing all the ways they’re awful, and it feels disgusting and delicious and is such a relief.
We organize much of our lives around reassuring ourselves about the accuracy of the hallucinated model world inside our skulls. We take pleasure in art, media and story that coheres with our models, and we feel irritated and alienated by that which doesn’t. We surround ourselves with “like-minded” people. Much of our most pleasurable social time is spent “bonding” over the ways we agree we’re right, especially on contentious issues.
Much of the conflict we see in life and story involves exactly these model-defending behaviors. It involves people with conflicting perceptions of the world who fight to convince each other of their rightness, to make it so their opponent’s neural model of the world matches theirs.
But it’s also by these kinds of conflicts that a protagonist learns and changes.
We’re all fictional characters. We’re the partial, biased, stubborn creations of our own minds. To help us feel in control of the outside world, our brains lull us into believing things that aren’t true. Among the most powerful of these beliefs are the ones that serve to bolster our sense of our moral superiority.
Our sense of who we are depends, in significant part, on our memories. And yet they’re not to be trusted. What is selected as a personal memory needs to fit the current idea that we have of ourselves. This isn’t simply a matter of strategic forgetting. We rewrite and even invent our own pasts. We often make up memories of events that never happened. Memories are very malleable, they can be distorted and changed easily. The most important memory distortions by far are the ones that serve to justify and explain our own lives.
My students think all of these incentives are important, of course, but they judge that the intrinsic motivators are significantly more important to them than they are to their follow students. “I care about doing something worthwhile, but others are mainly in it for the money.”
Everyone who’s psychologically normal thinks they’re the hero. Moral superiority is thought to be uniquely strong and prevalent form of positive illusion. Maintaining a positive moral self-image doesn’t only offer psychological and social benefits, it’s actually been found to improve our physical health. Even murderers and domestic abusers tend to consider themselves morally justified.
Violence and cruelty has 4 general causes: greed and ambition; sadism; high self-esteem and moral idealism. Popular belief and cliched stories tend to have it that greed and sadism are dominant. In fact, they’re vanishingly small. It’s actually high self-esteem and moral idealism — convictions of personal and moral superiority — that drive most acts of evil.
All this is complicated by the fact that characters in story aren’t only at war with the outside world. They’re also at war with themselves. A protagonist is engaged in a battle fought largely in the strange cellars of their own subconscious mind. At stake is the answer to the fundamental question that drives all drama: who am I?
You talk about the people as if you owned them, as though they belonged to you. Goodness. As long as I can remember you’ve talked about giving the people their rights, as if you could make them a present of liberty. As a reward for services rendered. Remember the working man? You used to write an awful lot about the working man. But he’s turning to something called organized labor. You’re not going to like that one little bit when you find out it means that your working man expects something as his right, not as your gift. When your precious underprivileged really get together. I don’t know what you’ll do.
Was he the man his old friend perceived: self-interested, delusional, desperate for approval and attention? Or was he the person his own hero-making brain told him he was: brave, generous and selfless?
It’s because of such findings, no psychologist asks people to explain the cause of their own thoughts and behavior anymore unless they’re interested in storytelling.
The terrible and fascinating truth about the human condition is that none of us really know the answer to the dramatic question as it pertains to ourselves. We don’t know why we do what we do, or feel what we feel. Our sense of self is organized by an unreliable narrator. We’re led to believe we’re in complete control of ourselves, but we’re not. We’re led to believe we really know who we are, but we don’t.
This is why life can be such a vexing struggle. It’s why we disappoint ourselves with behavior that’s mysterious and self-destructive. It’s why we shock ourselves by saying the unexpected. It’s why we find ourselves telling ourself off, giving ourselves pep talks or asking, “What the hell was I thinking?” It’s why we despair of ourselves, wondering if we’ll ever learn.
The problem of self-control, I’ve come to think, isn’t really one of willpower. It’s about being inhabited by many different people who have different goals and values, including one who’s determined to be healthy, and one who’s determined to be happy.
As well as having models of everything in the world, inside our heads, we have different models of self that are constantly fighting for control over who we are. At different times, under different circumstances, a different version of us becomes dominant.
Beneath the level of consciousness we’re a riotous democracy of min-selves which are locked in chronic battle for dominion. Our behavior is simply the end result of the battles.
All individuals are essentially scientists erecting and testing their hypothesis about the world and revising them in the light of their experience.
Stories such as this are like life itself, a constant conversation between conscious and subconscious, text and subtext, with causes and effects ricocheting between both levels. As incredible and heightened as they often are, they also tell us a truth about the human condition. We believe we’re in control of ourselves but we’re continually being altered by the world and people around us. The difference is that in life, unlike in story, the dramatic question of who we are never has a final and truly satisfying answer.
Films and novels are pleasurable — tense, shocking, gut-wrenching, thrilling, suspenseful, satisfying — in large part because of their ancient roots. The emotions we experience, when under the power of story, don’t happen by accident. Humans have evolved to respond in certain ways to tales of heroism and villainy because doing so has been critical for our survival. This was especially true back when we were living in hunter-gatherer tribes.
We’ve spend more than 95% of our time on earth existing in such tribes and much of the neural architecture we still carry around today evolved when we were doing so. In this 21st century of speed, information and high technology, we still have Stone Age brains.
How did they control each other’s self-interested behavior so fantastically, without the help of a police force, a judiciary or even any written law?
They’d do it with the earliest and most incendiary form of storytelling. Gossip. People would keep track of everyone else, closely tallying their behavior.
Selfless versus selfish is storified as hero versus villain. We’re wired to find selfless acts heroic and selfish deeds evil. Selflessness is thought to be the universal basis for all human morality. 60 groups worldwide shared these rules: return favors, be courageous, help your group, respect authority, love your family, never steal and be fair, all a variation on “don’t put your own selfish interests before that of the tribe.”
The hero’s ultimate test as selflessly “giving yourself to some higher end. When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness.” Mean while the “dark power” in stories represents the power of the ego and is immensely powerful and concerned solely with pursuing its own interests at the expense of everyone else in the world.
Not only is gossip universal, with around two-thirds of our conversation being devoted to social topics, most of it concerns moral infractions: people breaking the rules of the group.
Evolutionary psychologists argue we have 2 wired-in ambitions: to get along with people, so they like us and consider us non-selfish members of the tribe, and also get ahead of them, so we’re on top. Humans are driven to connect and dominate. These drives, of course, are frequently incompatible. Wanting to get along and get ahead of them sounds like a recipe for dishonesty, hyprocrisy, betrayal and Machiavellian maneuvering. It’s the conflict at the heart of the human condition and the stories we tell about it.
Getting ahead means gaining status, the craving for which is a human universal. Humans naturally pursue status with ferocity: we all relentlessly, if unconsciously, try to raise our own standing by impressing peers, and naturally if unconsciously, evaluate others in terms of their standing. And we need it. People’s subjective well-being, self-esteem, and mental and physical health appear to depend on the level of status they are accorded by others. In order to manage their status, people engage in a wide range of goal-directed activities. Underneath the noblest plots and pursuits of our lives, in other words, lies our unquenchable thirst for status.
Because status is of existential importance (benefits for chimps and humans include better food, better mating opportunities and safer sleeping sites) and because everyone’s status is always in flux, it’s a near-constant obsession. This status flux is the very flesh of human drama: it creates running narratives of loyalty and betrayal; ambition and despair; loves won and lost; schemes and intrigues; intimidation, assassination and war.
Chimpanzee politics, like human politics, runs on plots and alliances. Unlike so many other animals, chimpanzees don’t only fight and bite their way to the top, they also have to be coalitional. When they reach the heights, they need to adopt a policy of sensitive politicking. Lashing out at those beneath them risks triggering revolt and revolution. The tendency of chimps to rally for the underdog creates an inherent unstable hierarchy in which the power at the top is shakier than in any monkey group. When troop leaders are toppled from their throne, it’s usually because of a gang of low-status males has conspired against them.
A common feature of our hero-making cognition seems to be that we all tend to feel like this — relatively low in status and yet actually, perhaps secretly, possessing the skills and character of someone deserving of a great deal more. I suspect this is why we so easily identify with underdog heroes at the start of the story — and then cheer when they finally seize their just reward. Because they’re us.
If this is true, it would also explain the odd that, no matter what our level of actual privilege, everyone seems to feel unfairly lacking in status.
When people in brain scanners read of another’s wealth, popularity, good looks and qualifications, regions involved in the perception of pain became activated. When they read about them suffering a misfortune, they enjoyed a pleasurable spike in their brain’s reward systems.
Shakespeare understood that there’s nothing more likely to make a person mad, desperate and dangerous than the removal of their status. The play is a tragedy, a form that frequently shows how hubris — which can be viewed as the making of an unsound claim to status — can bring personal destruction.
He’s reduced to the position of beggar, this embodiment of the corrupt leader whose mistake was to forget that status, in human groups, should be earned.
Shakespeare knew well the psychological torments that can be unleashed by such a loss of status. In its most dangerous form, this is experienced as humiliation.
His hatred stems from an incident in childhood during which, on a dare, Cassius and Caesar tried to swim across the Tiber. But on this “raw and gusty” day, Caesar failed. He was reduced to begging Cassius to save his life.
Psychologists define humiliation as the removal of any ability to claim status. Severe humiliation has been described as “an annihilation of the self.” It’s thought to be a uniquely toxic state and is implicated in some of the worst behaviors the human animal engages in, from serial murder to honor killing to genocide. In story, an experience of humiliation is often the origin of the antagonist’s dark behavior.
As we’re a tribal people with tribal brains, it doesn’t count as humiliation unless other members of the tribe are aware of it.
In this way, stories transmitted the values of the tribe. They told listeners exactly how they ought to behave if they wanted to get along and get ahead in that particular group. There’s a sense in which these stories would become the tribe. They’d represent what is stood for in ways purer and clearer than could any flawed human.
Stories are tribal propaganda. They control their group, manipulating its members into behaving in ways that benefit it.
Because one of our deepest and most powerful urges is the gaining of ever more status, our tribal stories tell us how to earn it. A human tribe can be viewed as a status game that all its members are playing, its rules being recorded in its stories.
Take capitalism. For the left, it’s exploitative. The Industrial Revolution gave evil capitalists the technology to use and abuse workers as dumb machine-parts in their factories and mines and reap all the profits. The workers fought back, unionizing and electing more enlightened politicians and then, in the 1980s, the capitalists became resurgent, heralding an era of ever-increasing inequality and eco-disaster. For the right, capitalism is liberation. It freed the used and abused workers from exploitation by kings and tyrants and gave them property rights, the rule of law and free markets, motivating them to work and create. And yet this great freedom is under constant attack from leftists who resent the idea that the most productive individuals are properly rewarded for their hard work. They want everyone to be “equal and equally poor.”
What’s insidious about these stories is that they each tell only a partial truth. Capitalism is liberating and it’s also exploitative. Like any complex system it has a trade-off of effects, some good, others bad. But thinking with tribal stories means shutting out such morally unsatisfying complexity. Out storytelling brains transform reality’s chaos into a simple narrative of cause and effect that reassures us that our biased models, and the instincts and emotions they generate, are virtuous and right. And this means casting the opposing tribe into the role of villain.
Of course this model, and its theory of control, is indivisible from who we are. It’s what we’re experiencing, in the black vault of our skulls, as reality itself. It’s hardly surprising we’ll fight to defend it. Because different tribes live by different models of control — communists and capitalists, to take a broad example, award their prizes of status and connection for very different behaviors — a tribal challenge is existentially disturbing. It’s not merely a threat to our surface beliefs about this and that, but to the very subconscious structures by which we experience reality.
It’s also a threat to the status game to which we’ve invested the efforts of our lives. To our subconscious, if another tribe is allowed to win, their victory won’t merely pull us down the hierarchy but will destroy the hierarchy completely. Our loss in status will be complete and irreversible. The removal of the ability to claim status meets the psychologist’s definition of humiliation, that “annihilation of self.” When a group’s collective status feels threatened and they fear even the possibility of humiliation by another group, the result can be massacre, crusade and genocide.
Story is a form of play that we domesticated animals use to learn how to control the social world. Archetypal stories about antiheroes often end in their being killed or otherwise humiliated, thus serving their purpose as tribal propaganda. We’re taught the appropriate lesson and left in no doubt about the costs of such selfish behavior. But the awkward fact remains that, as we experience the story unfolding in our minds, we seem to enjoy “playing” the antihero. I wonder if this is because, somewhere in the sewers far beneath our hero-making narrators, we know we’re not so lovely. Keeping the secret of ourselves from ourselves can be exhausting. This, perhaps, is the subversive truth of stories about antiheroes. Being freed to be evil, if only in our minds, can be such a joyful relief.
I suspect it might be a foundational belief that other people are dangerous. I have a theory of control that says in order to remain safe humans should be avoided wherever possible. As I’ve grown older, and more adept at being social, I’ve developed a range of selves I wear in public like masks so I can function. But I’ve also retreated further into myself. My crafty brain tells me the decisions that have brought me to where I am have been brilliant. It’s wonderful I live such a relatively peaceful life, cocooned in they country with my wife and dogs. “Hell is other people, year?”
But, sometimes, I’m not sure. In my 30s, I’d occasionally pine for friends but whenever I got the chance to make any, would pull away. I no longer pine. As the world has quietened around me, I’ve come to know pleasant solitude and bitter loneliness as 2 expressions of the same face.
It seems characteristic of many successful stories that their authors reduce origin damage to specific moments. It doesn’t do to be general and say, for example, “it’s because their parents didn’t love them enough,” because such vague thinking can only lead to more vague thinking. In reality, of course, origin damage is often a matter of grim erosion, commonly taking place over months, years, and repeated bloody incidents. But it’s my experience when teaching these principles that, if we’re creating stories, specificity is essential.
This damage can take place before we’re even able to speak. Because humans crave control, infants whose caregivers behave unpredictably can grow up in a constant state of anxious high alert. Their distress gets built into their core concepts about people which can lead to significant social problems when they’re grown. Even a lack of affectionate touch, in our earliest years, has the potential to hurt us forever.
We’re literally blind to that which the brain ignores. If it sends the eye to only the distressing elements around us, that’s all we’ll see. If it spins cause-and-effect tales of violence and threat and prejudice about actually harmless events, that’s what we’ll experience. This is how the hallucinated reality in which we live at the center can be dramatically different to that of the person we’re standing right next to. We all exist in different worlds. And whether that world feels friendly or hostile depends, in significant part, on what happened to us as children. ***
The self-justifying hero-maker narrative then gets to work telling us we’re not partial or mistaken at all — we’re right. We see evidence to support this false belief everywhere, and we deny, forget or dismiss any counter-evidence. Experience after experience seems to confirm our rightness.
We want things and we strive to get them. When unexpected change strikes we don’t just climb back into bed and hope it all goes away. Well, we might for a while. But at some point we stand up. We face it. We fight. This was one inviolable rule of drama: What we ask of the theater is the spectacle of a will striving towards a goal. Fundamental to successful stories and successful lives is the fact that we don’t passively endure the chaos that erupt around us. These events challenge us. They generate a desire. This desire makes us act.
We have an average of 15 “personal projects” going at once, a mixture of trivial pursuits and magnificent obsessions. We are our personal projects.
Aristotle contemptuously dismissed the hedonists, saying that, “The life they decide on is a life for grazing animals.” Instead, he described the idea of “eudaemonia.” For Aristotle happiness was not a feeling but a practice. “It’s living in a way that fulfills our purpose. It’s flourishing. Stop hoping for happiness tomorrow. Happiness is being engaged in the process.”
- Eudaemonia is a kind of striving after a noble goal.
- So it’s heroic behavior in a sense?
- Right. Exactly.
Humans are built for story. When we push ourselves toward a tough yet meaningful goal, we thrive. Our reward systems spike not when we achieve what we’re after but when we’re in pursuit of it. It’s the pursuit that makes a life and the pursuit that makes a plot. Without a goal to follow and at least some sense we’re getting closer to it, there is only disappointment, depression and despair. A living death.
Emotional arcs:
- Rag to riches: characterized by rising emotion.
- Riches to rag: tragedies, characterized by falling emotion.
- Man in a hole: a fall then a rise.
- Icarus: a rise then a fall.
- Oedipus: fall, rise, fall.
You confront it in order to get what it has to offer you. The probability is that’s going to be intensely dangerous and push you right to the limit. But you don’t get the goal without the dragon. That’s a very, very strange idea. But it seems to be accurate.
That goal is the reward for accepting the fight of your life. But you only get if if you answer story’s dramatic question correctly: “I’m going to be someone better.”
Control is the ultimate mission of the brain. Our hero-making cognition always wants to make us feel as if we have ore of it than we actually do. Participants given electric shocks could withstand more pain simply by being told they could stop it at will.
Brains love control. It’s their heaven. They’re constantly battling to get there.
But the story ends where it does because that’s the blissful, fleeting instant in time in which Bromden has complete control over both levels of story: over the external world of the drama and the internal world of who he is. For one blissful, perfect moment, he has control over everything. He has become God.
The perfect archetypal ending takes the form of “the God moment” because it reassures us that, despite all the chaos and sadness and struggle that fills our lives, there is control. There’s no more reassuring message than this for the storytelling brain.
Life is change that yearns for stability. Story is a form of play that allows us to feel we’ve lost control without actually placing us in danger. It’s a rollercoaster, but not one made from ramps, rails and steel wheels, but from love, hope, dread, curiosity, status play, unexpected change and moral outrage. Story is thrill-ride of control.
We all inhabit foreign worlds. Each of us is ultimately alone in our black vault, wandering our singular neural realms, “seeing” things differently, feeling different passions and hatreds and associations of memory as our attention grazes over them.
He advises he daughter that she’ll along a lot better with all kinds of folks if she learns a simple trick: “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view, until you clim into his skin and walk around in it.” This is precisely what story enables us to do. In this way, it creates empathy. There can hardly be a better medicine than that for the groupish hatred that comes so naturally and seductively to all humans.
The lesson of story is that we have no idea how wrong we are. Discovering the fragile parts of our neural models means listening for their cry. When we become irrationally emotional and defensive, we’re often betraying the parts of us that require the most aggressive protection. This is the place in which our perception of the world is most warped and tender. Facing these flaws and fixing them will be the fight of our lives. To accept story’s challenge and win is to be a hero.
The consolation of story is truth. The curse of belonging to a hyper-social species is that we’re surrounded by people who are trying to control us. Because everyone we meet is attempting to get along and get ahead, we’re subjected to near-constant attempts at manipulation. Ours is an environment of soft lies and half smiles that seek to make us feel pleasant and render us pliable. In order to control what we think of them, people work hard to disguise their sins, failures and torments. Human sociality can be numbing. We can feel alienated without knowing why. It’s only in story that the mask truly breaks. To enter the flawed mind of another is to be reassured that it’s not only us.
It’s not only us who are broken; it’s not only us who are conflicted; it’s not only us who are confused; it’s not only us who have dark thoughts and bitter regrets and feel possessed, at times, by hateful selves. It’s not only us who are scared. The magic of story is its inability to connect mind with mind in a manner that’s unrivaled even by love. Story’s gift is the hope that we might not be quite so alone, in that dark bone vault, after all.