Last month I posted something long on the nature of story and how it seemed to be intrinsic to every human endeavor; foundational to our language processing as it were. So a few weeks back I started actually researching this. Turns out my assumptions were largely correct. My local library had several of the books I had run across in my searching, and as I type this they are all collected near my reading chair. Slowly I am making my way through them.

I am taking notes, scribbling furiously in their electronic margins. This is big. I have a feeling this is going to end up being a book. Let me tell you, it’s a lot.

Just one of the things I discovered was this: Humans are such a social species that we cannot measure ourselves except by using others as a kind of calibration or reflection. That is, we measure ourselves through the same lens that we use to measure others. Your understanding of how well you are doing (or not doing) is directly tied to how you perceive the others around you doing. Essentially we keep a group of people in our heads; friends, family, co-workers, etc, that we use as our core group. How our group collectively functions we take in as a measure of ourselves.

But our understanding doesn’t just stop there. All of these relationships are skewed through the lens of narration. If a friend or family member is facing cancer, they are not just sick, they are a hero battling like against an implacable foe. This is because our brains keep them in story format, complete with heroes and villains. Mind you, we’re not putting little capes on them in our minds, the process is usually not quite that obvious, but the basic structure of our thoughts mirror story structure.

There’s a lot in the books about why we do this. I am working my way through all that, but for me the most important part is the process. Not Why we do, but What we do. What is this narrative thing? How does it work? What does it mean, and How can we use it?

A tale of two stories.

I remember–back after almost a year of covid and vaccines were suddenly available–being gobsmacked at how so many Americans not only didn’t want a vaccine, but rallied against it. Why would someone think playing Russian Roulette (albeit on a gun with a lot of chambers) was such a great idea? Why was there all this needless division over something that struck me as obviously beneficial? The answer is, they were hearing another story, one that people in my immediate group couldn’t hear. And in their story, the vaccine (or someone who represented the vaccine, like Dr. Fauci) was the villain. In our story the vaccine was the hero.

What?

Imagine you and your best friend are both reading a book for a class. The books have the same tittle and the same author, but between the covers the stories are vastly different. Imagine how confusing it would be when you’re talking about your favorite part of the novel to your friend and they suddenly start asking, “Wait, in your book Frodo is the good guy?” And you nod your head, like of course. And then your friend asks, “And that Sauron guy isn’t trying to save the ring?” And you’re like “WTF?!?! Save the ring, from whom?” And they say, “From the hobbits who stole it, of course.” And right at that moment you really start to believe your best friend is stone cold crazy. How could they even get such an idea?

The thing is, it’s right there in their book. It’s just their book is different from yours, because their circle of friends is slightly different, so they see and measure the world slightly differently.

The irony is both you and your friend will feel terribly hurt and confused. Neither will understand why the other is acting so crazy. And worse, the more one of you tries to convince the other of their error, the more thy will believe in it. After all, in their book Sauron is the hero, it’s plain as day. Everyone can see it. Why can’t you? You are the crazy one. They are perfectly fine. Everyone in their circle (but you) agrees with them. Their story is the true one.

This is what I think was happening during covid. We had two sides fighting not over a vaccine, but over the roll in the story that the vaccine played. We had a hero camp and a villain camp, and the two sides could not be further apart, over something a year before they would have 100% agreed upon.

So how do you fix this? What do you do when your friend or your family members are reading from a slightly different book? I don’t know the answer yet. I’m still working on it, but I think it comes down to making up a third story that you both can believe in. And if I am right, it might be even easy to do.

We’ll see.