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IMPORTANCE OF STORYTELLERS IN 21st CENTURY

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Pic Source: https://thejobsauce.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Storytelling-Blog-Image.jpg
As a being driven by emotions, we are inclined to do things that are meaningful to us. Despite the role mathematics and statistics have played in expanding our reach as a species far beyond the horizon, we never learned to think in numbers or equations. Contrary to the general notion, progress never was driven by numbers. Rather it was stories that each civilization chose to believe in and narrate that drove progress.

The majority of us like to identify ourselves as rational decision-makers. For some reason, we feel it is a loss of face to admit that our decisions are the echoes of doctrines instilled in us as a child. Consequently, we overlook the fact that we use our rationality merely to rationalize our decisions, so that guilt of succumbing to our biases doesn't haunt us. And like an illusionist, our biases trick our mind's eye and make the irrational look rational. For instance, there is nothing rational about killing another fellow being in whose vein runs blood the same color as the rest. Yet world war happened - twice!

The human brain has mastered the art of storytelling like no other species on the planet. One just has to take a look at how our brain perceives reality to understand it. I reckon one could say, reality is nothing but varieties of raw energy waiting to be perceived by living organisms in whatever way they have evolved to perceive the stimuli picked up their various senses.

For instance, take vision – one of the senses we have been taught to trust the most. Our eyes can capture only a small spectrum of electromagnetic radiation – a type of raw energy – and relay to the brain. And yet the limited input doesn't stop our brain from attempting to draw meaning by distinguishing and relating the variation in the energy sensed by our eyes; the properties of light like wavelength and frequency determine the hue and their amplitude determines their brightness. Rays with high-frequency short wavelengths are interpreted as bluish and low-frequency long wavelengths as reddish. The human mind is determined to create order from chaos by drawing meaning from everything our sensory organs bombard it with. And stories are one of the effective tools to maintain the order it has created.

Since stories are meaningful in ways statistics or facts can never be, our mind internalizes it. Making it a framework to make decisions. It was not solved scientific equations that took Neil Armstrong to the moon. Rather, what those equations represented. It meant beating the Soviets in the race to dominate space. It meant serving the country and using wit and vigor to ensure that the future generation can have a life in which they would be the ones spying the world, and not the other way round.

To the mind, metaphors are more appealing than mathematics, for the former is felt by us, as we find it relatable to our experience (tainted by our biases), and the latter is devoid of any emotion as it is only understood by the human brain. And apparently, understanding and feeling are in stark contrast to one another which is why leaders who tell stories that are appealing to the biases of the mass are worshipped, even though the stories are not backed by any facts.

Hitler was a master storyteller. And he did not tell new stories. Rather he told stories to which the masses could relate to. For years, people had retained all the repelling notions against the Jews. Notions instilled in them through fairy tales and children’s rhymes. And when he echoed what everyone had internalized, it was as if God had read their minds. Consequently, the masses felt justified in what was done to the minorities of their land.

Stories are the building blocks of ideologies. And as an author in the 21st century, I feel that the world which is exponentially getting polarized needs storytellers devoted to the craft more than ever before. Not to tell stories to segregate people but to unite them.

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"Stories are a communal currency of humanity." 
-Tahir Shah, in Arabian Nights
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