How Our Love of Storytelling Leads Us Astray
What’s terrific in the arts and around the campfire is disastrous in everyday decision making
Human beings instinctively love stories and storytelling, we’re wired for gossip and drama.
That’s the heart of art and literature, around the campfire, but also the essence of media frenzy and delusion.
Hungry for the thrill, we’re energized by headline-grabbing news, while ignoring the stastically more dire.
Last night a crazed gunman went on a rampage in Maine, the nation now electrified and shocked.
The crazed gunman killed about twenty peoiple, wounded as many as sixty more, and is still on the run.
That’s horrific, but negligible compared to daily gun-related deaths and suffering in the country.
Suicides, domestic violence, endured by the tens of thousands, and mostly done with handguns.
While pundits and the government obsess over semi-automatic weapons, root causes remain untouched.
The hospital bombing in Gaza that short-circuited Biden’s trip was also terrible and shocking.
Yet preceding the instant death of 100–200 people, thousands were already killed from other airstrikes over several days.
While millions place blame on this side or that side, the war rages and will only get worse, root causes unaddressed.
Did you know that medical errors in the US kill on average of more than 300,000 people per year?
Bet you didn’t, problems ranging from wrong drug dosing to procedural errors that maim and kill.
Nearly a thousand die each day, while the healthcare system remains broken and dysfunctional.
Do you think that if headlines revealed the actual extent of this problem, something might be done about it?
Consider nuclear power: Hydrocarbons do more annual damage than 1,000 Fukushima or Chernobyl meltdowns.
That’s right: thousands die each year in oil and gas related acccidents, millions from cancer and other health problems.
Yet when accidents happen at nuke plants our obsession with catastrophism boosts are concerns.
The result is a viable energy source has been marginalized and neglected for decades, further polluting the planet.
Same for pile ups on highways: Front page news when five people die in a wreck, while hundreds die each day.
Did you know that car accidents and fatalities have been steadily on the rise? Of course you didn’t.
Did you know that near-misses of commercial aircraft are a daily occurrence? Of course you didn’t.
That’s because headline news demands a massive interstate accident that kills a dozen people, or two jets colliding killing hundreds.
Then you’ll hear about it. Then it’ll be front page news. Then we’ll talk about it for five minutes, and move on to the next story.
Whether mass shootings in the US, civilian casualties in war, medical errors, energy or transportations problems, we are deluded.
The challenge for us as a species is we’re moved by big news, bored by smaller events, learning nothing.
Yet these smaller events are far more frequent, and have a more significant and damaging cumulative effect.
Same rules apply for social media, and in droves: Negative and incendiary posts are amplified over less exciting ones.
The result is the promulgation of destructive information: Bad news, bullying, propaganda, false narratives.
The growing embrace of conspiracy theories is a perverse sign that we’re missing the actual threats.
And their growing popularity is a direct consequence of how social media companies monetize mis- and disinformation.
This growing discrepancy between perception and reality results in our species making many bad decisions.
We focus on the wrong things, so try to fix what isn’t broken, or what is only a small fraction of the real problem.
We elevate the inconsequential into existential levels of hysterics, distracting from actual issues.
More significant problems fly completely under the radar, get little to no attention so aren’t addressed.
And the viral growth of online garbage further contributes to our social and political polarization.
The media is partly to blame, but accountability is circular: they post what people like, reinforcing what people expect.
All of this is fueled, ironically enough, by our instinctive need to tell exciting and sharable stories.
That all said, what can we do about it? If we’re programmed to bullshit, how can we mitigate the consequences?
Authoritarian information control is ironically the only way humanity has figured out how to “solve” this issue.
But that sucks, too, because the intent of tyrants isn’t truth and a better life for their citizens, it’s power and control.
The AI revolution will only exacerbate these trends: more clickbait in free societies, more control in dictatorships.
Despite such an Orwellian inevitability, we can stay hopeful, if only because these trends might balance out.
For every authoritarian regime, let’s hope a chaotic, dysfunctional technocracy flourishes.
The future is uncertain, but we can all be sure things will get far, far worse, but also much, much better.
What do you think? If you respond, you’ll have to be bombastic on social media, or nobody will notice or care.
