What Is a Story?
Part 1: A Primer on Narrative Warfare
Author’s note: This is the first article in a series about narrative warfare. That series will unfold over the next few weeks. To begin to understand what’s happening to the politics and the storylines in the United States (and around the world), and to understand how it’s affecting our minds, we have to start with the basic building blocks of narrative warfare: the story.
My perspective comes from decades of studying story, psychology, and more recently narrative warfare, although I would never claim to be an expert in any of these areas. This is an attempt to wrap my mind around what’s happening and to help others grapple with it at the same time.
Also, spoiler alert: the very first paragraph gives away a scene in 3 Body Problem on Netflix.
There’s an unsettling scene in the Netflix show called 3 Body Problem where a minister talks with beings who are slowly making their way toward Earth. He refers to the alien representative as “My Lord” because he believes the voice speaking to him might be God.
In the scene, the minister reads the story of Little Red Riding Hood to the being speaking through the speaker, and somehow this being can also read his mind and emotions. When the voice asks why the little girl doesn’t know it’s a wolf, the minister repeatedly explains that she just doesn’t know, even though it seems obvious that maybe she should. He finally gets to the heart of the matter when he says that the wolf lies to the little girl and tells her that he is her grandmother—that’s why she doesn’t know.
The voice doesn’t understand the concept of a lie. Isn’t all information transmitted immediately, she asks?
No, that’s not how it works here, he tells her.
Do all humans lie? The voice asks.
The minister struggles to explain and admits that yes, humans lie.
The voice then demands to know where the forest is, and where the wolf is, so they can investigate. The minister is surprised and tells her this story isn’t real, it’s made up.
“So it’s a lie about a liar?” asks the voice.
Flummoxed, the minister admits that it is a lie about a liar, and the voice, in its creepy monotone, says it is afraid of humans before abruptly cutting off communication.
This scene made me think about the nature of stories.
Are stories lies?
Fundamentally, stories are composed of words and images that symbolize something else. My Kabbalah teacher used to say, “Words are like pictures on a menu; they are not the meal itself.” In other words, a word can never fully encapsulate the experience it represents.
This becomes evident when translating between languages. In 2013, while traveling through South America with barely passable Spanish, I started to really experience what it meant to look at the meaning of a word. It was not one-dimensional; and more than that, I’d not even been aware that I thought of words as one-dimensional until I was forced to consider all of the other ways of describing the meaning behind the word and how it’s represented in a symbol of sound.
Consider the word “love.” In English, we use “love” in a lot of different ways—some of them more casual than others. Spanish, however, has multiple words for love, which gives them a lot more room for movement in what they’re saying. If we say “I love Doritos” and “I love my daughter,” how does someone unfamiliar with English discern the difference? Do we love our children as much as we love Doritos?
Ideas and concepts are like prisms or diamonds, with each language revealing a different facet. To fully know a concept, we have to explore all its interpretations and meanings.
Back to stories.
Stories are crafted from words (with their multiple facets) and images, and those words and images stand in for some kind of meaning or transmission. Stories—whether they are “true” and based on real events or made up—often embody deep meanings and underlying truths. Stories rely on their creator or narrator’s perspective and have the potential to carry both deception and truth—in fact, they often carry both at the same time, for different reasons and in different ways. Stories are transmissions.
However, calling a story a lie because it isn’t based on verifiable facts is misleading. We tend to unconsciously think all stories are fictional, and that all myths have no basis in truth. Until the so-called “Age of Enlightenment” in the 17th and 18th centuries, cultures and people all over the world viewed myths as key carriers of ideas, values, history, and narratives that were important to preserve our respective ways. When rationalism became the dominant way in which the West viewed the world, the word “myth” began to take on a more pejorative tone when Enlightenment thinkers compared it with scientific knowledge. Over time, myths were seen more often as superstitious than useful or important. By the 19th and 20th centuries, the word myth had taken on the additional meaning of a widely held but false belief or idea.
Luckily, in some fields of study, myths are revived and studied for their cultural and symbolic, as well as their psychological meaning… because we’re beginning to see that stories convey deep truths about human experiences.
So, are stories lies, even if they are not literally true? No. Not at all.
A story represents truth as the narrator or writer perceives it, and that truth is inherently subjective. If you’ve ever heard someone tell the same story multiple times, you know it changes slightly (or sometimes by leaps and bounds with the folks whose fish gets bigger with each telling). This isn’t intentional deception but a response to the story’s aliveness, to the moment, to the people listening to the story.
This is not to say that some stories aren’t outright lies. I’ll explore that in another post on narrative warfare. The key takeaway is that a story is a construction, representing meaning as best as the storyteller can understand and convey it.